Road Trip Series Part 1: The Desert Absolute

Hello strangers! It has been one hell of a year. As we all know, 2020 was GREAT for travel if that means you binged ever episode of Planet Earth three times and the sound of David Attenborough’s voice now makes you cry. However, I did manage to sneak out of my apartment ( masked up and in a biohazard suite) and made my way out west for a month.

In this series, I will be taking you all on a contactless road trip to the southwest. We will be analyzing what it is like to travel with a partner instead of as a solo female traveler, why living somewhere new for a month is the best kind of travel, and how the great American road trip has evolved in the last 70 years.

Buckle up! It’s going to be a long journey.

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Transcript of The Desert Absolute

On a hot September day, I sit in my living room looking out or six story window in Brooklyn. I share this place with my boyfriend. We can call him Sam. He was on luck. Coincidence is episode. I moved into this place during the pandemic. Like a lot of people even remember from our first episode of this salmon, I had rushed upstate when the pandemic hit, what we thought was only going to be two weeks, ended up being six months, March suddenly turns into September and there was still no end in sight to the stillness.

But, you know, New York seems safer at this point and people had learned how to live with and around this new, painful reality. So in the fall, when we were back in the city, I kept getting this random feeling. I just had this sudden urge to be in the desert. I wanted to be surrounded by russet red rock.

Dusty roads and big boosts guys. Now, this was weird because I hate the desert. I was raised in upstate New York. I love being covered in trees and green and seeing wild flowers and life all around me in a forest. I feel so inspired and cozy. I feel the complete opposite in the desert. The dry landscape makes me angry.

I feel exposed and vulnerable. Like there's so much open nothingness. I feel empty and inspired. I can't explain it other than I just hate that feeling, which is why it was so strange that I craved it. I think that after six months of living through a global pandemic, a sentence, I never thought I would say I wanted a different kind of stomach.

I want it to sit out in an open, flat space and scream. I wanted to lie down on crunchy grass and hear nothing, but the wind whipped around my body, something about the pandemic, how the earth seemed to stop rotating made me want to escape from it all. The death toll the sensationalism, the waxing and waning hope of a vaccine.

Like everyone else. I longed to be out traveling, hugging my friends, eating at new restaurants and dancing with sweaty bodies around mantle four in the morning, but the waiting and waiting and waiting. We were always two weeks away from a little update and false hope I wanted to wallow. I wanted to feel as pointless as a barren landscape.

I think the CDC should have added existential wanderlust as an ancillary COVID symptom. And as Sam and I stayed cooped up in our apartment, all of these forgotten memories of my travels kept popping up into my brain. I remember being in Marrakesh, Morocco and eating snail soup at one of the nightstands in that big, main square.

I remember picking up pine cones on a mountain in Southern Turkey using through the snow covered streets of Stockholm or having a giant bowl of fi on a little plastic seat on the street in Hanoi, Vietnam, all of these places that I've missed so much and had no access to them. I couldn't do my favorite thing in the world, which was be in the world.

And even though travel is heavily romanticized, the reason we are in this global pandemic is because of travel diseases developed because we moved them, travel, spreads, ideas, inventions, and infections. It's long believed that the black plague crawled along the silk road from China. And it contaminated every fair trading middle Eastern country in between and sliced the European population in path.

In the 14th century. When the conquistadors came to conquer the Americas, it wasn't their superior technology or moral high grounds that helped them conquer. It was their germs. The natives decided to exchange spices for smallpox and they couldn't fight back. What was once booming empires of like 60 million people was diminished to a few million in a few hundred years.

We've been spreading germs as long as we've been exploring. And this made me rethink my own adventures. How many times have I accidentally gotten other sick as a gal have anted overseas? Because I traveled, there's a domino effect that I can't reverse or ever know the consequences to this love that I have dedicated my life and creativity to has helped COVID travel exponentially.

And that breaks my heart. It makes me feel like everything I've ever done was reckless and selfish. And I know I shouldn't, I know that this is like a very silly thought because I want to keep traveling. I don't want to find reasons to just stay in my apartment and I grappled with it because I was like, should I even be entertaining this idea of going from a hotbed of contagion to the quiet Southwest?

I had had zoom calls with my friends who were living in Italy and Canada, and they would tell me how they haven't seen their families and months and how strict their restrictions. I had heard in Greece that you had to text the government one of six reasons to leave your house and that the police would escort you back home.

If you didn't. Whereas I could go outside at any point during this whole thing, and I could still travel within my own country. Parties have been busted on college campuses. And on any day in February, you could have driven through Manhattan and not think that anything was wrong. Certainly not a global pandemic.

Americans couldn't be stopped. And that's exactly, what's ended us up until this March. Our death toll is the highest out of any wealthy country for a number of reasons. One of them is that our greatest philosophy was also our Achilles Americans. Don't like being told what to do. We self, uh, fixate on our freedom.

We don't want someone else to tell us, to wear a mask, to not see our loved ones and to stay inside indefinitely. Don't tell me what to do. And as cautious as I've been, I still felt that urge to do my own thing. I wanted to go on this trip and I didn't want to be stopped, but I knew that if I traveled, I would be part of the problem.

There had to be a way that we could go out west Sam and I were not comfortable enough to do. But he did just get a new car. Maybe, maybe we could drive that I've never done a road trip and I've always wanted to do on across America. I bet that we could go and try to do it in the safest way possible. And if we're driving, it's just him and I recycling the air.

Maybe it could work. So one cold January day, Sam and I started planning. Sam. And I picked the opposite of her metropolitan life, rural rustic, rugged Arizona, because with all of our social plans, indefinitely postponed, and we both work remotely. All we needed was good wifi to live a month in Arizona. And if we were going to spend four days of our healthy lives, just to sit in a car and listen to podcasts, you might as well stay.

As long as we could while we were there, the Southwest was calling me and I had to go. So one Friday morning at the end of February, our car was packed with all of our centrals, which included a weight set, audio equipment, and Sam and I headed west in this series. We'll be exploring the great American road trip.

We'll be making stops along the way, day in boutique hotels, swing into restaurants and explore the national wonders within our own borders. We will slowly tiptoe back into traveling. To feel the expansiveness of the open road and be reminded why we need to travel, but how to do it more safely.

I'm Adrien Behn.

And this is Strangers Abroad