Growing up near Buffalo, New York, fall was my favorite season. Fall there is made up of rich hues of red, orange, yellow, green, and brown. I loved the crisp air, playing soccer, watching football, jumping in leaves, and watching nature’s amazing paintings all around me. I spent last fall in New Mexico and the 14 before that in Pelham near New York City.
Last January we left Baltimore and headed south to Savannah, Georgia. On the way I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw one of the two tie-downs (which hold two Rubbermaid bins onto our rear hitch rack) dragging on the road. So we got off at the next exit, Courtland, Virginia, and pulled into an abandoned Knights Inn Motel to re-secure the bins.
In my last post I mentioned that Joshua Tree National Park has nine campgrounds, which are all available on a first-come, first-served basis, and when we visited the park on Friday and Saturday all nine were full. We arrived again on Tuesday and a couple of the campgrounds were crowded but we had a few options in the Jumbo Rocks campground. Many of the spots are close together, so we chose one that had a bit of separation from the neighbors, put our “reserved” sign up, and went out hiking to watch the sunset. 
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Though the Wonder Valley turned out to have an appeal all it’s own, the reason we rented a house in Twentynine Palms, California was its proximity to Joshua Tree National Park.
The fall after I finished college I jumped at the chance to travel by helping a friend move to France (in reality I’m not sure what help I was providing since I didn’t speak French and she had many of her things shipped, but I digress…) The plan was to spend two weeks in Paris and eastern France with my friend and then I’d make my way back to Paris, meet Pearson, and we’d take a train to Italy. So I left my job, packed way too much stuff, and headed across the Atlantic.
When the sun fully sinks into the horizon, as it glows brightly and then fades into glorious hues of orange, purple, red, and dissipates into the darkening blue sky, for those moments nothing else matters. All my problems—arguments, finances, work, failures, stress—are forgotten for those perfect, suspended moments. In those precious minutes I just am. I exist and breathe and am part of the world.
We got to White Sands National Monument just after it reopened and drove through the park (parts of it were, and still are, closed from the drone crash).
One of Pearson’s first memories is watching, live on TV, the Space Shuttle Columbia land at the White Sands Test Facility and he’s been enamored with White Sands, New Mexico ever since. So on our way out to California, we made a plan to stop and explore White Sands National Monument for a few days.
Adjacent to the National Monument is the NASA Test Facility, an Army Missile Range, and Holloman Air Force Base, so the National Monument and Route 70, the road from Alamogordo to Las Cruces, is closed quite often. Unfortunately, a week before we arrived in White Sands an unmanned drone on some sort of training mission crashed in the National Monument and they closed the entire park until further notice. Continue reading
On our way from Arizona to the Mojave desert in California, the Element’s tire blew out and we spent a couple of hours dealing with that (a long story for another time) so we arrived in Twentynine Palms well after dark. We turned onto a sand road and passed what looked like an abandoned home and then a collapsed garage, a couple more turns without a light in sight, all we could see was sand and occasional creosote bush illuminated by our headlights. We reached our rental house, exhausted and hungry, our only focus was unloading our stuff and eating a late dinner.
Now that I’ve been “homeless” and travelling for a year, I’ve come to some realizations about what home is and what home means, to me anyway. I lived in Pelham, NY (a 25 minute train ride to NYC and in Westchester county) for 11 years and I walked to the train station in town and commuted to Manhattan for 9 of those years. I grew up in Williamsville, a suburb of Buffalo, NY, and spent a lot of time with my Grandparents in Lewiston, a suburb of Niagara Falls, NY. But I moved away from Buffalo just before I turned 18 and my parents moved away when I was 23. When I started college I met Pearson and started visiting and spending time where he grew up in Skaneateles, NY. Now I visit my Dad in Hagerstown, MD and my mother, sister, and brother in Baltimore, MD.
