Hiking is fun, but hiking with a park ranger is a flipping bad ass adventure! Without my friend, we would have hiked around the park following designated trails and such, seeing the sites but never going deep in the canyons. With my friend, we were opened up to a whole new world of Ancient Puebloans architecture and petroglyphs.

When I woke up in Santa Fe, I gazed out our hotel window on the desert scenery and watched the sun heat the earth. It was a soft blue morning and I could feel Santa Fe’s unique peaceful energy.

I’d been on the phone with the receptionist earlier in the evening inquiring about lodging. There was a wedding in town and everything was booked but we could pay the $10 service fee and sleep on the property using their amenities. We hadn’t packed a tent for this road trip, so we decided to just sleep in our car in the El Cosmico parking lot.

New Orleans haunts me. My experience there was good, yet I feel my time there is unresolved. I left a piece of me in New Orleans, and I want to return in order to explore and understand the city better. New Orleans is a living breathing city, it possesses a strong spirit.

Spectre is in the center of this private peninsula and once we spotted the church steeple,  Dan and I pulled over and got out to walk around the dilapidated set. We didn’t go inside any of the building as there was a lot of overgrown plants and honestly, I was chicken, afraid of getting hurt. But still I was just thrilled to say I had made a stop in Spectre.

Our road trip had already been steeped in music history, having gone to the Grand Ol Opry in Nashville and Muscle Shoals in Alabama, so it’s to be expected we hit up Athens, GA as well (or at least that’s what Bowerbird felt). The day we visited Athens, we grabbed an awesome breakfast in Atlanta at the Rosebud café. When we picked the restaurant it was unbeknownst to us that the owner, Ron Eyester, was a contestant on Top Chef Season 12. 

I love to share my life, my story, and selfishly (as long as the internet doesn't crash) in the future I get to look back at all this documentation of my life and just smile! Dementia isn't an urban legend, especially in my family, so how wonderful would it be to have a collection of stories for my brain to return too. Reference points to jog a lost thought back into place.