10,000 miles. 20 states (OK, 19 plus Puerto Rico). 60 close friends and family members. 23 local, state and national parks.
We’re home. Time to caption & share the photos. That should do it for capturing memories, right?
For any normal person, maybe. But for capturing the full vibrancy of a past moment, I like to play “Best of.” It’s a game we started with our kids when they were small, and I think it rubbed off more on me than on them. Here’s how it works:
Best Hike of Trip: Nevada Falls in Yosemite (3/28). (I mean, really, how could anything in Yosemite NOT win Best Hike?) Eating an orange way too close to the edge with my son who’s about to disappear into Central America for 2 months…
Runner-up: El Yunque Peak, Puerto Rico (3/7) Getting drenched with The Mate on the way down…after all, it IS a rain forest…
Honorable Mention: Nevada Falls again (3/27). Yup, I went up twice in a row. Didn’t have enough time the first day.
Best Bike Path: Turtle Bay, Redding, California (3/29). An old favorite, not a new discovery, but nothing beats this wonderfully curvy path with its little roller-coaster section, wild bunnies, blooming redbuds…
Runner-up: Provo River, Utah (3/23). Exercising nervous tension before Carolina’s final NCAA game…
Honorable Mention: Bettendorf, Iowa (3/20). Who knew the Quad Cities were so into fitness?
Best Dinner: That little hamlet near Ceiba, Puerto Rico that served fish with sauteed onions and lime (3/6). Giant as-yet-uncaught fish patrolled the waters beneath the restaurant deck, probably scarfing the entrails of our dinner.
Runner-up: a tie between Mama Dip’s Fried Chicken in Chapel Hill (3/14) (Mama Dip catered our wedding back in 1986!) and our friend Ben’s braised lamb shanks in Asheville, NC (3/1). Ben OWNS lamb.
Honorable Mention: fried pork and plantains, El Yunque (3/3 and 3/4). Good thing we got out of there; that diet would have killed us. But we would’ve died happy…
Best Lunch: Allen & Son’s BBQ with fixins (3/13). OOOF. No possible runner-up.
Best Breakfast: El Yunque Inn’s creamy oatmeal with fresh mango (3/4). Since all our other breakfasts were cereal, that one kinda stands out…
And, lest you think with me and The Mate it’s all about exercise and food…well, it is. On road trips, we are rarely in Museum Mode. But we do branch out occasionally.
Best Cultural Experience: Bluegrass & Beer at Asheville’s French Broad Brewery (3/1). It’s the name of the river, silly, not some Parisian chick…
Runner-up: My own (first!) author reading at The Regulator Bookshop in my hometown, Durham, NC (3/11). 🙂
Best Unexpected Find: Great Basin National Park, Nevada (3/25-6). Aspens. Quiet. Wild turkeys.
Runner-up: Rock Canyon, Provo, Utah (3/22). Whoa, those rock climbers are all so happy!
Honorable Mention: Tie between the Ceiba Country Inn, Puerto Rico (3/5-6)--all those dogs!--and the Indianapolis Museum of Art’s 100-acre sculpture woods (3/19). Is that a spaceship sinking in that lake?
Notice a pattern here? The bolded words are the real memories. The whole “contest” is just an excuse to push my brain to run through all those thousands of possibilities, reinforcing the synaptic connections of every single one of those 49 days.
Oh, and the dates? That’s just my nerdiness. See, my grandma lived to be 103 and kept a razor-sharp memory till the end. Just in case I’ve inherited her longevity genes, I’m keeping my own brain in SHAPE.
So that’s how I remember good times. Do you have other tricks? Memorabilia? Rock collections? Or are you so glad to be home you just let it all go and move on to doing laundry?
Wing's World 
Oh, Gretchen!
I could do half a dozen blog posts on this loveliness, and I could write you a comment several times longer than this post…
But then, who would write my 33,333 NaNo words, or my A to Z posts? ;D
I’ve just sorted through a couple of hundred postcards collected in our traveling years (1997-2001). Memories, stories, moments of grace and fury and lessons learned (do NOT argue with your spouse while sitting in the front of a canoe in an alligator-inhabited mangrove swamp. It’s utterly and completely unsatisfying, your paddling gets out of sync, you get lost, and your neck kinks from all the tension and twisting…not to mention that years later, you’ll think back to that two kids or three debate – and think about two thriving children, and the one between, whose life was measured in days, and whose voice you never heard…yes, we both “won”. We will always, now, be the parents of three children: Jeremiah, Elijah, and Annalise….but only have two to lavish love upon, in life.).
Travel is full of lessons, and memories, and jokes (hitting an alligator with my paddle; the awesome hissing roar he made after he swam away, and how we couldn’t stop laughing, the rest of the trip…).
Thanks for the reminder, and I do feel some blog posts coming on….
I know, right? Photos from everyday life are powerful too, but somehow travel-memory pictures seem more…infused, I guess. Thank you for yours…
I woke up this morning to Best of the Best. What a great way to start my day! What a generous gift! Loved the images. Loved the idea. It will be used & shared. fondly Ann
From my Android phone on T-Mobile. The first nationwide 4G network.
Awww…thank you, Ann! Miss you, girl.
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