I had my credit card in hand and I was about to pay triple the price I’ve ever spent on a Travelodge in my life. I asked the clerically efficient and polite desk manager to please repeat the cost of the room. Surely I’d misheard her.
Unfortunately, no.
She repeated the hefty sum with a composure that explained why her hair was still in a neat tidy bun at 11:30 pm at the end of this long summer day. It was mid-July, every hotel room within a 400 mile radius was full, and I hadn’t booked a place for us to sleep in advance. What did I expect?
Well, a miracle, actually.
I had ample evidence that I could make spontaneous decisions, navigate by a higher intuition and have everything work out. Cheaply and magically. In fact, this very trip had started several weeks ago with just such a win because I’d refrained from booking hotels in advance, and that turned out to be a good thing.
We’d been planning this cross-country family adventure for months. Our leave day was clearly marked on the calendar. Weeks prior to our departure, my wife made the mistake of plopping down on the couch and thinking that a disguised truth might fly under the radar of Hermes, the Greek god of both sleep and travel, an odd pairing if you ask me.
“Can I just lay here on the couch and be sick for a few days so I can do nothing?”
I know my wife meant it as a joke, and we laughed and treated it as such in the moment. She wanted and needed a break.
Despite the way vacations are marketed and gussied up by the travel industry, the nervous system of any parent who has ever navigated more than a block away from home alongside their spouse and children cannot be fooled into believing that family travel will qualify as a break. While my wife and I pretended it would, my wife’s immune system had other, smarter plans.
We forgot all about her comment until a few days prior to our departure when she croaked out the words, “I have a really sore throat.”
Hoping it might pass, we delayed our departure, but several days later the thought of merely packing a toiletry bag caused her to glaze over and fall into another daytime sleep coma.
A hard decision had to be made. Rather than scuttle the whole trip or extend the delay, I decided my son and I should set sail and leave my wife at home to heal, which turned out to be a wise move since the sore throat morphed into a full covid take down a few days later. My instincts were right. And my wife was grateful to have the run of the house rather than being quarantined, and fortunately, the virus didn’t come along with us for a ride.
Sometimes I wonder if we’re the only clan in the world that mobilizes the laws of physics, meteorological events, exchange rates, and infectious diseases against us the moment we try to make a family plan. In any case, I bristle at advance planning. And if I do make plans, I never say them out loud to anyone, because Hermes has obviously bugged the room.
The family trip that turned into a father-and-son road trip had its own distinct joys, some of that due to my son’s willingness to voyage as spartanly as I wished. He’s the chillest travel companion in the world, happy to sit in the passenger seat listening to his music, a rich oratory landscape he loves to pair with the visual feast of the natural world sliding by. When the streaming connection is interrupted, which happens a lot in the backcountry and coastal highways of the western United States, he’ll effortlessly rest in silence or engage me in conversation.
I recall turning onto a spontaneously beckoning road, where I suddenly found myself singing, “This land is your land, this land is my land . . .” as we drove along an actual ribbon of snaking highway that was playfully draped over the rolling hills of a ponderosa forest. Where else would I get nine days of side-by-side silence with my kid? A silence that would eventually incubate a conversation that never would have transpired at home.
I remember exactly where we were and the particular hue of the passing parakeet scrub brush in the dappled shade of the pines when I looked over at him with his headphones on and saw a young man who was going somewhere—surveying the landscape with a glint of future in his eyes.
It made me curious what he was listening to.
“Would you mind sharing your music?” I asked him.
He looked surprised and then brightly said, “Sure!” while pairing the iPhone to the car speakers. He’s a die-hard fan of Dream Theater, and had been listening to the song “A View from the Top of the World,” which was particularly apropos as we crested a 4,200 foot summit that delivered a birds-eye view of the Tahoe National Forest.
Like a blind man in a maze
Who somehow finds an open door
The beauty and the danger
And the yearning to explore
Always keeps me coming back for more
The moment that you recognize
Just where your limits lie
Hanging on the brink of death
You’re never more alive1
When the twenty-three minute long song was done I couldn’t believe we’d never talked about his favorite band before. I asked him questions and he spoke at length about what the band stood for, and how committed he was to the principles evident in the lyrics.
“Wow,” I said. “Basically, you’re saying that the whole purpose of being human is to reach the pinnacle of what’s possible for a human being in a single lifetime, which is a view that I whole-heartedly share. That’s what this music means to you.”
It wasn’t a lengthy conversation, but it didn’t need to be. In a matter of minutes we both expressed what was most important to us in life.
Now, weeks later, we were on the last leg of our trip home. It had been a long day that started at 5 am when I woke up to an inner voice that said . . .
“Leave now . . . but don’t hit any deer.”
I assume you’ve had the experience of having insights in a half-sleep that seem like objective prophetic genius, but which quickly degrade into nonsense when considered away from a pillow. The inner voice that drew me out of bed with urgent clarity that morning started to fade by 6 am as I drove through a thick fog on highway 33 west out of Los Banos, California, hoping to reach the rugged Oregon coast by nightfall.
It was hauntingly beautiful as we reached the lower section of I-5 and navigated through the misty mountains and foothills of the southern Bay Area, green and verdant, but it was also harrowing as part of me was still convinced that a herd of deer was going to leap out of the shadowed shoulders at any moment.
Hours passed, and despite the absence of hoofed spirits in the mist, I continued to pay attention to my instincts as my first line of travel defense.
I know some people are exceptional planners who hit their marks like clockwork. I’ve even seen families like that. But whenever I try to wrestle the details of transit into submission, I always lose. The most memorable adventures, delightful lodging, and free flowing traffic has always come when I’ve followed the lay of the land, not an itinerary.
So, everything from where to stop for gas, when to get food, what detours or shortcuts to take, and which trucks to pass were subject to my inner spidey scrutiny to ensure adventurous yet efficient travel.
It took us eight hours to reach Eureka on the coast, where we finally stopped for a full meal at Chipotle.
It would have been a prudent decision to stop right there and find a hotel, still short of the Oregon coast; a full driving day of fog and mist and curves and semi-trucks was enough to warrant a break.
But I had a feeling.
“I think we ought to make just a bit more progress before calling it quits for the day.”
“Sure,” he said happily, loading up his headphones.
We were only twenty minutes out of the parking lot when we approached a long dip in the highway that leveled out alongside a new section of coastline at a pivotal moment of the day.
“Whoa,” my kid said. “Can we stop?”
We were just in time to pull over, scramble down the dunes, and catch this visual delight.
We lingered as the sun went down, marveling at the changing trail of colors in the sea-reflected sky.
But as we continued driving up the coast, the sunset just wouldn’t quit.
For the next hour after the sun had gone down, we watched a loitering display of celestial brush strokes grace the heavens with more nuanced hues of purple, violet, orange and lavender than Sherwin Williams has invented names for.
Finally, reaching a rest stop at a final summit, now more than an hour since I had a hunch that we should keep driving, we pulled over for one last observance of the day’s concluding masterpiece.
It was fully dark by the time we hit the road again.
By now we were well north of the famous Avenue of the Giants, where 2,000-year-old redwoods line the road, and their looming towers were marking the edge of the highway here in the passing night, their presence significantly silent with history.
We rounded a corner and before my headlights were back on the road, a ball of floating cotton glinted out from the highway shadows. If I hadn’t caught sight of that faint warning tail, I would have plowed into the two nocturnal elk that were proudly displaying their racks in our lane.
Fortunately there was no oncoming traffic as I swerved to avoid hitting them, and we carried on. With the prophecy complete, it was the final sign that this day was done, and I vowed to stop at first sight of a hotel.
One winter holiday I bought a dozen tickets to take my whole family to see Cirque du Soleil. I only discovered last minute that I’d paid double the rack price for each ticket through a grift site posing as the authentic Cirque operation. On top of the overcharge, four family members couldn’t make it. I walked away feeling like a dope, though the childlike wonder in my mother’s eyes watching the acrobats did partially redeem the fiasco.
That experience wasn’t unique.
As the person paying for tickets, seats, beds and flights for family travel and outings, I’d been burned too many times by predatory travel industry practices and last minute changes in plans to casually commit money and time in advance of our adventures. But I still wanted us to have them.
I convinced myself over the years that I could beat the event and travel gods by keeping my guard up, navigating by my instincts, and waiting to the very last minute to make decisions. I wanted serendipity without wasting our resources.
But where I was standing at the moment didn’t look good on my travel-leader résumé— somewhere on the southern Oregon coast at an over-expensive Travelodge. I didn’t even know the name of the little town. It was too dark, foggy and late to worry about the details. We just needed a place to sleep. As the night clerk handed me my receipt and wished me a good night, I tried to convince myself that there was a good reason I’d just spent a fist full of Franklin’s in exchange for a tiny bar of generic hand soap that we’d use once before getting a few hours rest and departing early the next morning.
I looked down at the key in my hand, expecting it might be gold-plated given the price of the room. Instead, it was a simple bronze key attached to the standard diamond-shaped, plastic, Travelodge tag. Opening the door confirmed that we’d found a place to sleep—nothing more.
Maybe I was making progress, since an older version of me would have refused to pay the ridiculous holiday rate and just kept driving. I allowed myself to appreciate the wins that following my instincts had brought that day, even if our final stop wasn’t exactly confirmation of its merit. You can’t win them all, I thought.
We had a full night of uninterrupted sleep. I woke early again, and surveyed the room. There was nothing worth hanging around for. A thread of golden light was peeking through the blinds, indicating that the fog had passed.
I got up, walked over to the window, and drew back the curtains.
It was a balcony I didn’t know we had.
When I looked up, I was met by this sight.
A big slow smile broke over my face as I took a seat overlooking the spectacular cove and lingered over the million dollar view.
Trips loosen the grip of my ordinary state of mind. They have their own climate, eco-system, and time signature. They restore my contact with a truth that I drift from in the controlled environment of home. Just when I think I’ve got the world figured out, navigating through the enigma of its geography restores my wonder, and reminds me that my hunches and instincts aren’t something to ignore, that delays and detours are the path itself.
Taking in a few final breaths of the sea air, I walked back inside, washed my hands once with the little bar of generic hand soap, and we departed for home.
Many thanks to
and - my Write Hearted companions who helped me tease out the memories of this adventure in conversation.Dream Theater. “A View from the Top of the World.”
Rick, this wonderful, blissfully spontaneous, barely-avoided disaster of a road trip reminds me of a quote, one that I hadn't realized is attributed to one Dale Carnegie: "Success is getting what you want. Happiness is wanting what you get."
By turning every trip into a series of spontaneous adventures, you're letting the universe come to you on its own terms. And this seems to apply to how you live life, even when you're not tooling down the road with the World's Best Travel Companion.
On top of everything else, your rich, vivid descriptions of everything you and your son saw were spot-on wonderful, and I like the humor you deftly sprinkled throughout this wordsmithing journey. (I know someone who uses humor like a sledgehammer; he can learn from you!) Thank you for taking us along for the ride.
Such a good reminder that gorgeous surprises can await if we don't plan too carefully and follow our instincts. What views!
And lucky elk (and you) that you somehow knew to look out for them.