I'm going back.........

to the West........Arizona and Utah. For a week. Wilderness soft and managed this time, National Park style. Not my favorite way to do it but I'm taking my daughters, one of whom is a little bit pregnant. I want them to see and feel so they will at least partially understand the day I leave not to return. At least not permanently return. There are times I wish I would get riffed out of this job so I'd have no reason not to make major decisions about my life. I wonder how many people stay somewhere just because of their kids, parents, grandchildren, a mate, a job...........when they would be much happier somewhere else. It's certainly not because I'm miserable here in the heartland or that I don't enjoy having those I love and who love me close at hand. I could never find another job that compensates me like this one does. But all this aside, there comes a time when a person has to make decisions for their own fine self. Bottom line is you come in alone and go out alone and owe it to yourself to end up where you want to end up both geographically and emotionally. The pursuit of happiness.
I'm very much looking forward to sharing the magical places I know with those I love. This will be the fifth year out of six that I have gone west in the third week of September. It is a beautiful time to go with the aspens turning yellow and red in the high elevations, cool, crisp mornings with that bluest of blue skies, a million night stars. Temperature ranging from high 30's to low 90's. Elevation changes of 5,000 feet, climatic zones the same as travelling from Mexico to Canada. Pinyon pine and juniper and sage to spruce and Douglas fir and Ponderosa pine. Once with a recent wife and my son, once alone, twice with the woman of that particular season and this time with daughters and their mother who was also a wife a long time ago. Who'd a thunk it all those years ago that there would be a family vacation in the distant future. Odd that my daughters would freak if I snuck into their mother's room to reenter the womb from which they emerged....... having been seeded by me. Life gets all funny sometimes don't it? I think it will be an experience remembered long after I am scattered among the red earth and rocks and rivers and canyons and have become part of the place I love more than any other.