There and Back Again Tires, Wind, Quartz, and Legions of Light - Chapter 4

The Departure

It took us way longer than expected, but eventually Larry and I left Colorado to return home.

Or at least, that was the plan.

The land ownership was finally settled, all the documents were registered, officiated, finalized and everything was now in our names. Other people no longer had a footing or claim to the land or anything they had abandoned there.

We had three major structures (including a vehicle) removed from the land, cutting off the negative energy cords they had anchored there.

I woke up one day to find that Larry was removing water tanks, packing generators, tools and plants.

Okidoki, I thought. This is it. We are leaving.

A few hours later, we started the GPS and it said, 19 hours to Port Angeles. We discussed where we might stop, how many hours we would drive that day and we left. We came to a grinding stop a few yards outside of the property… OMG, we had left Chinook tied up in the shade in the sand castle! Our giant, white, hard-to-miss Maremmano-Abruzzese dog. We re-checked everything again, loaded our love bug onto the truck and set off yet again.

We wanted to get north of Salt Lake City on the first day, which we did. We actually stayed at a Cabelas’ carpark, and there was a bit of grass next to us. The dogs sniffed it, laid down on it and went to sleep. They had missed the grass.

Everything was good, we had driven the rest of the day and had found a great place to park.

The next day, we found a restaurant that opened for breakfast at 7:30am. We walked over and found it to be both beautiful and high-frequency. The food was also amazing. After breakfast, our plan was to drive all day and get to Eastern Washington.

But when we got back in the car and started the map, it showed us we still had 17 hours left. How could this be? It was so confusing, we had driven a long way the previous day.

We sighed and started the drive again. It is not like this is the first time we had missing time in our travels.

In fact, as the journey unfolded, Larry and I started comparing notes with earlier trips and noticing some very strange patterns. We will explore those more deeply in the podcast.

Again, we drove all day. We veered north. The time on the GPS looked very similar to the Oregon route. We found an amazing National Forest camping ground and after some chopping of wood, walking the dogs and dinner, we went to sleep.

The next day the story repeated. Instead of the 8 hours left that the GPS had told us the previous night, we had 14!

OK, this was odd, weird and strange. Larry decided to find a physical map to check our journey on. There was a large map outside an information stop in Lolo, Montana. Yup, you guessed it. We still had 14 hours left to get home. At that point we stopped trying to make sense of it and simply kept driving.

We can discard it all with bad planning or failing GPS directions. But this became even stranger.

When we left Lolo, the GPS said to go north to Moscow and Coeur d’Alene. I was a bit confused by this, but we followed the instructions. As I was looking at the gps trying to figure out how far we were so we could stop for food there, I looked up and saw a notice saying “Welcome to Washington”. And, as I pointed it out to Larry asking him when we had stopped going north (he said we had not), I looked down to the map and saw our dot move from the road north, to one going west. Not only that, but it was well within Washington.

Hmm, OK, we thought. And looked around us. Endless green fields stretched to the horizon. Strong grasses rolled in the wind like waves on an ocean. Here and there sat seriously beautiful farmhouse compounds surrounded by trees, barns and silence. It felt less like driving through a place and more like moving through a painting.

Again, we drove all day. Nothing changed. The fields seemed to go forever. It does not take all day to drive across Washington State. Yet, at the end of the day, just as the green fields turned to desert, we found a campground in Wanapum Recreation Area. Yes, Still eastern washington.

The next day we did manage to get close to home! You got it. We drove all day and managed to get past Port Angeles, where we camped for the evening in our shared land, Fossil Beach, where our friends were waiting.

When we finally did get home, the next day, we felt very different from when we had left, different from who we had been in Colorado, and different again from who we had been on the road home. The locations themselves no longer seemed important. It was like we had never left home at all. Or more like all of it was home.

Which makes me wonder. Bilbo eventually returned to the Shire. So did we. But whether either of us ever truly left home, the road, or the destination is another question entirely.

And no, we didn’t bring home a ring to rule them all, but we did bring a truck full of quartz crystals.

On this week’s Wisdom Keepers Hour, we will share photographs, videos, and reflections from the journey home. Our panelists will also compare their own return journeys and help us explore a question we still cannot fully answer:

How do you drive for days and somehow remain inside the same stretch of road?