Travels with Doolin
My first road trip as ESB Consulting is in the books, and it was just what I needed.
I picked up the van the afternoon of Thursday, April 20th, spent the evening loading it up with the company of a handful of friends. On Friday morning, Collin, Doolin, and I climbed in the van and hit the road.
The van was due back by May 25th, just before Memorial Day weekend, so my visits with friends and colleagues had to fit in between April 21st and May 17th. That would leave me 8 days to make my way the 2000 miles from Minneapolis to Seattle. I planned about half of my visits ahead of time and finished the rest of the planning along the way. Collin was with me and Doolin for just the first two stops, then he had to jet back to work and leave us to it.
I fell easily into a nice routine in the van. I got up around 8:30 to make coffee, walk Doolin, and head off for the day. Every night before I went to bed I recorded what I'd done that day, selected my favorite photos, and figured out what specifically I would do the next. I typically went to bed around midnight after unwinding with note taking for an hour or two. I found that I really liked sleeping in the van, even when my friends offered to have me and Doolin their homes, it was just so nice to have my own space to decompress and convenient to keep my things in one spot.
Our road trip route, mapped in R (sf, tigris, osrm, googleway, ggplot2).
Collin’s dad recommended Travels with Charley, a book by John Steinbeck about a long road trip with his poodle Charley. Doolin was just as much of an asset to my trip as Charley was to his. Doolin met my friends, came on hikes up mountains and on walks around town. He even went to a conference!
This country is beautiful. Maybe it was the perfect timing of the trip – late spring so not much snow, lots of green, few hot days and few mosquitos – but even the stretches of road I was warned about as boring were gorgeous.
The night before my first conference in 4 years, I camped in a primitive BLM campground with not even a pit toilet. With a stroke of genius I steered myself through Lava Hot Springs, Idaho the on the way to the conference the next morning for a long hot soak and a shower.
Sure, you can skip Wall Drug like so many told me, but I didn’t. I had possibly the best chocolate covered old fashioned donut I've ever had. And 5 cent coffee. No regrets.
South Dakota is beautiful. This is the view from the visitor center at Crazy Horse, showing the final design of the sculpture in the foreground and progress in the distance. Crazy Horse is in the Black Hills National Forest, and not far from the Badlands National Park, also amazing.
My goals for the trip were to reconnect with colleagues in person after a long time working alone in my living room, catch up with good friends, and meet a few new people, while still having time to hang with my dog and get work done on my current contracts. A road trip allowed me to do all of that, and to see some beautiful sights along the way, and it was just what I needed. The boost I got from seeing people in person after years behind a zoom screen was overdue. I used the long drives to listen to some great podcasts and audiobooks. The trip wasn’t perfect, there were stressful moments here and there, but I was prepared for that, and I took away lessons that will help me next time.
It would be hard to beat this trip, but I definitely want to try. So I sat down to reflect on the trip before looking ahead at the next. That’ll be the subject of my next post.