We drove around twelve hours that first day before reaching Edmund, Oklahoma, a town just outside of Oklahoma City. I had never been to Oklahoma before but I will say the dirt seemed red and the folks seemed friendly. I easily welcomed the warm weather and snowless ground. We caught some sleep and left at 3 AM the next morning heading towards Flagstaff, Arizona.
Red dirt Oklahoma... Moon in the sky... sunrise in the Texas sky... New Mexico! New Mexico enchantment! It truly is something else- my first time in New Mexico. Something about it is very spiritual, mystic even. "The world is bigger than you... the world is bigger than you. me. The world is you.." And the mountains called my name.
We reached Flagstaff, Arizona, later that afternoon and checked into the Grand Canyon International Hostel. This place was awesome! I highly recommend it. We walked to a grocery store.. I got lost looking at all the health food, watching a man with his kids... thinking "I could raise kids here..." too hungry to make a decision on what to buy. We got some beers at a local brewery, got a little tipsier than we planned for (forgot about the elevation!) We had one roommate that night in the hostel. She seemed pretty quiet at first but after warming up a little she told us she was from Canada and she had been picking pine cones for work in below 20 degree weather.
Next morning we left again at 3AM. Seems early, but one of my favorite parts about every day was watching the moon trade places with the sun.. even sharing the same sky together for a while... Sunrise in California that day, I don't even think I want to begin to describe. Desert mountains.. Stunning vast.. Random moments of laughter... In my last post I mentioned how death brings this distinct clarity...Interesting, so do the mountains,the moon, natural wonders.. and I just kept laughing.
That day we drove through the Mojave, we drove through the Alta Wind Energy Center, the biggest wind turbine farm in the world! Set in the Tehechapi mountains. I felt like we were on a different planet.
We also saw miles and miles and miles of almond trees- I will never think of almonds the same again! They are beautiful.
We arrived in Salinas, CA, around 2 PM. Salinas is the hometown of John Steinbeck. If you know me very well, you probably know how much I admire him. Seeing his hometown and the land he wrote so much about was incredible. We went to Pacific Grove, a place right on the ocean... picture Big Sur surrounded by lush trees, vegetation. I was stoked about this because Steinbeck wrote a lot about Pacific Grove- even lived there.
Every atom of my body responded.
A surprise to me, we had to pay a $10 fee to get into the area and do the "17 mile drive." It seemed sort of silly because there's beautiful California coast line for hundreds of miles that is totally free. But we paid the fee anyway and entered the area.
Golf courses lining the road. Private property and fences. Tall chain-link fences at all the places you could stop and get out.
You can't put a fence around the ocean, but you can fence the people out.
Honestly, none of that took away from the beauty of the whole thing, or even the experience... it just perplexed me.
You can't put a fence around the ocean, but you can fence the people out.
Build a wall and call it freedom, but one will always break out.
Build a bridge and call it love, one will always swim around...
Swim around, swim around...
And I wondered what Steinbeck would think.
Here I am in Salinas next to the John Steinbeck Library!
Stay Tuned for Part 3! Turbulence, Stuck in the airport, and running late to a show!
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