Driving

Let me just state the obvious: I love driving. It's actually one of my favorite pastimes. It's a given that to undertake a trip like the one I'm on here, you'd better be comfortable with long-distance driving.

Some people meditate, in part, to achieve a sense of being in the moment. No past, no future. The eternal now. That's what driving can be. A meditation. Now, I grant you that fighting traffic in large cities is not so special. But moving along an almost empty highway in the wide open west with spectacular things to command your attention, well that's just one of the best ways possible to be "in the now."

I drove from the Los Angeles metro area to the mountains of Wyoming in three days, about a thousand miles. It seemed like one big now moment. On day one, I crossed the barren mountains that separate the LA Basin from the desert interior of California. These mammoth piles of rock and dirt are so different from our green mountains in the east. Their size and barrenness -- no trees to block the view -- seem to emphasize the fact that you are like an ant crawling up and down them.

After crossing the Mojave Desert, I was rolling through Las Vegas around dusk. I could see the glitzy casinos and hotels as I whizzed by, but I didn't even slow down. Cities tend to sap my energy when I'm on a trip like this so I try to avoid them. I cruised on to Mesquite, on the Nevada/Arizona border, where I stopped for the night.

The next day was spent almost entirely travelling through Utah. I'd never driven up the western side of the state on I-15, so this was new territory. More desert dotted with small towns with Biblical-sounding names like Nephi and Levan. Probably place names from the Book of Mormon. When evening rolled around, I was ready to stay somewhere with electricity and water hook ups. I found just the place at Utah Lake State Park on the shores of Utah Lake in Provo. What a beautiful setting.

The next morning I pulled out of Provo and started seeing signs warning that vehicles wider than 12 feet are not permitted in Provo Canyon. I'd never heard of Provo Canyon, but my GPS unit said it was on my route. I pulled over on a downtown street and got out my tape measure to determine the GoJoe's width. Just over ten feet. Whew. The side mirrors stick out beyond that, but there was never a problem. Provo Canyon proved to be beautifully dramatic with steep canyon walls framing the road and the rushing Provo River.

I crossed northeastern Utah and into Wyoming, a region of large ranches with a hint of green vegetation. I stopped for gas in the small ranching town of Afton, with its elkhorn arch stretching across Main Street and storefronts you'd see only in the American West.




By late evening I had made it to Jackson, a tony enclave of Western chic, and I stopped there for the night.

The next morning I prepared to drive over Togwotee Pass on the Continental Divide at around 10,000 feet. But before I got to the pass, I had to drive through Jackson Hole and was treated to a front row view of the incredible Grand Teton range to my left.





Part way up the mountain road to Togwotee Pass,I found that the asphalt roadway had been peeled away in preparation for repaving. The driving surface was bare dirt - or mud in this case as it had rained during the night.


In places it felt as if I were driving on cake frosting, not a happy feeling in a 14,000 pound RV, especially when coming down the mountain from the summit. There were a few times when I felt GoJoe slip a bit. All this was made a bit less comfortable by the absence of guard rails on the winding mountain road. But I made it over the pass and down the mountain into tiny Dubois, Wyoming, my destination.