And just like that, 5 Days of Blogging week has come to an end! I hope you’ve all enjoyed it! It’s been very exciting for me, personally. I’ve been itching to blog again for a while now, and finally getting back at it has been a dream.
Starting next week, I will be committing to post once a week, so keep an eye out for something new every Monday! Until then, please enjoy these wonderful desert landscapes.
The most beautiful desert drive I have ever experienced.
After an overnight road trip and a whirlwind reunion (click here to read that blog post), we loaded up our little Ford Fiesta and drove off into the Utah desert. Will grew up surrounded by some of the most beautiful landscapes most of us only dream about. Naturally, our first stop for photos at a look out was maybe only an hour after we left his mom’s house.
Personally, it’s my dream to see the Grand Canyon. Well… not just SEE it, but hike it, and explore it, and photograph it, and kayak through it. I want to be a proper adventurer through the Grand Canyon. And friends, it is going to happen at some point during these next few months. I can feel it in my bones.
As we left Utah and headed for Arizona, the desert forest and mountains rose around us. It smelled like camping. Like that southern California, Sierra Nevadas kind of camping. With the pine trees of the desert, not the pine trees of the Carolinas. They have reddish bark and are spread out with little to no bracken and brush to surround them. They remind me of the red woods of northern California, or the dryness of Spooner Lake in Nevada.
We passed by the northern rim of the Grand Canyon and we resisted. We watched a tour bus full of people pull into a restaurant. We saw 4Runners with dogs and hikers, with kayaks on their racks. And we didn’t go the 45 minutes out of our way to glimpse it.
We did, however, stop several more times within the next couple hours because the views were. just. stunning.
We rounded this corner and the trees went away, and the desert rocks and brush rose around us, and then there were these views of red rock and desert plains that went off into the distance. I’ll tell ya, I have lived in super green places like Oregon and British Columbia and North Carolina, where you think that this must be the definition of beautiful. But the desert is something else. I’ve never seen so many shades of orange, and red, and yellow, and brown. It is breathtaking.
At this point in the drive, we decided that we needed to stop stopping everywhere. Because we could have stopped every single mile, the landscape was just that incredible. It didn’t help that just a few miles later we drove over a canyon and a river.
I could have stared at this river for ages. We had barely made it into Arizona at this point and still had to drive almost all the way to Mexico. So we took a few quick shots, and then reluctantly got back on the road.
As we neared Tucson later that evening, we encountered a crazy storm. It was so exciting! The wind picked up and rocked the car. It whipped the sand and created great clouds along the ground. The skies got dark and in the distance we watched the most amazing lightning storm we’ve ever seen as it grew nearer and nearer.
It eventually turned into a torrential downpour and the flash flooding was real.
We passed through the storm and made it home after about ten hours of driving, grateful for an amazing weekend, a road trip for the books, and ready to crash and sleep immediately.
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If you enjoyed blogging week and those lighting pictures, please give this post a like and leave me a comment to let me know what you want to see next! Don’t forget to subscribe if you haven’t already and I’ll talk to you on Monday!
Until next time,
Jamie out
WamiesWorld 