A week ago today, the boys and I returned home from a two-week road trip to Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, Nevada, and even a tiny slice of Montana.
We camped. We stayed in guest bedrooms and an RV and a run-down motel in the middle of the Nevada desert for a night. We ate more fast food than we should have, but we also drank healthy amounts of chocolate milk infused with potato flakes and fresh vegetables from our garden.
We floated down the Idaho River in a raft built for four, and donned our roller skates for endless loops around the church parking lot just down the street from my parents’ house. We treated one son for a spider bite gone bad and comforted another when roller skating brought on an endless number of skinned knees.
When my husband flew up to meet us for five days, we trekked to the edge of eastern Idaho. Even though I’ve barely a picture to prove it, we hung out with dear friends from my Santa Cruz days and took day trips to Yellowstone and Grand Teton.
It was nothing short of magical.
And the trip held its fair share of hiccups along the way.
One such hiccup found us scrambling for a campsite at Yellowstone the day of — which is virtually impossible when you can book camping 13 months in advance for premium camping spots.
The plan had been to drive a couple hours into Yellowstone, see the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone, Upper and Lower Falls, and a couple more sights along the way, before setting up camp for the night.
We had bear spray and bear-proof containers. We had a tent and sleeping bags, mattress pads, and camping chairs. We had everything one might need for a night in the woods if one were to actually book the correct night.
But if one were to book the wrong date entirely, and only realize this error the morning you were supposed to set up camp in the forest, one would proverbially be up the creek without a paddle.
Of course, “one” in this case was me.
When I went to take a screenshot of our camping reservation, I realized we had long passed our date. Kind as the park rangers are, they weren’t about to find us a new campsite just because I’d mixed up our dates in a flurry of booking activity.
Luckily, the friends we were staying with knew their way around the area. They knew about lesser-known campgrounds and they knew how to reroute our two-day trip, if we could find a place with less than twelve hours’ notice.
As it turned out, we were able to find a campsite in Grand Teton, which borders the south side of Yellowstone.
Although the hiccup meant we got off to a later start than usual, we still saw the sights. We felt a catch in our throats when Old Faithful really, actually, finally spouted over a hundred feet in the air. We marveled at the beauty of Jenny Lake’s crystal blue water and of the silent, stunning mountains surrounding it.
When all was said and done, and we finally pulled into our driveway at 2:23 pm last Thursday afternoon, I was left with a single thought:
I want to be in the woods.
I want to return to nature, not necessarily to places marked by millions of tourists a day, but to places marked by unseen catches of beauty.
I want to camp (on the correct day, at the right time), and I want to be in those places that still your soul. I want to drive to a place and turn off the car for a day, a weekend, a week. I want to see little boy faces caked with dirt and I want to roast s’mores like nobody’s business.
I want the wild to mark me.
I loved this, Cara! I grew up the child of New Jersey public school teachers who dragged us four kids and a trailer all over the country every summer. We did not have a fancy house or car or clothes, but we have incredible memories and all of us love the woods and the natural splendor of America. Go whenever you can!