Home (Away from Home) Sweet Home: Santa Barbara, CA

After the natural beauty and punishing temperatures of Joshua Tree, we moseyed towards the coast to stay with some family friends who’ve known me since I was in cloth diapers. About twenty years ago, Lisa and David left the small town I grew up in and moved to Santa Barbara, California.

Why they chose this place over rural Iowa is anyone’s guess.

Since then, a string of relatives and family friends have moved to the West coast: my aunt helps run a permaculture school in Cuyama Valley, my uncle and grandma now live up in Chico, my brother went to UCSB — I even lived in Santa Barbara for a couple short stints, working for some local beekeepers and struggling to acclimate to the perfect weather. (In the Midwest, one becomes accustomed to spending half the year in a pre-emptive cower.)

After almost two months of camping, couch-surfing, and venturing through strange territory, Lisa and David’s place was like an oasis of familiarity. I mean, look at this fridge map and tell me you don’t feel comforted:

We spent our days in Santa Barbara roaming the city, wandering State Street and playing with strangers’ dogs at the beach. In the evenings we hung out with Lisa and David and my brother, Van, who had recently made the wise decision to move back to Santa Barbara from Colorado Springs.

In retrospect, Sean was definitely plotting something in this picture.

Santa Barbara is nestled between the mountains and the Pacific, with red tile roofs and palm trees as far as the eye can see. It’s where famous people go when they’re old and just want to chill in their mansions and use the word “terroir” a lot, but it’s also much more than that.

But I mean really, does it NEED to be more than that? Look at that view.

We were also lucky enough to catch a show at Soho featuring Jan Smith, a phenomenal local musician who also happens to be my aunt.

A few days later we went to visit Jan at the eco-village where she lives, out in the desert a couple hours from Santa Barbara. Usually teeming with visiting groups and students, the property was quiet in the summer heat. We stayed in a sweet little cob house that was constructed by a teenage girl during one of the eco-village’s natural building courses. (In my teenage years, I could barely construct a clean outfit — but hey, we all walk our own paths, okay?)

Being back in Santa Barbara reminds me of coming here as a beach-dazzled teenager, back when anywhere outside of Iowa seemed boundless and exotic. I feel fortunate to have had a rural childhood that was quiet but immensely full, and also to have had the opportunity to roam and explore so much as an adult. From here we’ll be venturing into more of the unknown, but I’m happy to know our way will be blessed with plenty of familiar faces.

Scorched Beauty: Joshua Tree, CA

We were sad to say goodbye to La Paz last week, but the homeland was calling, and we knew if we stayed much longer Sean would descend even further into his Mexican Coca-Cola addiction. We said our farewells and hit the road, heading back the way we came.

Well, more or less the same way — I confess there was one instance where I neglected my navigational duties and took us down a country road that soon turned to gravel. By the time we realized my mistake, we’d gone too far to backtrack, and before long the gravel turned to large rocks — some of them menacing enough that I had to jump out of the car and hurl them out of the way to ensure that Watermelon’s dainty underbelly could proceed unscathed. It wasn’t that close to sunset and we weren’t that low on gas, and we did end up making it to our hotel with plenty of time to spare, but let’s just say we both spent a lot of time thinking about how we’d survive in the desert if it came down to it.

If only we could eat breathtaking vistas.

Other than that, the drive up was fairly uneventful, although we did discover that military checkpoints are considerably less nonchalant when you’re driving towards the States. It was a true test of our Spanish skills trying to explain to Mexican officials what all the weird crap in our car was. (Things like antihistamines and tarot cards and odor-eating charcoal bags just don’t come up very often in Duolingo lessons.)

Just shy of Tijuana, we hit an exciting milestone:

That’s right, Watermelon is now a ripe 100,000 miles old. Gifts aren’t necessary, but she’d love to get a card. Ziggy is always nice. A check would be fine too.

After spending the night in Tijuana, we made our slow way back across the border and drove to our next stop: Joshua Tree.

Even in the dead of summer, Joshua Tree was by far the most crowded park we’ve been to, but somehow it felt more remote and pristine than anywhere we’d camped so far. Maybe it was the quiet: whereas the other campgrounds were filled with bird chatter or insect songs, in Joshua Tree we barely heard a wing flutter.

We did, however, have some uninvited guests.

In fact, much of our time at Joshua Tree was spent waging a rodent war of Caddyshack proportions. Every time we turned around, these disturbingly brazen creatures were infiltrating our food, water, beer and coffee supplies. They managed to devour an entire bag of guacamole chips, which I was hoping would at least cause them some mild intestinal discomfort, but it seemed only to cement their conviction that we wanted desperately to feed them and needed only to be shown how.

Nevertheless, after securing our comestibles, we managed to get in some very scenic hikes. I don’t know anything about rocks, but the ones in Joshua Tree look like giant pebbles stacked by a daydreaming child, piled in such improbable configurations that you can’t help but see whimsical shapes in them. It’s not unlike staring at a bunch of clouds.

When you’re just trying to get a cool rock picture and a tree totally photo-bombs.

The trees themselves are equally tempting to the imagination — they seem to be frozen midway through some frantic gesture, like hands grasping at the sky. They also have surprisingly shallow roots, so you frequently see them listing at precarious angles or collapsed entirely in the sand, like a desert traveler crawling towards water.

We kept these hikes short, however, because as soon as the shadows receded under the scorching mid-day sun, we were like ants under a magnifying glass. On our first day I made the mistake of trying to prepare lunch at noon and nearly burned myself on the silverware I’d set on the picnic table just seconds before.

For those particularly punishing hours, Sean and I ventured into town to explore. On the main drag we found a little gathering of weird galleries and shops, and we happened across a loosely defined outdoor art space that featured a spaceship-like construction with revolving disco boulders.

All the people we talked to (except the mannequins) was friendly and helpful, giving us suggestions for coffee-shops, bars, galleries, and tourist attractions. Following one tip, we drove out to a little Old West village called Pioneertown, which has served as a film set for famous westerns over the years such as, I kid you not, “The Gay Amigo.” The town is also home to a famous bar called Pappy and Harriet’s, which, in spite of its remote location, boasts such big names as Paul McCartney and Lorde in its roster. (We didn’t see any superstars, but their nachos were divine.)

After Joshua Tree, our trajectory will take us steadily Northward, which will bring a welcome change in climate. I love the desert, but we only have so many layers of skin left between the two of us.

Next we’ll be heading to Santa Barbara for a little dose of perfect weather (and to see some dear friends and family). Will we stop in L.A. and get famous real quick along the way? Probably. Stay tuned.

Living in Peace: La Paz, BCS (Part 2)

First and foremost, we have an introduction to make:

Yes, our dear Watermelon is now Watermelon 2.0. (Or Frankenmelon, if you prefer). With any luck, this will be her last non-elective surgery on this trip. Sean has made up a song that goes “el carro es azuuuul, but la puerta es blaaaanca…”

Fortunately, La Paz is a very walkable city, so there was plenty to do while we waited for the new door to arrive. Actually, do might be an overstatement — to be honest, my favorite activity in La Paz is just roaming up and down the malecon with a belly full of burritos, watching the sun go down.

I’ve been coming to La Paz for about 3 years now, ever since my dad moved down here to fix up a sailboat in 2016. While it’s a far cry from the party havens of Cabos or Cancun, La Paz sees its fair share of foreign visitors — mostly tourists seeking glimpses of local wildlife, or a respite from that bane of all earnest travelers: other tourists.

Even in the high season, however, La Paz always feels amicable and relaxed, free of that peculiar tension that often arises — at least in the U.S. — between locals and visitors.

In the dead of summer, the streets are sparse in the daytime, everyone hurrying towards the promise of air conditioning on their midday errands. As the sun goes down, however, the beachside paths are teeming with bodies in motion: families out for a stroll, resolute joggers in Spandex and hip weights, young couples sharing ice cream, children zooming through a sea of legs on their toy cars and tricycles. Someone is always camped out under a thatch umbrella with a pair of speakers piping Mexico’s Top 40 into the night air. Someone is always watching their children splash into the water one last time before the sun goes down.

When I tell people my dad lives on a boat in Mexico, they often assume that he’s some sort of retired investment banker living on a yacht in Cancun. The reality is much less extravagant, but significantly more charming: the good ship Thinkabout is a 30-foot Westsail that “drinks six, eats four, and sleeps two.”

Once we’d gotten our bearings on land, Dad dinghied us out to the boat and gave Sean the grand tour. We went for a dip when the current died down, and within minutes a small band of dolphins passed by, just meters away. (Sean, who’d just been asking some friendly but urgent questions about the prevalence of sharks, did not react with immediate delight.) Dad told us there’d been a pod hanging around his boat for the past few weeks, some of them babies.

After three days of tense mountain driving (and the whole, uh, stop sign situation), Sean and I are more than ready to let the city of peace work its magic on us.

Boojums and Choques: La Paz, BCS (Part 1)

The journey from San Diego to La Paz, BCS took about three days of driving. (We could have done it in less, but the narrow mountain roads inspired a cautious pace.) We got off to a rough start, mainly because I misread my dad’s very specific instructions and drove past the office where we were supposed to buy our tourist visas. Once we realized this, we attempted to backtrack, but inevitably found ourselves funneled into the huge, crawling line to get back into the U.S.

It took about an hour for us to reach the border, inching forward while a wide variety of industrious street vendors offered us everything from tacos to crucifixes to Frida Kahlo aprons. When asked why we were entering the U.S., we explained that we were just trying to get to Mexico.

At long last, we managed to get back across the border, obtain the proper documents, and start making our way South. Most of our drive would take place on Highway 1, which meanders down the length of the peninsula and offers stunning views of both the Pacific Ocean and the dreamy blue-green Sea of Cortez.

The view from Hotel El Morro in Santa Rosalia.

Aside from El Rosario and Santa Rosalia, where we spent our first and second nights, towns were few and far between. A couple times we saw signs for gas up ahead, only to realize that this referred to a truck parked by the side of the road with a few gas cans in the back.

We drove through hundreds of miles of parched desert, surrounded by blue-grey mountains and towering saguaros, the occasional burst of forsythia. Further South, we encountered a new kind of tree, tall and skinny with stubby little branches and a single tuft of greenery on top — sort of like if trees went through an awkward teenage phase. I was delighted to learn that this tree is called a boojum, a reference to Lewis Carroll’s “The Hunting of the Snark.”

The roads down to La Paz were, to say the least, nail-biting. Each time a car flew past us in the opposing lane, I felt a flash of terror and saw us tumbling into the valley below. As a passenger, the best tactic seemed to be to keep one’s eyes closed and trust the driver and God, but our looping trajectory made me nauseous every time I took my eyes off the road. Instead, we both spent most of the three-day drive braced for impact.

It seemed especially ironic, then, when we got into a car accident two blocks from our hotel in La Paz.

As with any city, the traffic in La Paz has its own particular rhythm that doesn’t always reflect the exact letter of the law. People tend to roll through stop signs as long as the intersection is clear, and, perhaps because of their apparent insignificance, these stop signs are often tucked into the far corner of the street and obscured by trees or vehicles. Unfortunately, I missed one such stop just as another car was running their stop. The other driver slammed into our side, tearing a wide gash in the door and spraying safety glass across our laps.

After the initial shock, it was clear that no one was hurt, and the damage to poor Watermelon was mainly cosmetic. Dad was only a few blocks away, and before long someone stopped and offered to help us translate to the cops. The man who’d been driving behind me generously waited around in the hot sun to testify that he’d seen the other driver run the stop sign too.

In the end, the cops determined that we’d both been at fault and would both pay for our own damages, which was probably the best case scenario considering all we needed was a new door. After a long, tense hour in the La Paz police station, waiting for the reports to be finalized, I happened to look out into the parking lot and saw what I thought was a piece of black plastic flapping on top of our car. Upon closer inspection, I realized it was a small black cat happily bathing herself on our roof.

Some might consider this a bad omen, but this little gato was a dead ringer for our own black cat, Phoebe, which we chose to take as a good sign. After all, if a choque was in our destiny, it happened in pretty fortunate circumstances. Replacing the door will be considerably cheaper here than in the U.S., and, as Sean pointed out, there’s always the chance that we’ll get a really cool mismatched door and Watermelon will look even more fly.

In the meantime, at least we’re in a beautiful place with one of my favorite people. Maybe destiny’s in our favor after all.

Life in a Hair Dryer: Phoenix, AZ

Driving out of Santa Fe, we’d expected to hit a gas station, but instead found ourselves on another endless stretch of desert with the needle nosing towards empty. Neither of our phones had a signal, so we wound up stopping in a small town called Madrid to ask where the nearest station was.

At this point, several nights of incomplete sleep cycles had left me decidedly short of cheerful, but my crankiness waned as we walked through Madrid. This was exactly the sort of place that inspired me to take roadtrips in the first place: although we soon learned that Madrid was home to only about 300 people, the main street was stuffed with colorful galleries, restaurants, and jewelry shops. We talked to one gallery owner who said she’d stopped in Madrid (firmly pronounced MAD-rid by the locals) in the 80’s and bought property there within the week. The jewelry salesman showed us his collection of cerrillos turquoise, a soft, aqua-tinted variety that had a smoky quality when unfinished. Everyone told us we had to go to Harvey the chocolate maker, whose generous samples and Wonka-esque wackiness lived up to their reputation. When we stopped in the bar to ask about a gas station, two day-drinking locals kindly offered to proffer gas cans from their own homes.

Instead, we managed to make it to the nearest station, which wasn’t far from our campground in Turquoise Trails. We settled in for a peaceful evening, pitching our tent under some low juniper trees that emitted a soft crackling sound through the night.

We also befriended the campground cat, whose loyalty was cemented when I helped him fish a dead bird out of our grill.

Om nom nom. Just kidding, I played it with it for three seconds and then forgot about it because I’m a cat.

Unfortunately, he also took it personally when we retired inside our tent, and decided to get our attention by jumping on top of it. I couldn’t stop laughing, but Sean was less than amused by the twenty claws coming through our recently repaired rain fly. (By the end of this trip, I suspect the whole thing will be made of weatherproofing tape.)

When we finally made it to Phoenix, our first stop was Sean’s aunt and uncle’s house, where we also found his cousin and her three kids. The five of us adults chatted over some much-needed ice water while we watched the big-screen TV that was the window onto the backyard pool, where the kids were by turns splashing manically through the water and jumping up on land to wave shyly at us.

Shyness didn’t last long. Who could resist Funcle Sean?

Once the sun went down and it went from being brutally hot to just horrendously hot, we all took a walk around the neighborhood while the kids rode their bikes. Sean opted for a more rigorous exercise routine, which mostly involved giving endless piggybacks to everyone under 10.

We also met up with Sean’s cousin from the other side of the family, who’d moved to Phoenix from Connecticut about a year ago. We were going to check out her friend’s concert at some cool dive bar downtown, but at the last minute we remembered that we’re old and broke, so instead we caught up over salads and craft beers in her kitchen the next day.

These family visits pretty much concluded our adventures in Phoenix, since it was too hot to explore anything that required leaving air conditioning. (I don’t know what the logistics are of connecting the entire city by underground tunnels, but it’s something Phoenix should maybe look into.) We set off for San Diego, our jumping-off point for the Mexican leg of our trip.

Fortunately, this drive offered a little more variety in scenery than the last few days. Rolling hills gave way to sandy desert, which morphed back into towering clay-red mesas. Once or twice we even drove through wind farms, which felt like being an ant in some Seussian garden, the long white blades swinging with the mesmerizing grace of something very large moving very swiftly.

After a night in San Diego, we’ll start heading down the Baja Peninsula to where my dad lives on a 30-foot Westsail in La Paz. Hasta luego, Estados!

Strange Oasis: Santa Fe, NM

The stretch of road between Roswell and Santa Fe was perilously empty, in the way that makes you glance nervously at your gas gauge every few minutes even if you just fueled up. It seemed we were the only people on the road.

Well… almost the only people. (art by John Cerney)

When we finally spotted a glinting chrome diner just off the highway — the first functioning business we’d seen in hours — we all but screeched the car to a cartoon stop.

Penny’s Diner was one of the few fixtures of a small town called Vaughn, New Mexico. It provided exactly the classic diner experience its retro image promised: generous but poker-faced waitresses in heavy eyeshadow, a white-haired man in suspenders cleaning egg out of his moustache, a misspelled specials board, rewardingly bland sandwiches.

After devouring said sandwiches, we soldiered on through the emptiness towards Santa Fe National Forest, where we set up for the night at Black Canyon Campground.

After the wide-open landscapes of western Texas, the tall pines had a sort of magical hush that felt like true wilderness. The quiet was punctuated with wingbeats up above, crows and robin trading places in the branches, the occasional whirr of a hummingbird.

We spent a couple peaceful nights as forest creatures, then ventured back down into the city to do a little exploring. We wound up springing for tickets to Meow Wolf‘s House of Eternal Return, something we’d heard about from almost everyone we’d talked to since Marfa.

Built from an old bowling alley owned by George R. R. Martin, House of Eternal Return is something of a real-life choose-your-own-adventure story with a highly interpretable plot. The installation essentially has two layers: visitors start out exploring the very believable facade of an ordinary household, but crawl into the fireplace or hop through the fridge and you’ll find yourself in a kaleidoscopic wonderland of neon surrealism.

Unfortunately, even on a Wednesday morning the place was shoulder-to-shoulder with visitors. Any detail that called for more than a few seconds’ attention — a newspaper clipping on the fridge, a bedside journal, a computer full of mysterious documents — was quickly swarmed with impatient bodies vying for their turn. The place itself was also rife with narrow tunnels and stairs, so anyone with limited mobility would miss out on most of the good stuff.

Emerging back into the soothing palette of reality, our imaginations and retinas still aflame, Sean and I retired to a nearby brewery to plan the route to our next stop: Phoenix. There, we’d meet up with two different factions of Sean’s family as well as some friends of mine from when I came through on my solo epic roadtrip a few years ago.

Hopefully, the desert will continue to smile upon us.

Land of Enchantment (and Aliens): Roswell, NM

En route from Marfa to our next destination in Santa Fe, we wound up landing in Roswell for a night. Like pretty much everyone, our only knowledge of Roswell came from the alleged alien sighting in 1947, and I was curious to see what the town was really like.

I came prepared to see beyond Roswell’s campy reputation, but as it turns out, when something brings tourism to your otherwise unremarkable rural town for over 60 years, you lean into it hard. The bug-eyed, green-skinned, mysteriously buff visages of those classic alien figures stared at us from fast food restaurants, sporting goods stores, T-shirt shops, even the local tax service.

After a peaceful evening at Bottomless Lake campground, where we found relief from the New Mexico heat by spending exactly eight seconds in the frigid water before waddling desperately ashore, we ventured into downtown Roswell and spent some time at the International UFO Museum & Research Center.

I come to Earth just for the tanning beds.

If only we hadn’t run out of gas in Zeta-9, we would have arrived in the 90’s like we planned and these chokers would have KILLED.

Indisputable proof that aliens also enjoy playing Frisbee.

In spite of its silliness, I was surprised to find that the whole experience did actually leave me a little unsettled. After all, regardless of what you believe about the 1947 incident, what are the chances that we’re the only intelligent beings in the universe? And if we don’t have a monopoly on “intelligent life,” wouldn’t that be cause to rethink what it is that makes us human?

One of the most interesting items I came across in the museum was a framed excerpt from a declassified report explaining why the government keeps information on UFOs under wraps. This particular quote stuck with me:

“If the public learned that other intelligent life was actually coming to our planet, many of our social institutions would be disrupted…Perhaps most important from a political viewpoint, younger members of society, especially those who grew up with the space program, would push for a new view of ourselves. Instead of thinking…Americans, Canadians, Peruvians, French, or Chinese, they would start to think of themselves as earthlings…As idyllic as this sounds, I know of no government that wants its citizens to owe their primary allegiance to the planet instead of to the nation…The biggest fear of anybody in power,…is losing that power…National governments do not want their subjects to have a planet wide orientation.”

I’ll leave it at that. Peace out, earthlings.