The next morning it was time to begin the journey back home. We woke up and packed, took down the tent and straightened up our campsite. We stopped at another overlook on the way back through the park, away from the campgrounds, to see one more view and say goodbye to Arches. We wanted to see Moab one more time, so we headed into town for breakfast at Eclectica Café, browsing the various flea market items for sale while we waited for our food to cook. Then, time to hit the road. We drove back through eastern Utah and into the mountains of Colorado, stopping for lunch at the Happy Cooker in Georgetown, and then a stroll around town to stretch our legs.

After lunch we were back to the road and on the final chapters of our book. Trinity was driving, and I was riding and reading slowly to savor the last chapters and pages of the story. The end of The Time Traveler’s Wife is so beautiful and sad and happy all at the same time, and we were rolling through the mountains of Colorado balling our eyes out as we finished the book. I stopped a few times to make sure it was safe for Trinity to be driving through her tears!

We contemplated driving through the evening to get back home late Saturday night, but we have both been miserable when we’ve tried to do that before, so we opted for another night in the tent. It was finally time to check out Bonny Lake, where we had originally planned to stop the first night. We got a few more groceries for dinner, and then figured out which of the many forms to fill out at the ranger station now empty for the night. Now that we had a few nights behind us and knew exactly what needed to be done and where everything was, we had the tent up, the fire blazing, and dinner started within ten minutes of pulling up to our spot. Another night of eating in the dark, but no mishaps this time!

Even though we still had more than a few hours across Kansas to go in the morning, we were back to the rolling plains of our part of the country, and the sights and sounds were a little more familiar to us. It was nice to hear the crickets and tree frogs chirping in the distance, though I certainly did not miss the mosquitoes in the desert. There were even a few little frogs hopping around the bathroom to welcome us back to (almost) home.

Then Sunday. A long day. I have an above average appreciation for the drive through Kansas, but wow this day seemed to drag on forever. Our book was finished, it was the last day of our wonderful vacation and back to work the next day (with many of the typical vacation reentry realizations), and I-70 on Kansas is long and flat.

Actually, that might be an appropriate way to describe how we were feeling during that part of the drive, and how I have felt many times for the last couple of years, in this confusing stage of my life – long and flat. We’re still trying to figure out how we can bring that calm and collected, optimistic, rejuvenated spirit with us through more than just vacation days. Some days are good, others not so much. Writing about our trip has helped, and I wonder in what ways I can perceive my daily experiences differently, see the bright side, the possibilities, the resourceful opportunities that I miss in the midst of a boring and stressful routine. How can I transform the boredom and stress; and into what? The desert of Utah was a time of renewal for us, because we chose to embrace it in that way. How can this time of desert in my life be renewal too? How and what do I need to embrace to make it so?

One of the themes of The Time Traveler’s Wife is embracing the present moment, because really, the present is all we have. When things are great, like vacation highs, this is easy for me, as it is for most of us, but other times it’s very hard because I am so adept and practiced at focusing on the negatives of any particular moment. After we got home and unloaded the car into the living room floor we decided we needed another hike, this time around the neighborhood. As we walked Trinity had the brilliant idea to just ask, “What is good about this moment?” and so we’ve been working on that question in many present moments since.

Even though we are practicing finding the positive in the present, we are also looking forward to our next big trip, and hopefully some smaller camping trips in the meantime. I am dreaming of a long crazy float trip down the Colorado River, through Canyonlands or the Grand Canyon, to see the same places from another perspective!

I woke up the next morning a bit on the early side, so I quietly unzipped the sleeping bag and tent and stepped out into the cool smooth sand without disturbing Trinity. The sun was just beginning to creep over the rocks so I grabbed the camera for a few shots, and then I put it down so I could enjoy the present moment with my own unobstructed eyes. It was a drizzly morning with clouds floating by and showers coming and going. We were planning to take a day trip to the nearby Canyonlands National Park, an hour away from Arches, and from anything else, including food. Rather than pack a full lunch, we decided to have a large leisurely breakfast before heading out, so I started a fire and enjoyed the early campground quiet before most folks stirred from their tents, reading the Michael Jackson Special Commemorative Issue of Rolling Stone. I made a big skillet of fried potatoes, toast, and coffee and when it was about ready I went to wake Trinity for breakfast.


After cleanup and afternoon snack packing, we headed to Canyonlands over more Time Traveler’s Wife. Canyonlands National Park is huge, and there is actually no way to go all the way through the park, across the main canyon. Wait, let me rephrase that – there is no way in a car to go all the way through the park – backpacking through is certainly an option, but one we were not prepared for! In order to see the whole park by car, you have to drive hours and hours around it to three different entrances. This adventure would take days, unless your goal was literally just to drive around the whole thing and not really enjoy where you were going, so we picked the closest entrance, the Island in the Sky section, and headed for the visitors center. There was an exuberant young Park Ranger setting up for a brief presentation, so we started our visit learning about the Utah Juniper and Big Horn Sheep, from a very excited graduate student/Park Ranger!

We were pretty worn out and sore from yesterday’s hikes, so we picked a lesser trail, which luckily was also supposed to be one of the most beautiful in this park. We still hiked more than a couple of miles throughout the day. Canyonlands is where the Colorado River and the Green River meet, and there are some amazing views of these rivers curling through the canyon hundreds of feet below. We hiked this first trail, and then took it easy the rest of the day, driving to the “overlook” spots for the views. We heard another Park Ranger extolling the beauty of the nearby Dead Horse State Park, so we decided to drive there after we had seen the main spots in Canyonlands.




We rounded out the day with more leisure time by the fire and another early night to bed. This was a much slower day of good home cooking, sunrises, canyon vistas, and reading… that wonderful stuff that vacations are made of. Why can’t we take time to enjoy these kinds of things at home more often? I am simultaneously determined to find it in my daily life at home, and plagued by the fact that my youthful optimism seems to be seeping away with each day’s commute to the office… Well, I don’t want to end this installment on a sour note, so here’s a look on the brighter side:

Once when we were starting one of the trails, we saw a couple of boys, maybe 10-15 years old, waiting at the entrance by themselves, kicking and tearing at one of the old worn out fence posts. We were both annoyed and disgusted with these guys, and I tried my trusty old passive aggressive technique of saying, “Wow, I can’t believe they’re doing that,” loud enough for them to hear. But they did not hear and kept right on destroying. So, Trinity turned around and walked back over to them and scolded them with a little lecture! After the hike when we walked back by, the fence post was safe and sound thanks to Trinity and her laughable sidekick.

One night while we were cooking dinner on the campfire it had gotten pretty late on us, and it was dark by the time it was ready to eat. Donning my oven mitts, I grabbed the cast iron pot off of the fire and set it down on the picnic table and we dug in. After we finished a delicious meal of our household favorite picadillo (a Costa Rican recipe for “green bean hash” from our Extending the Table cookbook) we began to clean up. When I went to grab the cast iron pot… It didn’t budge. Yes, the metal picnic table in fact had a plastic coating to prevent it from rusting, which I did not notice in the dark, which the hot cast iron pot had melted and was not quite stuck to. I pulled and pulled, but it was holding tight. I wish I could say that I held my cool, but for a few minutes I was quite upset and wondering if I had just ruined my favorite pot, and donated it to the park ranger!

After a few minutes I calmed down and got creative. I put some rocks into the fire to get hot and when they began to glow red I grabbed them with the tongs and put them into the pot so they could reheat the cast iron. In a matter of seconds the plastic softened back up and it popped right off of the table. The next morning in the light I could see that there was definitely some evidence left on the table, and on the bottom of my pot – and I could also see that I was not the first one to have done this! The good news is the next time we used the cast iron, all plastic melted away and the pot is now as good as new, and I got a great opportunity to be resourceful.

After our night of camping in Moab we got up bright and early to go grab ourselves a spot in the Arches National Park campground. We got their in plenty of time and had no problem getting a site for the next two nights. The park is so big that it is actually more than a thirty minute drive into the park to get to the campsites. We headed in to choose our site, ignoring our desire to stop and gawk at all the amazing scenery along the way. We were on a mission! The campsites at Arches are wonderful, clean, and far away from traffic, and we had plenty of room to spread out and enjoy the peace and quiet. Knowing that we’d be tired after the day of hiking and sunset watching we had planned, we put up the tent and then headed out for our first hike to see some arches.


Our first trek was the 4 mile hike to see Landscape and Double O Arches. The half a mile or so to Landscape is pretty easy, with a clear path, and then it switches to a “primitive trail” with nothing more than piles of rocks (cairns) showing you where to go. We made lots of stops in the hot, dry sun to drink water. There were many people making the trek with us, and in fact it began to feel like we were hiking in another country! We heard a handful of languages, but the one we heard the most was French. This remained the case throughout our two days in Utah – we must have been right in the middle of French (or Canadian) holiday season.

Landscape Arch

Double O Arch (Tim standing in the bottom O)

After a few hours of hiking with our French friends we made it back to the car just in time to avoid the heat of the afternoon and headed into Moab for lunch and air conditioning at Paradox Pizza. We lingered there and did a little window shopping in Moab. We did get some postcards to send out, a magnet for our souvenir magnet collection, a sun hat for Trinity, and a cup of coffee in some more AC. We wanted to make sure we rested up for the sunset hike, so we headed back to camp to chill with our book in the shade for the last hour or so.

Then we hiked up, up, up another 3 miles to see the iconic Delicate Arch at sunset. This was a beautiful site to see, and a lot of fun to do with the many other people (hundreds maybe?) with the same idea. As we were sitting there with all of these strangers enjoying the unique view of the arch and watching the sunset I felt a deep ancient connection to the throngs of people who came before us to see and experience the same wonder. It felt as though we were sitting there with more than just the people we could see today. We had light synthetic backpacks and aluminum water bottles, while other wore animal skins and carried water bottles made from bladders, but with our eyes and our spirits we were all beholding this same awesome vista of creation. The sense of reverence was amazing.

About half way up the climb.
You can see the cars way back there in the original photo.

Delicate Arch

As we hiked back down toward the cars, we made a stop to see some petroglyphs (rock engravings) carved about 500 years ago, another wondrous sight.


After a full day of hiking we made it back to the tent and crawled in for a very good night’s rest.

I forgot some important details from the first leg:

Somewhere between Russell and Denver, in that long, long stretch through Kansas (which I must say gets a bad rap as far as I’m concerned) we were lost in the book and cruising along without paying any attention to the gas gauge. When we finally saw the warning light, which could have been on for 20 feet or 20 miles, we started searching for a gas station. The odds are that it just lit up and we had another 30 miles or so left in the tank, but when you’re in the middle of a log and unfamiliar drive, it is easy to jump to the worst case scenario. Gas stations always seem hardest to find when you need them the most, and this proved true yet again this time. We exited at a ramp that said there was gas, and then there was no help about which way to go, and no gas station in sight. We wandered around Grainfield, and finally asked for help finding it and made it there just in time. Well, it felt like it anyway.

Another thing Trinity and I had a friendly disagreement about was whether or not we could use the wood from the park for fire. I had just spent the last week reading about National Parks, in which you most certainly cannot use wood from the park, but she said we could at the Colorado park. Well, it turns out she was right, but how much free, dry wood do you really think there is laying around next to the frequently used and recently rained on campsites? Exactly, none. We had brought some lump charcoal with us, so we had that for cooking if needed, but it is certainly not enough for a people warming fire. Luckily, a neighbor felt pity on us and sold us a bundle of firewood, which I doled out conservatively so we would have enough to warm up again in the morning.

Wednesday we woke up and warmed up over (a lot of) bacon, toast and more Time Traveler’s Wife. We had a whole package of bacon, and not much ice left, so we just ate a huge, high protein breakfast. After all, we were planning to do a lot of hiking right?! We headed back down the mountain in a different direction than we came in last night, to see it from a different view, passing through the casino towns of Black Hawk and Central City. I think this area might be right behind Las Vegas and Atlantic City for number of casinos (totally ruining the beautiful landscape of the mountains if I do say so myself). The rest of the ride was quite beautiful though.

Then, back to the interstate for more reading and driving. Somewhere about this time we reached territory that Trinity had never been to, and I had only been through once many years ago on a great trip with Grandma & Grandpa Honse (Justin & I took a different route West).

After a while we needed to stretch our legs and found a cool looking mountain town to stop in, so we parked for lunch in Eagle, Colorado. We had a nice light lunch at Red Canyon Café in Eagle with lots of organic goods and fair trade coffees – our kind of place. As we walked back through town to the car, I could tell from a few blocks away that something didn’t look right. Sure enough, we had a flat tire, and of course we didn’t know this until after we had already spent an hour wandering around and eating lunch. Another opportunity to take a deep breath and be cool. We unloaded the camping gear on top of the spare, changed the tire, which I have mastered in recent months by the way, got directions to a too busy tire shop, and finally headed 10 miles down the road to Gypsum’s tire shop where hopefully the wait would be less than a couple of hours! Success! The wonderful guys at Carquest in Gypsum dropped what they were doing and had the hole patched in 20 minutes flat. Muchas Gracias Amigos!

A couple more hours and it was time to stop at the Utah sign for a picture in Granny & Grandpa Taff style. You can definitely see the landscape changing from mountain to desert around the Utah/Colorado line on I-70. A bit more, and we were turning off the interstate towards Moab, Utah and Arches National Park.


We knew we needed to restock groceries and ice, but more important was figuring out our camping arrangement, so we headed straight for the Park. I don’t remember what time we got there, but the campground in the Park was full. We didn’t plan our trip early enough to make reservations, not to mention the fact that we left a day early, and the first-come sites were quite taken by later afternoon. The Park Ranger told us you have to get there around 7:30am, when they open for the day, to get one of the no reservation sites. So, an important lesson for our National Park tour file: make reservations for the campgrounds, unless you are going to drive through the night and arrive at opening time!

So, into Moab for the night. There are plenty of commercial campgrounds there, so we picked the closest one to the park so we could try to get there early and grab an Arches campsite for the next two nights. It was a nice night, but a little close to the road for my camping taste. It was getting late by this point, so we decided on an easy night of dinner in Moab, and grocery shopping. We headed to the Moab Brewery for some local stout over dinner, and then next door to the less chain looking grocery store in town. Moab is a pretty cool, local feeling place overall. Tourist oriented, but in a very authentic way. There were a few of the big boy restaurants, but it was clear that the local places ruled the scene.

I’ll conclude this installment with a fun shot of Utah’s own Polygamy Porter taken at the grocery store. Check out the tag lines for a laugh!

Our first major stop was in, drum roll please… Russell, Kansas. Trinity just had to stop in the town of her family name, so we wandered around town for a while in the car, looking for a good brunch spot. As we were driving through the square we kept hearing a weird noise coming and going through the cracked windows, so we slowed down to see what it was, and lo and behold it was Meat Loaf playing on the Russell, Kansas Square integrated surround sound system: “Though it's cold and lonely in the deep dark night/I can see paradise by the dashboard light.” We drove around a bit more and found Trinity United Methodist Church, so Trinity had to go take pictures of the church named Trinity in Russell, KS. As we swung back around to the square to ask somebody where the heck we could find breakfast, Meat Loaf was still singing, “Praying for the end of time, It’s all that I can do-oo-oo!” Not exactly what you expect to hear while you’re driving around the prominently proclaimed hometown of Bob Dole.

Finally, we found someone who directed us back towards the interstate to Meridy’s Restaurant and Lounge. I had seen it before, but for some unknown reason I have a subliminal aversion to the word “lounge,” especially after driving by the constant back and forth between billboards for strip clubs and porn shops, and those that warn of the danger and evil of such places with Bible verses attached. Missouri and Kansas seem to have more of this billboard debate than any other place I’ve driven through. “Sign, Sign, everywhere a sign, blocking out the scenery, breaking my mind.” Anyway, does anyone else think lounge sounds dirty? Trinity thinks I’m crazy. Turns out, Meridy’s is of course just the local diner, which was exactly what we were looking for. So we started off the trip with a low carb (not) breakfast of pancakes for Trinity, and biscuits and gravy for me. If you’re headed through Kansas, this place is worth a stop, but only if you make the short trek over to the square to see what's spinnin’.

After brunch at the lounge, back on the road. Our original thought was to stop for camping pretty soon after crossing into Colorado (at Bonny Lake) , but since we woke up and left hours ahead of schedule, plus time change of an hour, it was only 1:30 or so local time when we got there, so we decided to keep going. And if you do a little math, guess what time that puts us into Colorado… Yep, you guessed it, rush hour. There are two state parks in the Denver area, at least that seemed to make sense for our camping needs, so we had a hint of a disagreement about which way to go, but we were practicing our vacation attitudes so it wasn’t too bad.

We started creeping towards one, but traffic was really slow, and we needed to get a few more supplies, so we took a break to shop at a Target (our one and only national chain stop the whole trip… well, other than for gasoline). After gathering a few things we needed and heading back to the interstate, traffic in the direction we had been going had not changed a bit, but back toward the other camping option looked more promising, so Golden Gate Canyon State Park won our patronage for the night. And we were both glad it worked out that way. It was a beautiful drive, if not a little nerve racking in our four cylinder Scion xB, curving and climbing through the mountains to get there. Between Target, traffic, and twisting tardily through the turns, it was getting dark quickly, and raining a bit too, and it was our first night camping in a while, so we were rusty at getting things out and up.

We cooked and ate dinner in the dark, and shivered through the cold night (we were prepared for a cool night at Bonny Lake, but the rain and clouds up in the mountains put us about ten degrees cooler than expected), but it was a beautiful night and morning warming up by the fire before the second leg of the drive on Wednesday. And the best part was, it was all going shorter and sooner than expected. It’s amazing what having a leisurely attitude can do. Usually when we make trips I get all frantic about when we leave and annoyed about how much we have to stop, and we still end up later than expected, but tone that down a little, or a lot, and it turns into an enjoyable jaunt and we’re there before we know it.

Earlier this summer we had decided, even though for the first time we both actually had paid vacations, we would spend that time here in KC, chipping away at our ever-growing list of open projects at the Honse homestead. While in many ways it would be nice to have had some more extended and focused time to work on some of these projects, I think deep down inside we both knew that we needed a break from those very same things! Our list is going to ebb and flow, but it is not going to ever be finished, so if we’re waiting until it is, we’ll never leave the house. So, we put that list aside and made a new one of places we could go and how we planned to pull it off.

I am serious about making a list. Trinity has been a list maker for as long as I’ve known her, and in fact it was probably the first thing she did when she learned to write! And now she’s got me doing it. Every time we start to talk about something I say, “Let’s make a list.” I do it mostly because I have a horrible memory for details, and I think we both think pretty visually, so if we don’t see it with our eyes it doesn’t really click in our brains. So, our camping road trip started with a list, specifically, a Google Doc list so we could both edit it and access it from our computers since most of our research was being done online, only during lunch break at work of course.

Years ago when Trinity and I were just dating, I went to the Grand Canyon on a long road trip with Justin Gross and, you know, I was so enamored and in love (talk about sappy!) that the whole time I was thinking that I wished Trinity was there to see this amazing place with me. (I am happy to report I still feel that way. It is rarer that I take a trip like that without her anymore, but in Honduras in January I wished many times that she was sharing the experience.) So while I was at the Grand Canyon, I bought Trinity a little map/log book about the National Parks and said I wanted us to go visit as many of them as we could together and fill out this log of our journey. Trinity’s AH intern Kari suggested that we check out Arches National Park, and I am so glad she did. It was the perfect place to begin our journey of visiting the National Parks, and it is close enough to Canyonlands National Park that we could start off by visiting too parks in one trip.

As we made our list, we decided that a big part of this getaway would be an exercise in patience, flexibility, and not having too much of a plan. We mapped out our driving route and researched a few different camping options along the way, but we didn’t make any reservations or plan to push our driving time too far. It’s about a 14 hour drive, which splits nicely into a two day drive at a pretty leisurely pace.

The original plan was to leave on Wednesday, but as we sat at work on Monday with half of the stuff packed already and the Wild West calling our names, we decided we couldn’t make it through another day at our desks, so we finished packing Monday night and went to bed excited about heading out early. We woke up and some ridiculous time like 4:30am and tossed and turned, trying to get back to sleep. Finally around 5:30 or 6 we gave up and decided we might as well just get going. Our first opportunity to be flexible and have fun doing it!

Renewal, Utah

Monday, August 3, 2009 (Trinity is 26, Tim is 28)


You might not think of the desert as a place of great renewal – windy sandstorms; twisted gnarly juniper trees; prickly cacti; scorpions and rattlesnakes – but that is exactly what the canyons and mesas of the eastern Utah desert was for Trinity and I last week: Renewal.

We had no idea how much we needed this retreat when we began talking about a road trip just a week or two before leaving. Sure, vacations are nice, and we got excited planning where we would camp out and what sites we would see, but before long this quickly planned vacation became for us so much more than that. I am not sure how well either of us can describe the depth of our experience, we’ve already had a hard time telling others about it, but I need to write about this for myself, and so, since I am putting it on (digital) paper, I figure I will share it too.

Part of what made the experience so momentous for us was that we read The Time Traveler’s Wife together during the trip. We have enjoyed reading together, and/or listening to audiobooks, since our long drives back and forth from Georgia to Missouri to visit family when we lived in Atlanta, so as soon as we began planning the trip, one of our questions was, what will we read together? I’m sure I will say much more about this beautiful story later, but for now, an introduction:

I am a bit embarrassed to admit this, but the thing that got me interested in this wonderful book was seeing the trailer for the upcoming movie adaptation. I had judgmentally (and wrongly) assumed negative things about the sappy romantic nature of the book when Trinity had picked up a copy of it at a rummage sale, but the movie trailer made me rethink the book. The book is certainly romantic, but not even remotely sappy. It is romantic in a genuine and profound way, at least to me as I have experienced life and love.

Another way I would describe the book, which is what got me interested, is subtle science fiction. Again, not hokey sci-fi, but natural, believable, lifelike, and extremely intelligent. The characters inhabit a world only slightly different from our own (in which one of the main characters is plagued with chrono-displacement, or uncontrollable time travel), but the book is actually a timeless story about the people who live in this world, their relationship, personal journeys and struggles, love and commitment. It is a deep and moving story that I have been thinking of since we read the last page in eastern Colorado on the way back on Saturday. Something about the combination of being on the open road, and then the spacious and awesome Utah desert, without a schedule, just the two of us, at this present moment in our relationship and individual lives, made this story reach inside of us and grip us in a way neither of us have experienced for a long, long time. We are so thankful, and almost speechless about it.

Reading this sweeping life story of these two best friends and lovers has reminded me how much I love to write and tell stories, and so I am inspired to record this incredibly meaningful and reviving road trip to Utah. This week as we get back to work and routines and slowly unpack the mound of campfire scented supplies, air out the tent and sleeping bags, and sweep the left over terracotta colored sand from the living room floor, I need to do the same kind of careful unpacking of our experience. This is it.