Six ladies hiking

Sunstruck in Joshua Tree

Impaled desert rat

A 5-senses list today (on these next few days that I’m spending with friends, I’m likely going to do shorter posts, since Friend Time needs maximizing).

Because driving was a headache (literally and figuratively… don’t know how people manage this kind of driving on a daily basis), today’s blog post is going to be pictures+haiku.

This trip, to me, is a collection of places to see and experiences to be had, and partly that’s mundane realities like getting my first ever Del Taco or chilling out at a funky rental place without feeling like I “should” be going out to see or do something new wherever I’m at.

That’s the stuff that makes travel memorable: the idiosyncracies, whether they’re positive or negative.

Taking a moment to be publicly proud of myself for getting out of my anxiety spiral about unknown plans. Listening to my physical needs (last night, that was sleep; today, that was leisurely soaking in hot tubs) was indeed what I needed. I’m glad to have come to a place in my life where I can get out of my head and not let that anxiety spiraling completely dominate my choices.

For as wonderful and beautiful as today was, I’m ending it feeling overwhelmed by choice about where to go and how to approach this entirely unstructured time. Before this trip, I plotted out my general route, and stuck to it more or less throughout, but now I’m faced with my first truly unplanned moves.

Meow Wolf: I slid and climbed and played gesture games with costumed performers moving through the space. Jennifer and I made a lot of nerdy art museum jokes about which elements were like knock-off Yayoi Kusama’s or Nam June Paik’s and James Turrell’s. It was a good time of an afternoon.

There are things that are convenient about remote set-ups, but maybe convenience isn’t the thing we should be reaching for when we want to break out of the isolating, distancing patterns we’ve all had to use to cope with the last couple of years.

Also, there’s a lot of love for how many of my museum world buddies this trip is re-connecting me with.

I spent 8 hours driving on the interstate. Which is all well and good, and it was neat to see all the wind farms and the change from plains to shrubs to mesas to mountains. But it also means my brain is mush, so here is a bit of a photo and video diary of the day instead of words.