My plan was to divide into comfortable chunks the drive from the campground in Joshua Tree, where I had just spent about a week, to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon.
Joshua Tree to Lake Havasu City, then to Flagstaff, and from there to the canyon. I had researched where I could spend the night near the canyon to give me a full day to appreciate its magnificence.
But man plans and god laughs, it is said, and she had a good chuckle over my plans. When I read about a group of nomads, travelers affiliated with the Homes on Wheels Alliance, planning to hang out for two weeks in late October on BLM land near Moab, it changed everything.
It has been one of my dreams to spend significant time with fellow nomads. So I scrapped the Grand Canyon route for now, knowing I can always double back and catch it, and I mapped my route to Moab.
My first stop was a BLM campsite, where I stayed at one end of a rutted and bumpy dirt road because it was dark and I had no energy left for driving. The next day, I drove to an REI store in Prescott, Arizona, to scout some warmer sleeping gear, and then drove to another REI in Flagstaff, where they sold me just what I need for the upcoming colder weather. (Even in October, overnight temperatures in the desert can drop into the 40s, and I still plan to be back in New England for the holidays.)
From Flagstaff, I headed north toward Moab, with my first target being a town called Oljato, where I gathered there was an RV park of some sort called Goulding’s.
Well, Goulding’s turns out to be a sprawling campground and RV park and inn and lodge and rental cabins and restaurant and camp store and showers and restrooms and almost anything else you can think of for staying the night or filling your belly.
I arrived at Goulding’s in the dark on Saturday, taking a location with no hookups — no water or sewer lines, no electricity to charge my house batteries. And I went to sleep.
In the morning, it was drizzling on and off, first just a few drops on the windshield and soon heavy rain pelting the glass, and then nothing, as it can only manage in the desert with localized storms you can see approaching and then quickly pass over.
As I pulled out of Goulding’s in the light, I saw what I had been unable to see in the dark the night before: massive sandstone buttes, mesas, and towers, some rising seemingly thousands of feet from the desert floor — great red behemoths that had been carved over millennia by wind and water into shapes as beautiful and exotic as anything the desert has to offer.
I was driving through Monument Valley, on the Arizona-Utah border and sacred to the Navajo, on whose land it all sits — on display and looking fine.
And it was like this for miles: towers and shapes carved by time and nature, and my windshield being pelted by rain — at first just a few strong drops, and then a cloud full, and then nothing again. The highway is two lanes of opposing traffic separated only by a yellow line — with a speed limit of sixty-five. Every so often there are paved “scenic turnouts” at the side off the road that can be filled with two or three vehicles and people snapping photos of the stone objects, despite the occasional rain.
And finally, there is a single sign marking “Forrest Gump Hill” — the long iconic uphill that Forrest ran in the film of the same name. There, tourists and movie buffs wait for the traffic to clear, and then are photographed or filmed posing on the same hill.
“Run, Forrest, run!”
