Making God Laugh Funny, the things you don’t think about when planning for unfamiliar lands: such as 8-lane highways flooded with people I thought were working at home, campsites carefully chosen from maps and word pictures painted by a prevaricating Picasso, and bone-biting cold winds and damp fog where there should have been forest bathing and sunny beach walks. Neale Donald Walsch’s words, “Life begins at the end of your 18 comfort zone,” flew out pril 30, 2021 - I embark. of my head without a Destination: Lake Almanor backward glance in Northern California, For the past several months, I’ve My charted course of 1,316 miles been reading about the voyages is almost exactly twice the shortest of naturalist scientists such as distance recommended by Google Alexander von Humboldt, Charles Maps. Scheduled are two nights with Darwin, Joseph Banks and others friends, four nights in motels, and who sailed away for years, fell in seven nights camping. That was the love with foreign lands, and brought plan. It lasted two days. home discoveries that changed their Arrived 15 days later, having stayed worlds. Obviously, I overlooked the six nights with friends and family, bouts of malaria, storms that swept eight nights in motels, only one night people overboard, and meetings camping. Trip odometer: 1,936 miles. with local hostiles. Jan Phillips says wandering heals My petty FreakOut paled by us and “reunites us with our sacred comparison. I just wanted to quit, roots.” My carefully planned first go home (wherever that is), find real day on the road didn’t feel very somewhere warm and sunny, with healing or sacred. wifi, of course.
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Fortunately, morning came, with sunshine and some sanity. A stunning walk along the Fort Bragg cliffs restored my spirit. The crows still laughed at me, but that was ok. One of the major reasons for leaving our comfy lives and warm beds is because there are surprises out there on the road, things we’ve never thought about and definitely never expected. While there were many of these surprises on my northward adventure, one reminded me why I was on this particular journey on a back road to nowhere. It wasn’t really a road to nowhere … the pygmy cypress forest of Van Damne State Park called me. The unexpected surprise was an art glass studio. With places to go and things
