Guest Post: @PdxSag Summer Road Trip
[It's summer and that brings out travel blogs. Our Credit Bubble Stocks
correspondent, @PdxSag,
went on a two week road trip out west and sends the following to share.]
“Travel would be to drive an aged automobile with doubtful tires through Romania or Afghanistan without hotel reservations and to get by on terrible French. One who has hotel reservations and speaks no French is a tourist. Let the tourist be cushioned against misadventure, your true traveler will not feel that he has had his money’s worth unless he brings back a few scars.”
- from Abroad: British Literary Traveling between the Wars by Paul Fussell
Background
It has been nine years since we last went on a family extended road trip (not to be confused with an extended-family road trip, which seems not advisable). The biggest change this time compared to last time is that we are down a kid. The oldest is out of the house now and has a regular adult job. The second biggest change is the kids are teenagers, not sweet little rug-rats. Other than that, most things are the same. We have the same rig – a Sprinter with a DIY bed frame in place of two of the three rows of passenger seats – and we travel in the same manner: secondary roads, camping off-grid, and cooking most our own meals ourselves as we go.
There is an old saw about a certain class of sailboats to describe their size as “Drinks for six, dinner for four, sleeps two.” Adapting that for the Sprinter, I call it “Field trips for ten, road trips for four, sleeps two.”
I'm not gonna lie, having two kids instead of three was a far smoother operation. As Bob Metcalfe (father of two, ahem) would explain, removing one kid (33%) halves the drama factor from an 8 to a 4 (2^3 vs. 2^2). Plus, it means while underway there is now enough space that no one is ever forced to sit next to someone when they don't want to be next to that someone. One kid could be on the bed while the other could spread out on the bench seat.
For sleeping, we pitched a tent next to the van and the kids shared that. Again, two in a tent is a much smoother arrangement than three. It did mean we always had to stop where one could pitch a tent. When they were really small, in a pinch we could all fit three plus ourselves inside the van for the night. Sadly, those days are long gone.
Regarding the Sprinter, on the internet it's cool to have an RV conversion, whether DIY or factory. In real life, the passenger van with a bed temporarily installed on a raised platform/frame is superior. It is true that the passenger van gives up a closet and some drawers (meh), as well as the ability to cook and eat inside the van (not as great as it sounds), and a very cramped shower & toilet (gross). All that extra weight from a conversion kills driving performance and fuel economy. Then, the rest of the year the RV conversions are not hauling a gaggle of kids on a field trip, or a troop of scouts on a camping trip, or a cross country team to an out-of-town meet like the passenger Sprinter can. Anti-natalists don't want you to know this, but it's actually a lot of fun being the go-to guy for field trips, camp-outs, and cross-country meets.
Regarding the bed, this is the big compromise. It's just a twin. A twin doesn't take up the whole width of the van, which allows for more storage since you can stack more totes and coolers next to it than you could fit underneath it. It's also a lot easier to access frequently used items next to the bed than having them always stuffed underneath it. Being able to move from the front to the back of the van by walking instead of crawling over a bed is more convenient too. The compromise is obviously a twin is not as comfortable as a full size mattress. Fortunately, the missus and I are not Ameri-fats. If we sleep on our sides we fit well enough. Hey, it's a road trip. As Paul Fussell said, a little discomfort is part of the adventure.
Itinerary
I had never been to the Grand Canyon. Last year a friend who does a lot of outdoors-ing and grew up in Arizona couldn't believe it and said I had no idea what I was missing. I was also recommended to visit the North Rim. It has better summer weather and much, much smaller crowds. So I designed a road trip around visiting the North Rim of the Grand Canyon.
Our route was to go through southeastern Oregon, the Nevada Great Basin, Utah, hitting Zion National Park, then the Grand Canyon North Rim. After the GC we would go around the east side of the canyon to Flagstaff, then a couple nights in Sedona with hotel reservations, and finally Phoenix, to visit some
family friends.
The Great Basin is enormous. I generally like driving through flat, wide-open empty land with the road stretching ahead like a ribbon for as far as you can see. It's what I love most about Oregon east of the Cascades. But the Great Basin kind of broke me. I think half of it was the difference between 4-6 hours and 12-14 hours just hits different. The other half was it wasn't our destination. It was in the way of our destination, and I was feeling impatient about getting there. (And for getting home on the return leg.) Normally I'm pretty relaxed about getting to where I'm going and happy to make the journey part of the destination, but for a few reasons I didn't have as much time for the journey part as I would have preferred. Plus, 1400 miles from Portland to Phoenix by way of the Grand Canyon, and 1200 miles return taking the slightly more direct route via Las Vegas is A LOT of driving no matter how you slice it.
Zion National Park feels like a tourist trap. The west side, Kolob Canyons, was nice. But for the main park there is one way in and it is full of tacky signage for restaurants and lodging and paid parking. Once you are inside the park, the one road has a number of pull-offs for parking, but they are nearly all full. About 2/3rds of the way through there is a long tunnel, which is one of the focal points of the park. Past the tunnel traffic falls off by 80%. ("Where did all the people go?" was a common feeling I had on this trip.) If the park before the tunnel had been like the park after the tunnel, crowd-wise, I would have liked it a lot more and would rate it as worth going to again. As it stands, it's not high on my list of places I want to go out of my way to visit again. Maybe in the shoulder season with a backcountry permit would get me back.
The scenic back-way from Sedona to Phoenix, going through Jerome, is a great drive and well worth the extra travel time. I think it would have been neat to spend a few hours in Jerome walking around, but we didn't stop this time. We did stop at Arcosanti, an intentional community (aka hippie commune) still in operation from the 1970's. It was interesting, but didn't give off an energy like anyone with options would want to live there. It felt like an abandoned inner city skate park had been inhabited by a small group of survivor hold-outs in a Mad Max-like wasteland. For sure, the people were nice. We did the tour and bought a bell. But still. Something felt off. Too hot and too isolated. Felt like its purpose for the people there was to ignore the rest of the world. I could be wrong.
Phoenix in the summer is nuts. By 9:30 AM it was too hot to be outside. The daytime highs in June were 105 to 110+ F everyday. That a place so unfit for human habitation has grown by leaps and bounds for three decades and counting really makes one wonder. Is Phoenix the revealed preference for what whites will endure to live in proximity of a mestizo underclass instead of a black one? Fun fact: the one black person we saw in Phoenix, which we bumped into at the gas station, was a retiree from Oregon.
Post-travel Musings
I've always loved the Paul Fussell quote distinguishing between tourists and travelers. It is yet another illustration of one of the running themes at the CBS blog: high agency people are qualitatively different from most other people. What we recognize as high agency, Paul Fussell termed travelers.
Fifty years later and after 3000 miles across four states, I think I'm qualified to update his description to the present time:
A tourist has 4WD, GPS, and hotel or campground reservations.
Travelers have 2WD, bad photocopies of USGS maps, and no campground reservations.
It really was that stark.
Our first night at the Grand Canyon we were given a campground site from a random couple we met in line. They were not able to hang around and use their site and didn't want to see go to waste. After being on the road for three days and two nights at that point, it was quite a welcome gift.
The campground was full of new RV's of various sizes and levels of fanciness and a few very skookum overlanding rigs. In contrast, our 15 year old passenger Sprinter seemed quite pedestrian. (Empty America calls this phenomenon Mass Affluence.)
Our second night we dry-camped in the Kaibab National Forest which surrounds the North Rim National Park. Like all national forests, it has free dispersed camping. I was slightly worried we'd have a tough time finding a spot in the forest since the Grand Canyon, like all national parks, is notorious for being fully reserved months and months in advance. I figured there would be tons of people like us visiting the park and free-camping in the national forest just outside. I needn't have worried. We saw three other campers.
My favorite were these two guys in a loaded-down Prius with a couple mountain bikes on back. They rolled in at about 9 or 10 PM, pitched their tent using the car's headlights for light and then were up and back on the road in the morning before 7:00.
Another guy we saw, Boomer, parked in a small clearing well back from the road. He was sitting in a lawn chair in front of an older 4-door hatchback with a small tent pitched behind it. He was just sitting there, watching the road (with virtually no cars on it). He was either a serial killer, or wasn't able to hike like he could in the old days but still enjoyed coming out for the nature and solitude. In either case, definitely not a tourist type.
The third set of campers were a young couple with a diaper-less toddler, a yellow dog, and a 4 year old riding a miniature BMX bike. They were from Flagstaff, but could just as easily have been from Portland or Hood River. Definitely traveler people.
~~~
I started a joke with my kids about “Asian trails” and “Anglo trails.” Whenever they started complaining about maybe we weren't supposed to be hiking where we were, I would say, “no, it's perfectly fine. This is the Anglo trail. The Asian trail is the one we used to get to this one. You don't want to only hike on Asian trails do you?”
It was especially funny the one time in the Grand Canyon we crossed paths with a guided tour-group of Boomers. They all had walking sticks, water bottles, binoculars, and name cards hanging around their necks. About 1/3 of them had their ankles and knees wrapped up like an NFL linebacker. They stood out because they were the only whites we saw on that trail (a short hike along the rim from the campground to the lodge). The three other groups we crossed paths with were Indian (dots, not feathers) and Asian.
This applied to roads too. When we were on some rough dirt forest service roads with signs giving warnings about only high-clearance 4WD vehicles, I would tell the kids these are the Anglo roads. Those 4WD warnings are for the Asians, so they know not to drive here.
~~~
Much to my chagrin, because of course their website hasn't been updated to tell of the new system, the in-person lottery for back-country permits is dead and gone. It ended in August 2023. It is replaced by an exclusively on-line system, which in theory allows for last-minute bookings but in practice cannot because when you're off-grid in a parking lot you can't be re-loading a web page every 10 minutes all-day to see if something new has opened up. Plus, the old system was easy to schedule your day around: get a lottery number anytime before close for the next morning. Be there at 8:00AM and make your pick first-come, first-served based on yesterday's numbers. If you didn't get what you wanted, you are given a new number and come back tomorrow at the same time and at the front of the line.
This was the biggest FUBAR of the whole trip. I had planned (and rushed!) to get to the Grand Canyon by 4:00PM Wednesday so that we'd be in Thursday's lottery. This was strategic. I didn't expect to get any of the campsites I really wanted on Thursday, but it would give us first or nearly first dibs the next day on Friday. Well, the lottery system is dead and gone. All sites are only available via recreation.gov. Even the ranger office uses it. (They have a Starlink subscription.) If/when a cancellation occurs the campsite goes back up on recreation.gov immediately and it's first-reload-first-serve for the entire online public. If someone makes a reservation and no-shows, well, that's certainly a bummer for the on-site public that could have gone out in their place, but don't worry, the no-show pre-paid online so the parks service still gets their money. No refunds. (They still use the old-style wait list for a few spots in one campground below the rim, but all the above rim sites are exclusively online.)
~~~
Acrosanti has these massive 60 foot tall arches of cast concrete. Knowing what we know now about aging steel reinforced concrete structures and Boomer maintenance habits, I couldn't help but think if CBS knew I was standing under hundreds of tons of concrete built by a bunch of untrained volunteer hippies 50 years ago, he'd be laughing his butt off at me.
~~~
The most noticeable difference this time versus nine years ago was how people reacted to us in the Sprinter. When I got it in 2008 most Sprinters were white, contractor vans. While everyone could see the obvious potential as a camping/travel rig, very few were on the road being used that way. Whenever people saw us and our young family pile out of one, they smiled and waved and sometimes came over to talk and look. On the road people were polite and chill. Boy, have the Cali-bros and social media “influencers” burned through goodwill. At best other people treated like just another car on the road, at worst they were openly rude. Sad!
~~~
Shifting gears slightly before ending, I'll offer a quick shout-out for Oakleys Prizm Road sunglasses. I hate Oakley's mark-up, but, a lot like Apple OS, what are you gonna do. There just aren't any other comparable options. Mitigating the cost is that I have the relatively good luck of only losing a pair of sunglasses on average about once every 8 years.
Last year was a lose year (forgot and left them on my head while jumping into a river from an overhead rock), so right before this trip I replaced them with a pair of Oakleys with the Prizm Road lenses. The thing I like most about Oakleys is the selection of tints. When it's overcast in the Pacific NW and I'd normally just want to stay in and hibernate, the right tint fools my brain into thinking it's a sunny day and I should be outside. On this trip, under the dazzeling and oppressive Arizona sun, the prizm road lenses made me forget how bright it was. I had no problem driving for hours on end, and it always looked and felt like a great day to be outside. Strong endorsement.
~~~
All in all, we had a great time. There were reasons, but I shouldn't have waited so long to do another one of these. I won't wait nine years for the next one.
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