“Travel with collected and resolute people. They enhance and appreciate adventure in a way few others can.” – Old Sean
Mountain Journey
Again and again, I find myself barely acclimating while bounding about in highlands and mountains. In Sanderson’s novels, the Stormlight Achieves, one of his supporting characters, Rock, famously laughs at the irrational habits and logic of “airsick lowlanders.” It was an appropriate name for this article and our journey at large.
After a month of lounging in Dallas, I’m embarking on another road trip, this time striving north through the Rocky Mountains seeking out camping destinations and whatever nature pockets this country has left. Yellowstone will eventually be our natural pivoting point. But for now, north we go.
Like earlier trips, this won’t be a solo odyssey. Instead, I’ll be driving alongside two university friends, Krone and Evan.
Rental and Rumble
Our trip started, naturally, in Dallas, where we rented a hardy little white Honda Equinox from the DFW Airport. Despite an initial mix up with the rental company’s third party service, we quickly drove our ride back to home base, where the next few hours were spent slowly encumbering the vehicle.
Space dissipated quickly, and while our Tetras and Jenga skills were enough to cram everything inside, our initial setup was inconvenient and somewhat cramped. We set out late, after Evan and Krone had completed their work shifts on Friday, lunging into the rapidly falling darkness at 8 PM to thunder our way west.
The number of times I’ve crossed West Texas has made that long, somewhat barren patch of land my bane, a great flat expanse of speed traps and stubbornly tiny, flat towns gradually lodging their places in my mind as necessary obstacles for my every journey west.
The ride was smooth, however, with each person handling the wheel and the others attempting to rest. Evan, in particular, found himself incapable of sleeping in a moving vehicle, making him wildly tired as the night dragged on. Krone eventually brought us home at the crack of a grey, cloudy dawn, rumbling into Santa Fe and bracing against a sudden cold front.
Morning in Santa Fe
Naturally, we all bundled in the car for an hour or so trying to sleep, but temperatures dropped even as the sky brightened our eyelids and I took the wheel.
Compatriots still asleep, I first drove us to see the enormous Ethyl the Whale, a huge plastic sculpture of a whale composed completely of single-use plastics (polyethylene, hence the whale’s name). I’ve seen an exact replica before in California on a previous road trip and it’s beautiful with a depressing description, as always.
Now, we had a goal in Santa Fe. Long ago, just after COVID restrictions became somewhat lax, I booked three tickets to Meow Wolf, an interactive art and music venue known for unearthly concerts and general mind-warping displays.
But our booking was hours away, so our time was spent instead bumbling around the downtown Santa Fe area, endlessly making loops on the one way streets, and window shopping at closed buildings at a snail’s pace.
Evan and I eventually stumbled into Weck’s Breakfast Lunch, which served a powerful dose of Cheesy Papas to start our day in a secondary food and sleep stupor. Krone continued to snooze in the car until we returned, at which point he perked up and began to sustain himself on macadamia nuts.
Exploring Sant Fe
Santa Fe is supremely nice to drive around. The buildings are all dark adobe, with a distinctly western vibe. Wagon wheels, cast iron, wooden signs and desert art are all common features. Some of the more prominent buildings are built as multi-layered forts, stark logs bristling outwards (El Dorado Hotel). Other buildings are graced with sculptures of enormous, cloaked natives or Chinese dragons bracing low roofs. Santa Fe Plaza, the Palace of the Governors, Loretto Chapel and the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi are all impressive structures in the Old Town.
However, if art is the name of the game, Canyon Drive is the greatest direction to wander towards.
The street and it’s offshoot districts are crammed with paintings, sculptures and strange devices. While we were still to early to arrive when the galleries were open, we were able to find native art of cast bronze creatures, a rocking chair made of rocks, colorful geometric paintings, outlandish kinetic sculptures of enormous animals bobbing their heads, and endlessly rotating wind-wheels in the sky.
While we wandered, a graceful dusting of snow descended, spinning briefly through the air as we trundled back to the car.
And then it was time.
Meow Wolf
Grabbing some snacks from the back of our car, we rushed to Meow Wolf, where we joined the surprisingly dense hoard of people tittering around the front entrance.
The parking lot alone was an interesting sight. A two-story flower-holding robot that syncs to a shortwave FM radio station hangs right outside. A wolf of strangely geometric proportions peers around a parked pickup truck, and a delicate spider lurks over a picnic table.
Meow Wolf did a long speech while we were out front on COVID safety measures, and we were asked to provide temperature scans and show masks firmly over our nose before being let in.
Once inside however, my eyes glazed and blazed with garish and clashing neon. The first room was a inward tilted forest of vibrant saplings, which quickly led to a series of caves complete with the embedded pink skeleton of a wooly mammoth. This skeleton could, naturally, be played with a pair of electronic mallets tapping the ribcage.
Neon dragons, the length of my forearm, perched atop hand sanitizers and odd, pulsing bubbles lined crevices. Clambering up a painfully narrow staircase led to a series of rooms with secret messages lodged into synthetic sounds and uniquely odd symbols. Translating the symbols led to a website crammed with pages and pages of backstory regarding the family who, in this strange land, made Meow Wolf their ill-fortuned home.
Flaring Art
This, naturally, was the most normal part.
Occult symbols glowed in walls, wavy rooms buzzed across ceilings, bottlecaps made up entire floor plans in a dimension dominated by burning Elmo dolls and creepy clowns. Other areas included cozy treehouses with tumbles of pink plastic flowers falling down, and leaves of carefully carved cloud-paper.
A lighthouse in a geometric dance hall lit up a zebra-patterned stage, while faces of varying cuteness and creepiness stared out from stones and tree trunks. Steampunk rooms of flushing pipes with electric tubes graced catwalks and odd limericks were written on dark walls in glowing, iridescent ink.
Some rooms were interactive videos, others chambers that altered colors when users moved. Other rooms were pattered with light-altering puzzles while others were entirely dark, where instruments made from lasers were plucked like harps. Nests of fairies rested in the rafters, while walls of butchered cereal boxes and advertisements were tucked into narrow hallways. A synthetic piano shot colored electricity while playing harshly disharmonized chords and an orca made entirely of smaller orcas swam on a low, blue, sci-fi shelf.
In short, there was nothing in Meow Wolf that didn’t provide some level of sensory overload.
Meal Slog
When we finally stumbled back outside, we struggled away in a slight state of discombobulation. It’s fair to say we were somewhat battered and tired from our night drive and subsequent activities at this point, so we settled in for a place to eat lunch.
We settled for a place called Realburger, which, as the name implies, provided us real burgers.
At this point, we had finally ended up puttering on energy. Evan especially, unable to sleep in a moving vehicle, voted that we grab a hotel for the night.
We did just that, but still had three hours to kill until check-in, so off we went hiking near Chamisa Trail looking for signs of enormous, ancient meteor impacts. Our short hike took us along a trickle of a creek, past numerous birds of incredible blue and shattered rocks creating rolling footfalls on the trail.
Krone quickly adopted his iconic travel-specialty, grabbing a prominent walking stick from the forest floor and befriending it for the rest of our hike.
And All the Rest
We failed to find the meteor-melt impressions, but decided to head back into Santa Fe to rest. Evan promptly passed out, while Krone and I wandered back into town to check out the last few sights. We wandered from Bumble Bee’s Baja Grill to Santa Fe Plaza, across small art studios, past windows complete with tiny houses balanced on the frames and through Cathedral Park.
And then night fell, and our first day on our road trip was finished. We returned to the hotel to stockpile as much sleep possible.
Until the morning,
Best regards and excellent trails,
Old Sean
Written April 17th 2021
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The GoPro Hero Black is my go to Action camera. I’m not comfortable bringing my cell phone to many wet and rugged locations, so the GoPro does most of my photographic heavy-lifting. The only things I bring in my GoPro kit are the camera, a spare battery and the forehead mount. I upgrade my GoPro once every two years. It was particularly excellent to have during my aquatic tour of Belize.
