Amateur - Blog
We weren’t supposed to get lost.
P.S. Dad finally bought a GPS. He keeps it in the glove compartment. Next to the Thomas Guide.
“Preparation is freedom,” he said, handing me a laminated itinerary. blog amateur
The Summer the Map Ran Out of Ink Posted by: Margot | August 12th | Filed under: Growing Pains, Road Trips, Letting Go
“It’s a dirt road,” Dad argued. “We have a sedan.” We weren’t supposed to get lost
“Alright, captain. You navigate.”
And I learned that sometimes, the only way to find the thing you weren’t looking for is to run out of instructions. He keeps it in the glove compartment
I can’t describe it right. That’s the amateur part of this blog. I’m not a poet. But imagine if someone took all the colors of a bonfire—gold, rust, deep purple—and poured them into a crack in the earth a mile wide. There was no guardrail. No gift shop. No plaque. Just us, and the silence, and the feeling that we’d found something that wasn’t supposed to exist.
“Gas is low,” Mom said softly. “Back is sixty miles.”
“It’s a road ,” I said. “And we have a spare tire. And it’s three in the afternoon. And I’m tired of the Petrified Forest.”
Not literally. But Dad’s printed directions ended at a place called “Scenic Overlook 7.” The road after it wasn’t on the page. It was just a beige slit in the red earth, disappearing into a haze of heat.
