average life

I remember listening to this story on “This American Life” on NPR about roadtrips and about how often we expect that we’ll gain some deep insight or great self understanding on roadtrips. How could you not? Alone for hours with nothing but your thoughts and possibly some music. More often, however, we gain no great insight at all. Rather, we often arrive at our destination tired, stiff, and a little crabby. I wasn’t crabby when I pulled into Sarah’s apartment’s parking lot, but I also had gained no great insight into myself or anything else, really.

If I had wanted too, I could have taken my time on the trip. I could have stopped at small towns along the way. Interstate 40 roughly follows old Route 66 across the country, so there was no lack of random little roadside attractions, but every time I saw a sign for “Longest Route 66 Map”, “Largest Cross in the Western Hemisphere” or “Meteor Crater” I just drove on (even though the meteor crater was tempting). For some reason I just wanted to drive. There were few “stretching-my-legs” type stops. Even on my gas fill-up breaks, I usually didn’t go into the station. I just had one thought…”get there”.

As I passed through Gallup, NM yesterday, I officially entered uncharted territory. I had only driven north from Gallup, never west. This was the part where I was unsure what to expect (considering I had seen about 400 miles of desert, I had a pretty good idea, though). After a couple of more hours I ended up in Flagstaff, a surprisingly aesthetic town. Instead of a stark desert landscape, there were trees and mountains. As Sarah and Nate gave me the grand tour of Flagstaff downtown (which had a bunch of cool shops and restaurants), they told me the city was uncommonly dark because of the observatory which sat on the mountain just above where we were. I remember hearing about the observatory in my audiobook on the universe that I had listened to since Alabama (not consistently).

I spend today with the Ortons in Flagstaff before I head off tomorrow morning for Los Angeles. More uncharted territory.