The Last Ten Days /  by Nathalie Klinck

A Clear Night. Mojave Desert, CA. February 2017

A recap of the last week and a half. Coming to you from sunny Laguna Beach!

Valley of Fire, NV.

Huge, red, Swiss cheese-like holes dot the mountains and boulders here, making it easy to partake in some amateur climbing. Here we spotted the first of what were to be many small desert lizards, that scamper in and out of the crevices and pause in the hot sunlight.

Boulder City/Lake Mead, NV.

In Boulder City, we spent our time poking our heads into antique shops (no idea what the deal is but there are a tonne) and enjoying a patio beer before pitching up in a secluded area of BLM land outside of the town, feet from Lake Mead. This was probably our most beautiful sleep spot to date, surprisingly only a few miles from the unanticipated headache that was to be Las Vegas.

Las Vegas, NV.

In Vegas, it feels like you can get up to a lot and yet achieve nothing. Lowlights include: being roped into a FIVE-hour timeshare presentation for $200 worth of free dinner and slots (absolutely not worth it—never, ever, ever do this. Ever.), spending too much time wandering through and getting lost in casinos, feeling like shit. Highlights include: Freemont Street (Old Vegas Strip), cheap and secret pizza parlour, sleeping in a king-sized bed. I will happily spend the rest of my life never coming back here.

Death Valley National Park, CA.

Death Valley, though beautiful, was our least favourite national park so far—we romped through soft sand dunes and the camping was decent, but it took us hours just to escape the vast park and we are tired of driving.

Mojave Desert, CA.

We just stopped in the Mojave to sleep for the night, but it's worth remembering because the drive to a free campsite down the dustiest road we have encountered so far was just super fun.

Treehugger. Joshua Tree National Park, CA. February 2017

Joshua Tree National Park, CA.

Joshua Tree is still the desert, but the town community and the trees themselves (technically yucca plants) totally set the landscape and culture apart. We stopped at the laundromat in town first, desperate to clean our limited supply of clothes. Apparently the laundromat is the place to be. The town’s inhabitants (mostly snowbirds and hippies) flood in and out, chitchatting excitedly while they wait or fold. We ate breakfast at Crossroads Café. I ordered scrambled tofu and peanut soyrizo (and then died and went to heaven). We drove into neighbouring Yucca Valley and picked up some clothes at vintage shop The End, and finished off the day with a drink at Joshua Tree Saloon.

The park itself was packed, but thanks to Gigi’s appeal, a young guy from Santa Cruz and an older nomad gentleman with a loaded army-style rig offered to share a site with us. We spent the night swapping stories and ended up going brewery-hopping with Santa Cruz a few days later in San Diego.

When we left the park, we headed to Noah Purifoy’s Desert Art Museum, a 40-acre property chock full of junkyard sculptures, then Pioneertown, a ghost town a few miles away that felt like stepping onto the Wild West set of Westworld.

The girls. Moapa Valley, NV. February 2017

Palm Springs, CA.

Zach’s family has friends that live in a gated community here, so we spent the night drinking fancy cocktails and very expensive red wine, and talking politics, y’know.

Salton Sea/Salvation Mountain/Slab City/Borrego Springs, CA.

The Salton Sea is a body of water that is overly rich in salt and other minerals, causing the coastline to be strewn with dead marine life, mostly fish. It smelled awful, looked even more awful, but was a bucket list check off.

Salvation Mountain, on the outskirts of “the last free place in America”, is an impressive pseudo-religious art piece that took an impassioned elderly man the better part of twenty years to construct. It consists of hay, clay, latex-free paint. When we arrived, there was a gospel choir holding a congregation at its base, a moving rarity that we were very lucky to witness.

A difficult place to describe, Slab City is worth just looking up. This lawless region houses squatters, hippies, snowbirds, retired folk—all artists in some shape or form. I thought it was The Weirdest, Most Fascinating Place in America. We rounded out that day with a stop at Borrego Springs, a town dotted with larger-than-life metal sculptures by artist Anza Borrego.

A Desert Climb. Death Valley, CA. February 2017

San Diego, CA.

We really enjoyed San Diego, and as far as cities go, it was a breath of fresh air after our series of mishaps in Las Vegas. San Diego is a major hub for breweries, so we had to check out a few of those (St. Archer Brewing, Ballast Point, Pizza Port Ocean Beach). We were lucky enough to stay last-minute with a connection that I had made through a travellers’ Facebook group (street parking is highly verboten), in exchange for helping her to assemble some Ikea furniture. She had just moved to San Diego from Buffalo, NY, and is one of the nicest people we have ever met.

San Elijo State Beach

In San Diego, we picked up a surfboard at Coconut Peet’s: a repair shop full of eccentric, pretty stereotypical surf dudes. Last night we found a campground close to Encinitas, and Zach has just come in from the ocean. Today we continue up the coast.

Sante Fe/Sedona/Flagstaff/The Grand Canyon/Zion National Park: A Catch-Up /  by Nathalie Klinck

Gigi, Geronimo, Patrick, Vanessa, Zachary, Nathalie. Grand Canyon National Park, AZ. February 5 2017

A deep curiousity about Arizona and its diverse landscape was one deciding factor of what, mind the pun, drove us to make this journey. We arrived in the state a few days ago, but are now in Utah since we’ve been exploring and socializing so much that I’ve hardly had time to post an update.

As an aside: The United States, and the world, are feeling (and certainly are) tumultuous right now. I am trying to both be consciously active of this and still revel in the landscapes that we came here to explore, so I hope that these tidbits of travel news do not trivialize the unrest that surrounds us. I am always listening.

A New Friend, A New View. Grand Canyon National Park, AZ. February 4 2017

We traveled by way of the Guadalupe mountains in New Mexico, through Santa Fe, Albuquerque, Flagstaff, Sedona, Grand Canyon National Park, and tonight, Zion National Park. In Santa Fe, we crashed at an Airbnb hosted by two super friendly young guys, one an actor, the other a developer. The former was on a few episodes of HBO’s Better Call Saul, which we found downright hysterical being in New Mexico and all. After a few pizzas, bottles of wine, and rounds of Cards Against Humanity, we became fast friends. Zach and I wandered around town the next day, and then set off towards the mountains.

We didn’t see Albuquerque at all because we were stuck in traffic attempting to escape it for two hours. Small setback.

Flagstaff is a great little town—a “drinking town with a skiing problem” as noted by a friend of mine who once decided to stay there for an entire year after his bike broke down mid-road trip. He recommended we drive down the 89a to Sedona (coined “the little Grand Canyon”). We spent the night there at a lush campground next to a trout-filled creek, the US $22 price tag thankfully including the most eccentric, anecdote-filled and wonderful “camp host” I have or ever will meet. That night we shared a bonfire, drank whiskey and played music with a handful of other travelers from all over the States and Canada, and the host gifted me with a javelina skull (fuzzy boar-like creatures that roam these mountains eating prickly pears).

We hesitantly departed our little family in Sedona, opting to continue onward to the Grand Canyon. When we arrived, we weren’t surprised to find that, it being winter, there was only one campsite open and it was otherwise lacking in fellow campers…at first. But we thought hey, we’ll just turn one more corner before settling on a site. And there, parked in all her glory, was a green 1983 Westfalia just like ours. His name is Geronimo. We chatted with its owners, Patrick and Vanessa, over a campfire, and watched the sun rise over the Grand Canyon with them the following morning. It was nothing short of gasp-inducing.

Zach and I walked the Grand Canyon’s South Rim that day, and pondered the possibility that the reason for the park’s popularity is that it’s an easy way to feel like you’ve just climbed a massive mountain with minimal (and I mean stepping-out-of-a-bus minimal) effort. All reward and no risk, unless you decide to spend two days venturing into the belly of the beast. At the Grand Canyon, you can go hardcore, or you can be a guppy. Guess which we were?

Last night we watched the Super Bowl in the little town of Page, Arizona, and shared drinks with a friend that we’d run into in both Sedona and the Grand Canyon (traveler’s trajectories tend to be eerily similar). We snuck into a paid campground in town that night, and then left for Zion.

Tonight in the southern region of Zion, as we play with a neighbour’s spunky pitbull, I have a chance to share with you the last five or so days of our journey. By Friday we’ll be in Vegas.

Making Moves: A Prologue /  by Nathalie Klinck

At Kyle and Kaitlin's. Gravenhurst, ON. Canada. Summer 2016.

Three weeks ago, I wasn't sure this trip was still going to happen.

Three years ago, Zach and Gigi, the 1981 VW vanagon, found each other and then they found me. We determined that together we would forego a city-dwelling Toronto winter, paying the bills, shooting the shit, in exchange for #vanlife and all of its idiosyncrasies. To us, the idea of adventure and the unknown, although romanticized, outweighed perfect predictability. 

But despite what we see in movies, on TV, and flooding the Facebook page of that one perpetually-in-transit hippie friend, it's not so easy to just drop everything and go. I already had a great job in my field--one that I had ultimately acquired after years of riding a guileless merry-go-round of service industry gigs. This job let me be creative, it made me feel cool, and perhaps most notably, it gave me stability. Every time I thought about giving it up, I experienced a queasy sensation in my gut not dissimilar to that of a mild to moderate hangover (you know, that 5pm to 7pm window? Not the worst, but not easy to ignore). I figured out that this feeling is called anxiety. A few days before handing in my resignation, it really began to wear me down. I almost cancelled our plans altogether. Zach was sympathetic, but insisted that he was going anyway. So I pulled up my socks, rolled into work, and gurgled out something along the lines of "I'm so sorry I'm moving into a van and leaving the country."

I learned a few things from this delicate moment of my life:

  1. Sometimes if you're anxious, opening your big fat mouth and talking about it will make that anxiety dissipate. 
  2. You can both be comfortable and in motion simultaneously.
  3. Change spurs creativity (at least for me).
  4. If something feels weird but not scary, maybe weird is exactly what you need.

We leave tomorrow!

N