Road Trip Magic

Sunset light pierced my left ear, the full harvest moon, my right. Above me, orange blankets folded over my wet eyes as we headed north on I-29 out of Sioux Falls, South Dakota. I rode the rush of coincidences that are too much coincidence, and never would have happened if a lot of inconvenient things hadn’t happened first.

The sun and moon held my mind in place on the surface of the rotating ball we call earth. I could feel it rotating, feel its gravity shift and twirl as the stars faded from my eyes. It was pure luck and blessing. Pure secret earth magic. God’s voice.

However; the replacement windshield wipers that wouldn’t go on right, and made us late for everything, were pure works of a devil’s hand. Or so I thought.

Sometimes the winning lottery ticket is found behind a shady gas station counter.

I get these bricks of ideas in my heart and I start laying them out in pretty patterns. Then I expect my destined path to take a long leisurely stroll down that ragged pathway, revealing the secrets of the universe. But reality takes a bulldozer to the perfect designs I have made for myself and rips out every brick I ever laid down.

Tonight, I am in Glacier National Park. We started this morning with eight hours left on our trip. Somehow those eight hours turned into fourteen hours. It might have something to do with the tire change in Billings. Or showers at Eddie’s Corner. Or taking drone footage of the car in the early morning sunlight.

Or pulling off at JD’s II Wildlife Refuge and Bar to eat homemade crunch wraps and Snickers while twenty Hutterite women filled the small room to order a wild mixed drink called a Caesar.

As soon as we got into Glacier we saw three moose. A mother and two babies.

Sometimes we win the lottery.

This will be short. We are going to go find a place in the twenty nine degree weather to get some pictures of the sunrise and contemplate existence, non-existence, and all thats in between. And when things don’t go my way today I’m going to remind myself that Road Trip Magic is bound to happen.

Enjoy some shots from our trip.