More Pie

There was a time, more than a decade ago, when I would take a trip purely for the pleasure of doing so.

And while I did scribble a note to an editor friend about this trip to Arizona in hopes of perhaps landing a story, I intentionally left it vague. “If there’s something there, can I send it your way?”

“Here’s some stuff you might read before you write about geology,” he replied. “You know what to do.”

I forgot that I had considered taking this trip as a travel writer the moment I crossed security in Phoenix. My brother was there.

“They’ll meet us on the curb,” he said, and when we walked outside, there was the family. We piled our bags into the back of the minivan. We folded ourselves onto the bench seat at the rear. We stopped first for groceries, and then, at a historic roadhouse for pie.

“How long have they been serving pie here?” I asked the waitress.

“Well, the roadhouse has been here since 1918, but I don’t think they’ve been making pie since then,” she answered.

That was good enough for the not working me. There were five or maybe seven types of pie on the table.  I could have asked more questions, but instead, I stuck my fork in the slice of pie in front of me, the Jack Daniels pecan, and it was delicious. The coffee was not, but it was exactly what I expected from road house coffee, so I was not disappointed.

We chattered, the parents, the adult children, the mates, and stared out the window and quibbled over directions. We padded around the vacation rental house in socks, we paged through guidebooks, we decided the evening before what we would do the morning after. We settled for less than fully detailed information and made mistakes. That’s why the station was empty, save for the ladies working the phones. Mistakes.

“Oh, no, the train doesn’t run today, it’s Wednesdays and Saturdays only now. But you have to make reservations.”

And because we made mistakes, we simply went to other places instead, picked out because they were nearby, because they had funny names, because the sign said “Three miles that way.” It didn’t matter that there was no train or that there was a wait for a table big enough for everyone or that there was no cell phone signal.  I didn’t have to go back to take the train another day or to explain that I would not make the media dinner. I didn’t have a story to write, so I could just take things as they were.

We wound in and out of park sites, listening to ranger talks, reading interpretive signs, admiring the views. We repeated the same jokes about Sedona’s famous consciousness altering vortexes until the jokes weren’t funny, and then, were again. We ate cake and scrambled eggs and Italian food and more sandwiches.

We spent most days outside, most evenings at the dinner table. We went to bed at a reasonable time and started the next day at a reasonable time and we never tried to cram more things in a day than ought to be in a day. When I’m on assignment, I squeeze an absurd amount of activities into my waking hours until often everything is a blur, until there are no details, or worse, until there are only details.

1918. $12.95. Sinauga, meaning without water. Wednesdays and Saturdays.

Details. Facts.

Instead of details, I watched the sun change the color of the rocks from red to very red to “Wow, will you look at how red that is? Can you believe that red?” I went on the longest hike I’d been on in I don’t know since when, and because I was tired when it was over and because it was the end of the trip, I was lazy the next day. I did wander the extra spur down to the edge of the lake, but I didn’t walk down there because I had to, I did it purely because I was curious.

We all washed dishes and carried grocery bags of picnic supplies and tried to find the directions to and from. We all took pictures of each other, and I took a lot of pictures with my phone, but I didn’t even bring the important camera because I was on vacation, I wasn’t looking at things for anyone else’s eyes, only for my own.

I have a friend who once worked for Lonely Planet, the guide book company. She taught me the job description for travel writers. “See everything, experience nothing.”

I’m not complaining about the work I do as a travel writer and if you ever hear me say it is hard, you can have the vowels from my keyboard. I will tell you it’s hard to make a living, and that the long days can make you tired, but I won’t tell you it’s hard to stay in some nice hotels or to be paid to see things that most people only dream of seeing. The perks are amazing and I’ve made some long term friends on media trips. I’m grateful for the work I do as a travel writer.

But it’s become different than how and why I loved to travel in the first place.

Save for a few weekends at the Washington Coast, it’s been a long time since I did the kind of travel that sent me down the path to writing travel in the first place. Mostly aimless wandering with little preparation, little sense of direction beyond “Over there. That way.” Before all of this career driven writing, I used to get in the car with the husband and some camping gear and go see The West. I used to buy plane tickets to Europe and book myself into tiny little hotels in Italy or Paris because I wanted to see a painting. I didn’t plan for much beyond finding the Botticelli or hoping to catch sight of a moose grazing in the meadows below the Tetons.

Overly organized travel can rob you of the opportunity to be curious, to discover things on your own. Disorganized travel is better for me, even as a writer with an assignment, because it gives me the chance to get lost, to make mistakes and wrong turns, to feel my legs complain that I have walked them too far the day before.

It gives me time to enjoy my pie.

I have missed enjoying the pie.

Travel. It needs more pie.