To See the World

I’m back in Southern California!  I can’t believe I would ever say this, but I guess I do miss Utah…a little.  On the first day of May, my dad and my little brother Luke picked me up from Faith’s house (were there tears?  I’d be lying if I said no), and my dad wasted no time (for his motto is “haste does not make waste), and we headed out on the open road.  He had decided not to make a reservation for a hotel because we wanted to drive as much as we could.  However, there was an intense boxing match occurring in Las Vegas (“the biggest one in like ten years” according to my dad…he’s the sports nerd, not me), so hotels were booked all the way up through Mesquite, St. George, and Cedar City (this is the only explanation we could find for the no vacancies we kept running into…soon I was wondering if we’d have to stay in a stable).  My dad finally found a hotel “off the beaten path,” as he described to me.  With Luke snoring in the back, we drove off the main freeway and passed literally nothing.  Slowly, we pulled into the surrounding town of Zion National Park. 

The next morning we drove around the national park, and it was so beautiful!  Of course, if we had been equipped for hiking, there could have been even more beautiful attractions.  However, I am quite content to drive in the car with the windows down and feel the breeze of the wind blowing through the rocks.  If my dad had planned ahead and booked a hotel reservation, we would have stayed in a hotel off the freeway and arrived home a couple hours earlier.  But instead we were impulsive (I need to learn to take healthy risks).  I mentioned to Dad that there’s so many places I don’t even know exist because I stick to the main freeway, but we drove off it and saw an amazing part of Utah.  (Zion National Park is a popular place, but somewhere I’ve never been, I’d love to go back and hike it.)  This unplanned detour only fueled my desire to drive, to go somewhere, to explore.  One of my strange dreams is to just hop in the car and drive anywhere in the United States, to meet people, to discover places worth discovering, to just drive!

I’m reminded of the quote from the movie The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.  “To see the world, things dangers to come to, to see behind walls, draw closer, to find each other and to feel.  That is the purpose of life.”  I’m not sure why I loved this movie so much, maybe it’s because I love Ben Stiller (he is really, really, ridiculously good looking) and Adam Scott (even more ridiculously good looking), but I think I loved the storyline.  I won’t be flying to Greenland anytime soon, but I loved that he went on an adventure and discovered places he never would have been.  But I also love that he was content to stay at home and draw closer between those at home.  He wanted to find others, and he could do that perfectly at home.  Exploring is so fun, but so is developing relationships with others here at home.  Now I should figure out how to combine those two… Someone call me Kristin cause I’m about to start wiggin out!

Dad was especially proud of this picture he took with the tunnel framing the rock