Pandemic Road Trip: To Stay or to Go?

The statement rang out from the back seat, as our car sped along somewhere in the middle of a New Mexico desert.

“Nobody look at me,” a young voice said. “I’m going to pee in this bottle.”

Welcome to a road trip with the Wicks.

Let me apologize for the phone calls and emails that went unreturned over the past couple of weeks. I was out of the office on a vacation.

With coronavirus cases exploding here in Fayette County, my wife, I and our four kids fled to the most remote place we could think of – Wyoming, a state that has fewer total COVID cases than the new ones Texas has daily before lunch.

We really did drive 3,800 miles round trip to Wyoming earlier this month, but it was not to get away from the coronavirus. I’d actually made our first reservations for a summer trip at Yellowstone National Park way back in February, before most of us had even heard of coronavirus.

Turns out such advanced planning was a waste.

Our reservation at the Old Faithful Lodge was cancelled by the park months later as the pandemic spread and the lodge closed.

So too was a park ranger led tour of Native American cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde National Park we had planned on the way up there.

We scrambled to make other arrangements.

But a few days before we left on July 1, when we got word that all New Mexico State Parks were going to be closed (thus cancelling the reservation we had to camp in a yurt at a park near Santa Fe) I started to think maybe we should just cancel this trip altogether.

Stay home, stay safe, as they say.

Boy I was glad we did not.

For each roadblock, we found other arrangements.

The cancelled yurt reservation turned instead into a night of camping in a beautiful Ponderosa pine forest a short hike from Jemez Falls in the Santa Fe National Forest.

The cancelled Mesa Verde excursion turned instead into a selfguided tour through some Pueblo Native American ruins, a stunning sunset visit to Arches National Park, scrambling all over crazy red rock formations, and a night in Moab, Utah.

We were going to watch the famous hillside fireworks display on July 4 in Park City, Utah. They cancelled that show, but in nearby Midway, Utah we watched from the base of the Wasatch Mountains, looking down and enjoying as several smaller communities held fireworks displays in the valley below.

The cancelled stay at Old Faithful Lodge turned instead into a night of tent camping near Lake Yellowstone, where we awoke to 39 degree temperatures (an exhilarating departure from Texas heat) and a elk and her baby walking near our campsite.

At the top of Mammoth Hot Springs a couple from Texas recognized my ‘SHSU’ pullover as being from Sam Houston State University. We jumped into icy lakes in the Grand Tetons and at the gateway to Rocky Mountain National Park.

Social distancing is pretty easy to do in our country’s expansive national parks.

We explored geyser basins, and hot springs and mountain vistas, sometime with very few people around.

But that’s not to say everywhere we went was devoid of people.

We joined hundreds of other (mostly) mask-wearing people crowded around Old Faithful geyser waiting for it’s scheduled eruption. What an amazing thing, I thought at the time, a crowd of people watching a performance – not by a celebrity or athletes – but by Mother Nature.

And it was incredibly beautiful, the water bursting several stories into the sky and flying off in whisps like the world’s tallest spider web.

On our way back south we went through the Rockies, driving along a highway two miles above sea level and playing in snow (in July!) that was still hanging around from the winter.

The drive was long, but made easier by some video tapes and audio books courtesy of the Fayette Public Library.

Of course the antics of our kids – a 16-year-old girl and boys 10, 8 and 5 – kept things lively too.

And yes, unfortunately, that whole peeing in a bottle thing was all too true. And there was a sequel.

We masked up before going into gas station restrooms (and most any other public places) and doused on the hand sanitizer after getting back in the car. We tried our best to keep our distance from folks, but as we were driving out of the south entrance to Yellowstone I realized we had not taken a picture holding The Fayette County Record yet (a trip requirement for any faithful subscriber).

We got out by the big “Welcome to Yellowstone” sign. There were a few other people around, but I was not going to ask someone to take our picture. That’s just not something you can do anymore. I was just going to take a picture of my wife and kids by the sign.

A college-aged guy walked up and offered to take a picture of all six of us.

I paused half a second and handed him my phone. He snapped a couple of shots and then he asked if I could do the same for him and his buddy with his phone.

“Sure,” I replied.

Sometimes social distancing only works if you are willing to be antisocial. But I wasn’t willing to draw that line. Not then. Not there.

Those two guys were coming into the park, and I could see the anticipation on their faces. I knew every expectation they had was going to be exceeded, as it had for us.

With so many reasons not to, we made the roadtrip of a lifetime amidst a pandemic.

Would it have been safer to stay home?

It’s always safer to stay home.

But it sure is a lot less fun.