Falling in love

Can you love a place? It certainly feels like it – the exhilaration, the new feeling every day, the small smile that sits on your face like you’ve got a little secret inside, the joy at being alive that sings inside of you. Very much like loving a person. If so, I’ve fallen in love with a place so very far from all of my loved ones. Ones soon to be married, grandchildren whose voices I’ve not heard now for more than a week as their mom picks them up from school, and from my aging parents. How does one reconcile the two??

I’ve lived far from family for years now, relatively speaking. But never more than one hard days driving to get to them. This is much farther. But the beauty here, it’s breathtaking. The quiet. The changing faces of the mountains as the sun passes overhead through the day. The colors, more muted than back East, for sure. But they are so calming to me. Even the critters are different. But owls still hunt here too, at dusk and dawn. The moon appears as a brilliant disk snapped into the huge, open sky. Birds flutter through in clusters, sounding just like the birds in the Pixar short film “The Birds”. The air is scented like an incense pack.

No mosquitos! But I did meet a mating pair of tarantulas, and watched as she scurried back into her little hole in the ground after the deed was complete.

Will I, too, scurry back home now? Right now the answer is no. There is too much out here I long to see and experience. I’m so close to one of my life long visiting dreams, the Baja Peninsula. I want to experience Quartzsite, and the assembly of the winter tribe. I want to backtrack into the mountains of New Mexico. And a whole lot of other things that would take too long to enumerate.

But all of this also has to balance with working; the grease that keeps the wheels of the van rolling from time to time.

So rather than making your head hurt like mine is, enjoy some photos of my camp and the area here. I’ll be pulling out of here shortly to join up with another solo camper for a bit. At least, that’s today’s plan 😲. Since I’m on vacation, who knows what might transpire before back to the grind on Monday!

Singing and smiling from the road..

-SE