Road Trips

Road trips can enliven the soul. They can open our minds, help us breathe a bit. Road trips can help us have (and create) a sense of adventure . . . especially when they are to nowhere in particular.

When I was in graduate school, a friend and I took off on road trips over two consecutive Christmas breaks. We began both trips from Abilene, Texas and had no destination whatsoever in mind. We literally hopped in the truck and drove off. We knew we wanted to go west. But that's about all we knew.

On the first trip, we wound up going through Big Bend country. We really had no idea what to expect from it. But as you can see from the above picture, it is stunning. The picture is from Texas, looking south across the Rio Grande (not so stunning . . . or grand), into Mexico. We were amazed with what we came across during that trip.

That trip opened up our sense of adventure . . . so much so that we wound up at the Grand Canyon the next year. Incredible. We were so adventurous that we decided to try to come back through the Rocky Mountains in Colorado during a snowstorm. That proved to be a bit too adventurous, as we became stranded and then found ourselves creeping back home across ice and snow.

We might have bit off more than we could chew with the second trip. But nonetheless, our experiences opened up our senses of adventure and showed us how worthwhile a true road trip can be.