Road Trip

Rish has been asking to go on a road trip for a long time. We always have a great time, driving, talking, podcasting, and I suppose even visiting some place at the end of all that driving.

Rish has been looking for something that we'd both enjoy like a Sting concert, or a Louis CK standup, or the traveling version of the Broadway musical Cats, but we just never found anything that would work.

He finally gave up, and said we could go to something that he would hate and only I would enjoy. I finally won. Immediately, I worked it out that we could take the drive out to a National Park for a hike. I went to Arches one time with my family last year, but the one thing we didn't do was hike to the Delicate Arch. It's the most iconic arch in the park, and we didn't see it. Instead, we made the mistake of going to the lookout point. At the lookout point, the Delicate Arch looked like this:

In case you're having a hard time seeing it, maybe this will help:

Yeah, a little less than spectacular. Especially considering that in every picture I've ever seen of it, it looks more like this:

Well, I wanted to go back and do the actual hike that gets you close. So, I dragged Rish along for the ride. He was glad to go on the ride, because we podcast the entire way. But I don't know how glad he was to go on the hike.

It took us about four hours to get there, and we podcast about a bunch of things. Several episodes of That Gets My Goat, including one that has a sort of big announcement in it. Then we arrived:

We drove straight to the Delicate Arch trail, podcasting the whole way, and then we hit the trail. First we stopped in at the bathrooms, because it was going to be a long hike. Somehow Rish didn't notice this sign in the stalls:

I'd hate to know just what kinds of things were going on in those toilets for them to have to create a sign like that. "DO NOT use the floor. Use the toilet." WTF? I feel bad for the guy who kept having to clean that shit up, until it got to the point that he said, "You know, we should make a sign that tells people not to shit on the floor. Maybe that will make them stop."

Anyway, we hit the trail. It didn't take long until I was huffing and puffing, and Rish was making fun of my extreme out-of-shape state. It was quite a hike though. You got about a hundred yards of flat ground and then it was a steep incline from there on out. This picture is from about the halfway point:

If you look close, you can see the parking lot way off in the distance. I'll admit that I had to take a few breaks along the way. Sometimes it got hard to follow the trail, because, as you can see, it was a lot of bare rock we were walking on. We discovered that in parks like this, though, they mark the trail by making stacks of rocks called cairns. One time we were lost, but then we found some cairns to help us along our way:

It was really hot out there, and it's barely April. They recommend that you take a gallon of water per person on the hike, to be sure that you don't get dehydrated. I saw a couple of guys doing it the low-budget way, each of them carrying a gallon-sized milk jug filled with water in their hands. No wasteful expensive backpacks or water bottles for them. Of course, I probably should have taken their example. Eventually, we got thristy, and had to resort to whatever means of sustenance we could find:

At last, however, we made it:

Rish said it was nice and all, but he just wanted to check out the attractive female hikers that had taken the trail along with us. The arch didn't interest him all that much. And I suppose I could see his point, but I also liked the arch too.

We struggled our way back to the car, and then drove home, podcasting for a little of the trip as well. We got involved enough in our podcast that we missed our turn, and had to drive several miles out of our way to turn around. Then several miles further along, we realized that if we didn't turn back and go to the town that we had just passed that we were going to run out of gas in the middle of friggin' nowhere. My gas gauge was lower than it had ever been before in this car.

Eventually, we got home, and then I still had to write my 1,000 words. It was the second day of April, and I totally failed and fulfilling my goal of writing my words before 11:00 PM. I didn't even get home until after 11:00 PM, so I really had no chance. But I did 1,021 words in before going to bed.

I had a lot of fun, and I hope Rish did as well. And I hope you guys enjoy the podcasts that come from it. Get ready for some That Gets My Goat On The Go episodes coming your way soon!