Canyonlands National Park, Utah.
All of This Glory
Yesterday morning a new chapter in my life began.
I woke up, gave the cabin a deep clean, packed the van and officially hit the road. I ended up driving a handful of hours before pulling over at a beautiful hot spring not far off my route. They don’t allow overnight parking at the hot spring, but I was able to find a great little dispersed (free) site about a mile away which I decided to call home for the night.
After parking the van, I tossed my swim trunks, towel and camera into my backpack and walked the dirt road to the hot springs. When I arrived, I couldn’t help but neglect the hot springs for a while, as the sun was beginning to set and the photo conditions were supreme. But as the sunset faded and the photo conditions deteriorated, I put away my camera, stripped down to my trunks and slowly lowered myself into the steamy water. Heaven!
After drying off, I walked back to the van where I checked off multiple van firsts: my first dinner in the van, my first cleaning dishes in the van, my first brushing my teeth in the van, my first crawling into bed in the van, and eventually my first sleep in the van.
Did I sleep great? No. Nor did I expect to, especially considering the new environment, new mattress and new things to be alert to. But I didn’t sleep terribly either. A solid start.
Yesterday, before leaving home, I was full of anxiety—nervous about the adventure ahead. There are so many unknowns, so many things on the van that could break, so many things that could go wrong! But shortly after leaving I saw multiple omens that calmed my nerves—a bald eagle soaring in circles overhead and two Sandhill Cranes not far from the road. I took them as encouragement—gentle nudges forward.
Last night was lovely, and this morning I woke with the sunrise, opened my window covers and was greeted with a desert sunrise on one side of the van and a snow-capped mountain range on the other. And, in that moment, it seemed so completely absurd that I had been a bundle of nerves at home, while all of this glory awaited me on the road.
"It's ruinous for the soul to be anxious about the future and miserable in advance of misery." — Seneca
P.S. Can you see the person standing on the cliff edge in that photo?
