Making a Good Road Trip a Great Road Trip: Re-Define Road Trip
On the Road to Sedona, Arizona (Photo: B.L. McGarr)
Ask any avid travler, and you’ll get many definitions of what a road trip is. That is what is so special about road trips though, they require each individual person to define what exactly it is. For me, a Road Trip is any trip that is purely for my enjoyment. This maybe driving around town aimlessly passing time, or driving across country. It is this definition of a road trip that allows me to have more road trips, and subsequently, some more enjoyable road trips. However, correlation does not equal causation in this case. Meaning just because I tend to go on more smaller road trips does not mean that I have more memorable trips. In reality, very few of these short trips are overly memorable. However, I have had many memorable trips that are short indeed.
Exploring your local area can be a memorable and rewarding experience. Whether you live in a large metropolis like Phoenix, Arizona, or in a backwater town such as Odessa, Washington, the result is often the same: finding there is so much to enjoy just down the street.
While growing up in Wenatchee, Washington, I had the opportunity to do a little exploring the local area with my friends while driving my 1991 Chevrolet Lumina. What we found were some great times, and, some great stretches of asphalt. The Wenatchee Area sits at the confluence of the Wenatchee River and the mighty Columbia River, in a nice gorge. In that area we found country roads with hill crests sharp enough to jump the Lumina, which for the record I don’t recommend doing. Not so much because it is illegal, but because we tended to have some sore heads after it!
Continuing the idiocy of our youth, and experimenting with physics, we found other roads. We took a risk and traveled up the gravel and winding Horse Lake Road, only to realize doing so in late winter was a dumb idea. We found some great views of the Wenatchee River Valley at night, including the towns of Monitor and Cashmere. We even discovered that cheap GMRS radios reach across the valley really well, with my younger brother watching our car climb the mountain on the other side of the narrow valley (even flashing our headlamps to see if he could identify where we were). The failure in this plan was making it down the icy gravel roadway. None of us wanted to admit it, but we all were afraid we were going to die. At 17, I was overly confident in my driving skills, however even I agreed very quickly that any future trips up the road would be in summer during the day.
Finally, we had one other trip early that spring, in search of the still un-found Colockum Pass, a dirt roadway between Wenatchee and Ellensburg clearly marked “Not Recommended for Passenger Autos”. However, we wanted to see how close we could get in a sedan. Unfortunately we never found it, instead driving miles upon miles of roads that seemed to change names every 100 feet. Colockum Pass is still on my list of area roadways to explore (including Badger Mountain Road, Palisades Road, Old Cascade Highway, and Old Blewett Pass Road).
The point of these stories is not to make anyone cringe in fear. Your trips hopefully will be less exciting, and preferably completely without that ‘I’m going to die’ feeling. However these are just a few of the local explorations I’ve been on in my life thus far that are very memorable. We never know what is going to be around the next bend, and what we may stumble upon. I find new things driving around the Phoenix area all the time, or at least new to me.
The next time you find yourself with some idle time, take a detailed map of the area, a compass, and go exploring. Just try not to climb any primitive mountain roads in winter while in a sedan.
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