Week Two: The Big Trip 2025

Each time I strike out on a trip, I reflect on the journey: a trip of a lifetime; the best trip ever. And I'm not wrong, as typically, it was the first time visiting a new place, and the experience was like wrapping myself in wonder itself.

It's easy to forget the feeling of wonder.

The year I turned five, my parents moved to a cabin on Los Trancos Woods Road in San Mateo, California. It's odd the things we remember throughout our lives--snapshots, really, rather than a long winding reel of events stitched like an old quilt spread out on the sweet, hot summer grass of one's life. I don't remember a cake, but I do remember my father pulling a fluffy orange and black tiger with green glass eyes from the trunk of his Studebaker, and wishing me a happy birthday. I liked the tiger, but I was most excited to show my parents the bright yellow banana slug that my dog Horse and I found in the woods that morning. I remember speedtalking through the adventure: Horse finding the perfect mudpit and an array of fallen logs, and the slug perfectly perched on a leaf as though waiting to tell me a story, and the total wonder of the forest as I pulled a matchbox from the front pocket of my little jacket with the slug inside nestled in a bed of grass and leaves and presented it to my mother. If she said anything, I don't remember. I remember watching as she pulled a box of Morton salt off the shelf in the kitchen, taking both the slug and my birthday to the woods.

It's easy to forget the feeling of wonder. Perhaps that's why I travel. I plan enough to keep myself safe, but not so much that I pass by the unexpected: the miles and miles of sunflowers in South Dakota and Nebraska that reach well over 6 feet tall, faces turned toward the sun when it's shining, and chins tucked and leaves curled in the rain. The smell of untouched grasslands, warm and sweet, blankets the prairie as far as the eye can see. Bison, deer, and wild turkeys roaming across protected parklands--and the skies at night, unfettered by city lights, bright with stars and planets and galaxies whisper a reminder that wonder isn't something I can share: wonder lives within me.

Here are some pictures from week two of last fall's Big Trip. I'm planning a Big Trip to Yellowstone, the Tetons, Montana, and North Dakota in the late spring this year.