Dreams, Moments, Travels
Landed in Atlanta at 4:00 pm hungry and ready for our drive north to find somewhere to spend the night before heading further on to other places. Our first stop after leaving the airport was Dave Poe’s BBQ joint in Marietta and the claims of it being one of the best in the larger Atlanta area are not without good reason. We’d come back.
It’s now two and a half years since we made this trip along the Pacific Ocean in Oregon, and I wrote this in May 2018. I should have been blogging about the journey then, but I was carving time out of operating TimefireVR, and spending quality time with Caroline required serious efforts. I could have been writing during the evening or on stops at coffee shops, but it was a legitimate vacation for me, too, as my time in Phoenix was a rare commodity not often shared with writing my blog, let alone my wife. So when we returned to our routines, I continued to neglect my blog and now regret that as so many nuances are lost in time.
It’s not often that I get a solo photo of me taken by someone else (in this case, Caroline) that I really do like, but this is one of them. Caroline had been spinning, weaving, crocheting, I mean knitting this for me in the early fall just for a winter adventure and so here I am modeling it for the first time.
I know this spot; seen it a dozen or more times. From memory, I have no idea of the name or the exact place on the map. While Google Maps could help me find it, I guess I don’t really care, as the visual reminder is enough to make me enjoy another glance westward from the road as we travel north.
Gilligan never slept here.
So this is how I deduced that we were traveling north today; this is Caroline about to enjoy a Marionberry Pie ice cream cone at the Tillamook Cheese Factory and Ice Cream Store in Tillamook, Oregon. From Lincoln City, it’s about an hour or three if you are us to drive the 44 miles between our yurt and this small town famous for its cheese.
It’s scenes such as this that are the cause of delays and making drives that could be made in an hour take multiple hours to finish. While it is true that much of my life revolves around food, it doesn’t dictate the timing of our day more often than not. We are not in a rush to get to a resort or a movie. We have no family to meet out this way. We are free to explore at our leisure and stop where we are inspired to do so.
I’m fairly certain these spectacular sunsets happen all the time; they must. It cannot just be our fortunate luck that we are looking in the right direction at the right time. Then I ask myself why don’t I see more of these kinds of Oregon coast photos? Why are people not clamoring to buy up every inch of this section of the Pacific coast? If I had to wager a serious guess, I’d suggest that people are too busy seeing their destination and the bumper in front of them to realize that just to their left or right are some amazing sights not often witnessed.
Damned cows pick up all the luxury real estate where they get to lounge around, graze all day, have their teats massaged, and take pride that the cheese and ice cream made from their milk is made all the yummier by the salt air and golden purple light of their environs. Wish I were a cow sometimes, maybe a Brahman, though the slaughter aspect would be a huge bummer. We stop from time to time so I can commune with them, which reminds me of the first time I pulled over and let off a loud MOO at a pasture of cows, more to Caroline’s surprise than to the large assembly of bovines’.
We are traveling south, and in other blog posts about the Oregon coast, I have written about this location with the tiny road that travels out to Whalen Island, but right now, it will have to suffice to say that this image, too, is from our road trip on this particular day and is in fact in the sequence of where we were at this time of the day. I don’t know about you, but the reflection and hints of gold and orange in the clouds help this photo stand out and force me to gasp at the profound beauty, or maybe it’s the triggering of the memory that makes it special to me.
Just another average Oregon coastal sunset at some other nondescript beach that obviously nobody else goes to because you don’t see any people, do you? Because I’ve seen so much better, and this one was missing the striking purple hues I’ve come to expect. I almost didn’t shoot this image, but hey, it’s better than a poke in the eye, so here’s yet another look at our boring trip to Oregon. Enough snark; this is from Cape Kiwanda in Pacific City, as is the photo below.
With the sun now below the horizon, we can safely go for dinner and head to our yurt back at Devils Lake State Park. Besides eating, listening to the ocean, and who knows, maybe we will take an evening walk along another deserted beach. I have no real idea how the rest of the afternoon into evening played out two-and-a-half years ago. One thing is certain: we were awash in things we found extraordinarily beautiful.
And then there was this Ultimate Monster 4-pound burger with eggs, ham, grilled onions, cheese, lettuce, tomato, and maybe something else, but it’s so big that it’s hard to know just what we ate. Next time, we’ll be sure to order the 8-pound Super Ultimate Monster, and I won’t let Caroline talk me out of it. You, too, can indulge in one of these at the Newport Cafe in Newport, Oregon – just down the road from Lincoln City if you believe 25 miles is ‘just down the road.’
Per my wife Caroline Wise’s request, besides taking her on vacation, she has asked me to blog. So here I am, fulfilling that special wish of hers. During the previous 20 years, we often went on road trips between a minimum of 5 times up to 24 times a year (that was back in 2004 – our record year!). In the dark ages before that, we were novices and only took road trips between 1 and 5 times per year, though that included journeys around Germany, Holland, France, Belgium, and places like that; remember that we lived in Frankfurt.
This afternoon, we left Phoenix for Kanab, Utah, where we won’t be going to Moqui Cave; 1. it won’t be open when we get there or leave; 2. we’ve been there and highly recommend you go too.
Not much preparation was done for this excursion until the last minute as we weren’t certain I’d find the time, but obviously, I did make the time. Originally, we were going to head to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, but the weather looked foreboding. Instead, we will turn left in Crane, Oregon, and head out to the coast. We tried to avoid the Oregon coast. Seriously, we did because we know we’ve been there way too many times, but we love it, and so that’s that.
Tampico Steak for breakfast, Mr. Wise? Of course, only the best breakfast for me. I could have opted for eggs and some other shite, but come on, we’re in Socorro, and the El Camino Family Restaurant may not be around forever, so I need to have my favorite dish every time we stop. As a matter of fact, I believe I could eat the same thing for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for at least a few consecutive days.
Sending this one via satellite, as stated over the previous six days; this post is coming at you from the future, as in February 2023, because back in 2015, your’s truly were distracted by all manner of things and failed to blog about many things, this being just one of those things. The photo is from the Very Large Array in Datil, New Mexico.
We are in Pie Town, New Mexico, and it just so happens to be one of those ultra-rare occasions where something is open in Pie Town. Coffee, pie, and ice cream don’t get better than here in Pie Town, well, unless you are at the Thunderbird Restaurant at Mt. Carmel Junction in southern Utah for some “Ho-Made” pie because who doesn’t like some authentic Ho-Made pie?
Yay, we survived Texas, the flooding, fiber shops, too much barbecue, green chilies, pie, and unfocused John, who should have brought his DSLR and taken notes so things wouldn’t simply be lost.
After getting back to Phoenix, there was no rest for the wicked, as we had a concert to attend at the Musical Instrument Museum. Niyaz was playing, and we certainly didn’t want to miss this opportunity to see them.
Now that I’m finally done with this post, it’s sad, tragic even, that this trip lay fallow for all these years. It was a big mistake to allow it to fall between the cracks and its memories to largely be lost, but such is life for most people. The problem is, I never wanted to be “most people,” and so I suffered a certain amount of regret that I allowed work to consume most everything over the years I felt I was following my dreams. Dreams should be multi-dimensional, just like the virtual reality I was attempting to create. Don’t forget to live while you work and love someone else. I don’t mean to imply things weren’t great, but I should have been managing my private life better during these years.
As I’ve stated in the previous two days of this blog post covering our trip to Texas, this isn’t being written and posted until February 2023. What’s worse, there are no notes to work from and the itinerary from that time ended up being more of a suggestion of locations instead of fixed destinations. In addition to the lack of notes, these images arrive from the land of laziness: I shot these with my Samsung S6 instead of taking the DSLR I would have normally used. Like I said, I was being lazy.
So, from out of the fog, memories are dragged from wherever they can be found and splashed upon the page. As I posted yesterday, I believe we stayed in Del Rio, and the timing between images seems to support that, but if anyone in the future looking at this image of a foggy road can offer me a more precise placing of where we were, I’m open to adjusting these details.
Fortunately, there are moments that are captured, such as this one when we were stopping for breakfast in Laredo, Texas. How do I know we are in Laredo? It says so on the side of the building, over there where it’s stenciled saying, “Best Little Smokehouse in Laredo.” Should you be wondering about barbecue for breakfast, we are in Texas, where that’s all they eat.
Picked up the convict, who was apparently on the lam and in need of a ride to the Guitar Center in McAllen further south. She seemed reasonable, so I said sure until I heard she was looking for a ukulele. Who plays the ukulele these days? She could only have been a serial killer.
Here we are at South Padre Island on the Gulf of Mexico in southern Texas, with not a barbecue joint in sight.
Looks to me like the road has already ended.
Do I look stressed out to you? It’s been a little more than a year since I started a virtual reality company. While I knew it would eat my time, I never really considered what we would have to give up as I wanted to build something in that space for the previous 20 years, and with the opportunity finally available, I jumped on it. The consequence of that decision was that Caroline and I rarely traveled, and when we did, I don’t think my heart was 100% in it. Of course, we were together, and I couldn’t be anywhere else but with her when we were out on the road, but it’s like these photos taken with a phone; I couldn’t be bothered with investing myself deeply in these trips as I did prior and since shutting the company down.
Someone lost their dinosaur, and now its plastic corpse lays discarded, awaiting a poor turtle to come eat it and commit suicide on this unhealthy snack.
We avoided the highway as long as we could while trying to find our way east toward Corpus Christi, where we’d be staying the night.
While we know we ate at some random crab-shack-kind-of-place in Corpus Christi, the photo was a bunch of meh, like most of our food photos. We have no idea where it was precisely, and I suppose it doesn’t really matter. Being out on the road with Caroline is often the best part of traveling, and so it was with this excursion into southern Texas. I can’t remember thinking that anything we were seeing was so compelling to inspire a return visit. Tomorrow, we leave for parts north as we are going to cut right through the middle of this massive state.
Talk about being lazy. It is 2023, mid-February, when I finally get around to dealing with posting what details might be discovered regarding this trip Caroline and I took to Texas about a year after I started a new company that was eating all of my time and leaving precious few moments for us to share. The trip did not go according to plan, but that will be divulged as the post continues. There won’t be many photos as not only did I shoot less than 200 images over the seven days we were on the road, I foolishly didn’t even take my DSLR and instead shot these photos on a Samsung S6 smartphone. There may have been notes, as Caroline can be seen in a photo from this day (not worth publishing), in which she can be seen taking notes, but where that notebook is might be lost in time. We do still have the original itinerary but there’s no telling how well we stuck to it as there were no reservations made in advance. According to that travel outline, we went as far as Las Cruces, New Mexico, but the next day, I took a photo of the motel we stayed at, and it showed up in Deming, New Mexico.