And I learned that sometimes, the only way to find the thing you weren’t looking for is to run out of instructions.
For the first six days, everything went exactly to script. We saw the Petrified Forest (Dad took 200 photos of rocks). We ate at a diner where the waitress called us “hon.” We sang “Sweet Caroline” so many times that Sam threatened to jump out of the moving vehicle.
But Dad looked at the map. Then at the road. Then at the gas gauge. For the first time in his entire life, he said something I didn’t expect. blog amateur
I didn’t have a compass. I didn’t have a GPS signal. All I had was a sunburn and a stupid sense of direction. But I pointed left, and he turned.
“Alright, captain. You navigate.”
“You knew,” he said.
“We go forward,” I said.
Then, somewhere outside of Moab, Utah, the map ran out of ink.
For two hours, we bounced along that forgotten road. The canyon walls rose up on either side, striped like a jawbreaker. Sam fell asleep with his head on a stuffed pterodactyl. Mom passed back peanut butter crackers. And Dad didn’t say a word. And I learned that sometimes, the only way