“Oh man, that would be the dream, quit my job, drive wherever I wanted, and just sleep in my car.”
Yes, my fellow #neature person enjoying these hot springs on a cold Utah night in the middle of nowhere, you’re right, it is the dream. But let me remind you that every daydream can also feel like a nightmare.
Obviously this little trip of mine has not been exempted from that.
First tip for a great trip; actually pack. For someone who loves to move around so much, I absolutely despise packing and it might have slightly affected our departure time from Boulder. Our goal was to leave by 7am. Well folks, we promptly embarked (disembarked? My sister has me all caught up on which word to use) at 10:30am…
Luckily, we had a place to sleep that night. Kevin’s cousin down in Utah let us stay at their place. By place, I mean castle. We were so worried about getting our savage little fingers on something that we didn’t dare even breathe on anything. After a good night’s sleep we locked up the castle in the same way we found it and left to go play in the desert.
I squeezed through narrow little halls, crawled through holes under fallen rocks, and ran my hands along the ancient walls that were carved by the brute force of past floods. Walking through the deep orange slot canyons of southern Utah will without a doubt remind you of how insignificant you are. That, that is the feeling Kevin and I are constantly chasing.
Now you might be asking “Shelby it only sounds like a dream so far, where are these nightmarish moments you’re talking about?” Well my lovely reader, have you ever tried to cook dinner on the hood of your car while you’re dripping wet in 20-degree weather? Or not know where you’re going sleep that night because the campsite where you were planning to sleep at is buried under 5 feet of snow? Or try to drive 8-hour days when both you and your co-pilot are dying from colds? And to top it all off have your sleeping pad pop right before you fall asleep?
Is it all worth it? Hell yeah!
Because have you ever spent a night laughing with total strangers in a hot springs in Utah? Or ice-skated under the stars across a frozen lake in Montana wearing your rain boots? Or pulled off the side of the highway just to take pictures of a sunset reflecting on the Canadian Rockies? Or woken up at sunrise to watch the birds sing the songs of spring in a completely secluded hot spring in a different country?
It’s worth the patching up of my sleeping pad with duct tape at midnight and the inch of ice that covers the inside of my car every morning, because it means I can enjoy the most soul fulfilling moments this life has to offer. So yeah, I guess it is a dream.
-Shelby Lynn
Where In the World is Shelby Lynn 