The Big Parks Trip

Winnie at the Petrified Forest National Park.

Mr. Linton and I took to the road in early June and wandered back to Florida on the first of August.

9000 miles and 16 states and eight weeks of making like a tumbling tumbleweed in our sweet lumbering Winnebago.

We stayed off the big roads, to a great extent, as we went from state park to national park. Sometimes we managed to avoid steep mountain ranges. We looked out the window and waved when anyone looked at us passing by.

A dreamy, leisurely, amazing voyage across the the American West.

We formed any number of opinions –– about these regions, about this kind of travel, about the parks system, about the country –– that I can summarize, but probably won't.

We had only one dud stop on our tour, and that was our own fault for getting the idea of place from television shows like "Bones" and "The X-Files." 

We swung by Roswell, New Mexico on the way to Carlsbad Caverns from Albuquerque, NM.

And if you don't think I didn't suggest that we needed to take a left in Albuquerque a couple of dozen times, you'd be wrong.  You might also underestimate our excitement at catching sight of a road-runner. 

After all, we are from a generation of television-watchers. 

Roswell, we both kind of imagined, would be dusty little desert town far from anything since about 1948.

We figured on stopping at the quirky little diner that we'd find there. Maybe we'd have a slice of pie amidst a collection of ephemera of the 1947 UFO wreck. The waitress would look a little like an alien. It would be odd and we'd have a story to tell. 

Instead, we drove stop-and-go through a medium-sized American city, complete with a Super Wal-Mart and a Panda Express, all the hotel chains and Applebee's. An unremarkable place with a touristy downtown reminiscent of A-Bay, NY or Ocean Park, NJ or Venice Beach, CA.

​Ridiculously disappointed, we slunk into an Albertson's supermarket (they had little-green-men balloons, etc.) for groceries and then drove to Dexter, New Mexico, where we found a peaceful berth for the night under cottonwoods and a wide starry sky. 

Just the one piece of pie with a side of story lacking for the whole trip.

I'm not actually complaining. ​