Reflections: "Life, Travel, Adventure"
Several years ago when I was eighteen years old and a senior in high school, I had a burning desire to visit the mountains. I decided that I wanted to travel to Alaska during the summer before starting school in Purdue University's world class engineering program. I bought travel books and made plans on how I was going to drive all the way there, all 5,500 miles of it. I looked through travel books and thought about taking a trip with a good high school buddy up through the northern midwest across Canada and up to Alaska. I wanted to visit exotic sounding national parks like Denali, Kenai Fjords, and Gates of the Arctic.
Sometimes I wonder if I would have actually taken that trip, whether my first college experience might have turned out differently, but that's water over the bridge now. I made it to Colorado, worked inside the boundaries of Rocky Mountain National Park for a 13 months over the course of four summers, and have been a resident of Colorado for 2 years now.
There was this other trip, which was a down right crazy idea. The same buddy and I planned this trip to Ecuador in South America. We actually went and bought plane tickets off of the "cheap tickets" webpage, and planned on landing in Ecuador, renting a van and driving to Patagonia. My friend spoke Spanish fluently, so that was the only non-stupid part of the idea. Probably the worst part was that I didn't tell my parents about it. I just read about every country in Central and South America online, and printed the encyclopedia facts, statistics, and general information pertaining to all of these exotic places. I really just wanted to get the hell out of Indiana, away from my failures in Purdue's engineering programs and out of the country for a while. The ideas for this trip sprung from the "Motorcycle Diaries", a great film about two Argentinian Doctors that dropped out of medical school to take a motorbike trip to the United States of America. Except along the way they encountered people in dire medical need and one of them decided to stay and help the people. My friend and I never went on our trip to South America and I was out eight hundred dollars for the plane tickets. It was not a good idea, and had no real purpose.
After that, while attending a community college and getting straight A's despite living some folks who liked to sleep 5 hours a night and get hammered every other night, another friend and I decided to go visit a high school friend that had moved to Thousand Oaks, CA. I took my mom's car and told her that I was going to check out a college in Colorado, called Colorado Mountain College, which was in Leadville up at 11,000 feet above sea level in the highest incorporated town in America. I never mentioned a word about California. Well my travel buddy and I "eventually" ended up going to visit this college, on the way back from California, in a snowstorm in the middle of the night, but this was not really the primary purpose of our trip. We switched off driving every four hours and made it all the way to California with only one long stop for sleep in about 40 hours. On the way there we visited the Grand Canyon in Arizona for an hour. While in California we visited places like Hollywood, Laguna Beach, and Santa Barbara. After staying there for 4 days we drove the 40 hours back halfway across the United States to Indiana and went back to school. I ended up with 3 A's and a B that semester despite the crazy living conditions and atmosphere. Who knows? Sometimes just going with an idea can affect a person just enough to figure out how to succeed in life. I think I learned some lessons on that crazy ass trip.
I hit my rebellious stage in my late teens early twenties rather than in high school like a good number of other classmates. ...
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Several years later after graduating from college I was working with my sister out in Estes Park, CO for the summer and the flood came on September 12th, 2013. We lost power, they closed Rocky Mountain National Park, the entire downtown was severely flooded, and eventually the town told all of the seasonal employees to "get out" because the infrastructure was damaged, and the sewer systems couldn't handle all the people. Our friend Gardner from Tiawan and my sister's friend Anna didn't have anyplace to go right away. The only way out was to drive west through the closed Rocky Mountain National Park. So of course, what the hell, we decided to go on a 6,000 mile, 17 day road trip across eleven different states, to five major cities, five national parks, and two national monuments. So was born, "Road Trip! Road Trip! Road Trip!", as our friend Gardner called it out. That trip is a story in and of itself, and it deserves it's own blog story, so we'll leave those seventeen days for another time. Certainly though, again it was an eyeopener, a life changer, a soul changer. When I saw the damage in Yosemite National Park from the fires that had raged, and that no water was coming over Yosemite Falls, it made an impression on me that changed my future path(s) in life.
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Not too long after that trip, as I said a story in and of itself, I found myself packing up my Subaru Outback and strapping a kayak to the top of it, covered with a cockpit tarp, jammed full of hiking and backpacking gear and all the cloths that I owned, and I started my seven day off-the-beaten-path road trip back to Estes Park, CO. I made a few "detours" along the way and ended up 300 miles south of my Estes Park destination in Alamosa, CO. One of the first things I did in Alamosa was hike to the top of the highest sand dune in the park. 8,700ish feet above sea level. This is Colorado. God doesn't fool around with sand dunes. The base of the dunes was around 8,000ish feet so the tallest sand dune was almost 700 vertical feet above that! Ever try to hike up a seven hundred foot sand dune in the wind!? Not so easy. Everybody else in the park turned around, but I knew that this might be my only shot at seeing what was up there so I kept going. I made it to what seemed like the top, and was nearly blinded by the baking sun and howling winds. There wasn't really much special about the top of that pile of sand, but "what the hell! why not?", so I did, "Because it's there." --> (George Mallory). After that I remember going to San Luis Brewery in Alamosa, CO and having my first beer as a planned resident of Colorado. It was a damn good beer, I'll tell you. The waitress was certainly something to look at. ;) She was a student at the university there in Alamosa called Adams State University. And so gradually entered the idea of returning to college at some point while in Colorado... And that's another story for another day too. I'd like to expand this story and some point to include the tale of sleeping in half constructed tent in the western portion of Iowa with Grass Roaches (a cousin of the cockroach) crawling all over me all night long... but yeah that'll be an expanded story for another day.
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The whole point is, I learned something from each of these trips or "failed trips". I learned something about myself. I learned something about the world. I learned something about the natural world around me. And I learned stuff that I didn't think that I would learn. And I saw stuff that I didn't think that I would see. And shit went wrong that I wasn't even on my radar.
All these experiences helped shape my future destiny and my future life aspirations. So yeah it was all worth it in the end. "That's life. That's travel. That's adventure." And the story goes on..
~ Nick Whittemore (30th of April, 2016)
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"I am a rebel, one who has not listened. We all are rebels. In this way we are all the same" - Nick Whittemore in the post "In Rebellion to a Rebel" (Feb. 2012)
"My mind is in a state of constant rebellion. I believe that will always be so." - George Mallory (1920's Everest Pioneer, Everest Expeditions)
"All good things are wild and free." - Henry David Thoreau
"A but hell I'm just a blind man on the plains, I drink my water when it rains, and live by chance among the lightning strikes." - The Tallest Man on Earth (Musician) from the album "The Wild Hunt, 2010"
