(somewhere outside Sacramento)
The following was written back on October 27, right before leaving Boulder...
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The fresh foot of early snow left behind.
Today begins my long-awaited road trip to the Left Coast. And you are right...hell yeah, it is about time! For almost a month I'll be in California, after whipping through Wyoming, Utah and Nevada. With any luck I'll get to spend time in the Sierra Nevadas -- especially catching the Hangtown Halloween Ball, an incredible new three-day music festival -- then San Francisco, Big Sur, and hopefully more of the Pacific coast on my way down to Los Angeles. The plan is then for me to undergo my occasional transformation to a clean-cut Marine and work for a couple of weeks, before returning east to the Rocky Mountains (man, that turn of phrase sounds weird...east to the Rockies?).
What's it all about, you may be wondering...especially if you are a parent of mine. Well, aside from the obvious benefits of employment and continuous service during the latter phase, it's about all those glorious western cliches...the open road, independence, exploring the new and the relatively exotic. I refuse to believe that discovery cannot be reason enough for a lengthy adventure.
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Street art and a nomad, San Francisco.
Still, I won't have anything close to a true recap tonight (err, this morning...as it's 3 am). It's time to leave LA today, and head out on the journey's bonus leg: a northern jaunt to the Pacific Northwest for Thanksgiving before returning to Colorado. The odyssey has been everything I thought it would be, and then some -- from the furious pace of the sprint west to the unbridled enthusiasm of a harvest festival, from the character of an iconic city to the wonder of the wild coast, from the accepted glitz of tinseltown to the chill vibe of southernmost Cali -- and I need to sleep a bit so I can continue it in one piece. Keep on keepin' on, as I like to say.
Sunset beyond "the City of Angels"
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