- Quick facts
- Total days on the road: 586
- Currently in: USA
- Miles Driven: 36821
- Countries Visited: 17
- Days Camping: 389
- Days Indoors: 202
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Confessions of a Desert Rat
I love the desert. I love everything about it. Some can’t stand it, these God-forsaken places. I worship them, like a lizard worships hot asphalt. We spent less than 24 hours in Death Valley National Park. It was barely long enough to remember what I love so much about the desert.
The heat.
The scorching unrelenting heat. The kind that makes your lips crack, your hands sweat and your heart slow down. Heat that makes moving difficult, sleeping harder and working impossible.
The sun.
The massive white blinding sun. The light that cooks anything in its view from dusk to dawn. It makes your skin tight and rough and eventually – like leather. The sun whose power blackens the rocks, wilts the plants, and forces even the smallest creatures to cower.
The dry.
The quenching, dusty, barren dry. Sand dunes, salt flats, arid tundras. They sweep miles without a sight of water. The absence of humidity. It sucks the water from your throat, from your skin, from everywhere it can. The constant battle for the last drop, the last fleck of moisture from the air.
The silence.
The long haunting fragile silence. The lack of the typical -- water running, leaves ruffling, animals calling. There is nothing here, only muffles of the growl of the wind, the rattle of snakes, the crackle of the heat.
The emptiness.
The vast, desolate, emptiness. Long stretches of nothing, followed by more nothing. Eternities of blank space, baked into oblivion. There is no one, nothing, just harsh unforgiving landscapes.
Until next time... I'll be somewhere else, missing the desert.
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Dad
Dad