I Quit My Job Then Drove 3,000 Miles to Clear My Head Episode #141

Aaron McHugh (00:00): Friends, Welcome To Work Life Play.

(00:05): I'm your host, Aaron McHugh. I'm here to help you find work you love, learn to play, Live Adventurously, Become Curious and live your life with joy and purpose. Ready, set, go.

(00:34): Broadcasting live from the narrows in Zion National Park. Just came through 'em and headed back down. Wanted to give you a quick live field report update. It's definitely worth the hike. It's just nice to get away from the parking lots and the crowds and for 40 bucks, rent some cold weather gear to stay mildly comfortable and see this ancient place that water carved Who knows how many hundreds of millions of years ago. Super rad. Highly recommend it. Come give it a try.

(01:44): Friends, how did you like that intro? It's kind of fun, huh? I'm back in my studio recording this live out of the field, out of our VW bus, and I thought I would share with you this adventure I just went on. So what you just heard on the intro there, was kind of a couple snippets of recordings that I did during the course of this 10-day 3000-mile VW bus, kind of this epic hall. And I didn't really know what I was getting into, so I just thought I'd go for it and see where it went. What I'd love to do in this episode is just walk you through this adventure as a way of invitation for you to go and find your own as well as repeat some of the highlights. So I've got a distilled set of lists that I'll go through with you and give you my favorites.

(02:44): Here's what I found, here's what I saw, and here's some story along the way. So instead of it being just a full-on riff about every story, I thought I would just give it to you in more of a field report guide trip style. So let me read you one of the things I wrote. I was at Doheny Beach and I had made it all the way to California. I left on a Sunday in our 1974 VW bus and traveled over the course of a few days (I'll walk you through what some of those days looked like) and arrived in California and when I got there, our bus wasn't running great and I needed a little love and I had spent probably four days just getting there, had met up with a friend of mine and

(03:38): He also has a bus and it's a 1973 West Follia and he got custom plates for California that say Joy bus on his as well. So there'll be some fun pictures you can check out in the show notes, but I had this low moment. And so here's what I wrote in this low moment, and then we'll go into some of the highs. So unfiltered, this moment was beautiful. I’m driving away, and this was leaving my friend Jake's house. I was wondering “what am I doing?” Not specifically, but really. I quit my job, I hopped in our bus and I hoped it would make it a thousand miles to meet a few friends, to see my dad, to pick up my brother at the airport, to drive to our childhood home in Bishop California. To meander our way back to Colorado via Blue Highways. Whiskey, fly fishing, Lord Huron, Johnny Cash, Jacko Pierce and God's wind at our back.

(04:37): Yes, that is the plan, loose as it feels timid, as it feels, audaciously bold as it feels. And we're not quite halfway. So I wanted to share that with you. And I think that's a great start of really what happened. A few weeks ago I resigned from a career that I've had for 13 years. And before I ramp up and start a new season, a new stretch of getting into work where I know it will occupy lots and lots of my attention and my energy and my effort. I wanted to just stop down and just do this thing I've dreamed about. The number of times that I've sat on airplanes, going to some business meeting somewhere, I thought, You know what? Those are the times I've dreamed about, Oh, wouldn't it be so cool? I'm reading an outside magazine at a time.

(05:29): Probably wouldn't it be so cool to hop into our bus? Wouldn't it be so cool to venture to this faraway place? Wouldn't it be so cool? And I thought “you know what, I'm faced with that.” I can actually go do that right now. I've got some time. I've got the blessing and favor from my wife and family to go do it. And we got this shot of weather in Colorado before things kind of go south and get really cold and snowy. Then I can kind of scoot out and go see my son and go see some of the national parks I wanted to see. So this moment when I was sitting there, I did have this drive away of “man, do I really know what I'm doing?” I can say now the report is just shy of 3000 miles, which is a really long way when you're driving a vehicle that was made in 1974 and its top speed on a downhill with the wind at your back is 75 miles an hour.

(06:23): So it was a lot of driving, especially in that short amount of time. So I definitely underestimated the endeavor, but I would absolutely do it again and shout out to my brother. And as you heard there in that intro one of the things that you heard at the very end was him singing, Well, I'll tell you one of my favorite moments, as I get to this list of favorites. He and I put on our first-ever live show, which is kind of fun. So let me just tell you about this trip and I'll start with a list of my favorites. So just like if you were reading an article.

(07:06): Well, let me tell you a list of my favorites. So my favorite camp spot that I found in these 10 days, I spent one of them indoors and the rest of 'em we were out staying at our bus. My favorite campground was actually in Barstow California, which is in the middle of the desert. It's really not fancy, it's not sexy, and it's not cool. I actually even mentioned to a couple of people I stayed in Barstow and they were like, Oh, I'm sorry I had to do that. It's right in the Mojave Desert. And I found this Sawtooth campground, which is like 17 miles outside of town. So I got there, pulled over, got some Starbucks, actually ate some dinner there, borrowed some wifi, and then hopped in the car, found this campground, and meandered my way out there.

(07:57): There was one other person there. It was so incredible. The sunrise was so incredible. You'll have to check out these pictures. So for all of these spots and all these highlights, you'll want to check out these show notes for this podcast because I'll include all the photography in it. One another additional introduction that I'll make is if you haven't checked out my Instagram account, it's Aaron D Mchuth at Instagram or at Aaron d McHugh. I think I spent a lot of time kind of curating shots and I wouldn't even necessarily consider myself a photographer so much as I just see and experience some really cool things. And so I spent a lot of time throwing stuff up. So I may not make it into a post.

(08:50): It's much easier to just throw it up on Instagram. So you can definitely check it out there. All of these favorites that I'll outline for you will come with, a photography piece to accompany it. So my favorite sunrise was in Bishop California and Bishop is in the Eastern Sierra Nevadas. And, it's basically four hours from everywhere. It's four hours from Vegas, it's four hours from LA, it's four hours from Reno, It's four hours from Yosemite National Park, but it also means it's four hours to anything else. And it's just a lot of desert. Now for any of you that are into outdoor endeavors and climbing or fourteeners and climbing mountains or big trails like the John Muir Trail, which intersects or terminates right at Mount Whitney. And Mount Whitney is in Loan Pine, which is about an hour from Bishop.

(09:51): I'd say the closest like Mark or Mammoth Mountain is like 30, 45 minutes away. The mammoth ski area, is about the same. And then Death Valley National Park is about an hour and a half away too. But in terms of the city, there's not much there. We woke up in the morning and my brother joined me, he flew into Orange County, and then we road trip there. It was our childhood home. And so we slept out by the Owens River and woke up to these amazing snow-capped high Eastern peaks of the Sierras and it was really fabulous. I hadn't been there in 19 years, so that was definitely a really high moment. Let me tell you about the kindest human that I met. This guy's name is Norm.

(10:44): Norm, for 40-plus years has been running Mesa West in Costa Mesa and it is a German auto VW repair shop. So I rolled into town there on the west coast on the ocean and our bus was just kind of running hot and high and the throttle was sticking and all this. And I'm like, I gotta get some help cuz this is probably above my pay grade here. So I called and I said, Hey, this is my story. I just rode in town, just drove a thousand miles, can you help me out? He's like, Yeah, I got a two-week waiting list, but if you get over here in the next few minutes, I'll see what I can do. It sounds simple. So I cruise over and they moved buses out of the way, they moved vehicles.

(11:34): They made it happen and spent about an hour and a half working with me on our bus to get it good enough to get on down the road. In this conversation that I had with Norm, I said, Hey, how long have you been doing this? You know, thanks so much. And he just said, You know what I feel for people like you, you're rolling through town, you're on vacation, you're not from here, you're trying to get somewhere else. And if I were you, I would want the generosity of people if I if it was in your position. So that's why I'm extending it to you. So shout out Norm, Thank you. Bless you. All right. The best most adventurous hike that I experienced was in Zion National Park in Zion National Park is in the southwestern corner of Utah.

(12:23): Utah has five national parks, that's really unusual, and you hear me talk a lot about national parks and I'm just kind of a geek for 'em because they're these protected sacred places that are wild and rugged and we have a tremendous amount of them here in the west. So I tend to visit a lot of them and have this punch list of ones that I have visited and have this kind of loosely held goal. Can't say I have like added 'em all up on paper, but would love to visit all of them here in North America. So I visited Zion National Park for the first time and there's a famous hike called The Narrows. And on the intro audio you heard I was in the narrows and did this like, “hey, I'm at a broadcast live from the Narrows.”

(13:09): So I fired up my actual GoPro is what I did it with. And what I experienced was, first of all, it's a hike in the river, and I don't mean a hike alongside the river. I mean you get in the river and you hike up river through a canyon, a steep-walled canyon where it's 1500 to 2000 foot vertical walls on either side of you. And what is the narrows is the section that's higher up that you hike to, let's say it's a couple of miles. And once you intersect the section of the narrows, the canyon walls tighten and constrict down to about 15 feet wide. It's really cool while you're standing in a river. So it's very prone to flash floods. It's very prone to run off all kinds of times of the year where it can actually be dangerous.

(14:04): Well, this time of the year there's very little rain coming in. There is a low risk of flash floods and there's no snow melt and the snow hasn't really started coming yet. So it was incredible. I went and rented some gear at an adventure guide service that was just around the corner and they were phenomenal. I'll put the information about them and the show notes as well and probably spent four to six hours doing this hike, taking pictures. And what's really cool too is you actually start in the river, then all of a sudden there are crowds of people along the river trail for the first mile before you actually begin the hike inside of the river. But as soon as you get in the river, it is sparse of people. I mean, there are definitely a dozen people out there, but you're spaced out where you almost don't even see each other around.

(14:55): And there's so much bend and turn to this. So highly recommend the narrows in Zion. My favorite stretch of Epic Road was in Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument. It's between Bryce Canyon National Park and Zion National Park. So it was the stretch of road that I drove to get from Bryce to Zion and it was by far one of the most isolated stretches of road that we were on in this 3000-mile tour. So picture this grand staircase, the reason it's named this is you basically feel like you're in a dinosaur boneyard. That every mound is these huge globs of mountainous size, dome-y rock that you can tell at one time was all the bottom of a riverbed. Cause it has all this line structure to it and what looks like layers of all the sediment layers and settling and arches and waco's and hollows.

(16:13): And it was rad. So I drove the stretcher road where it's like a spine is what I would call it, and it is not much wider than the road is, but on either side is a thousand foot, 800 foot, 1500 foot drop off. So it's a canyon on both sides. So on the left side, you're looking out the window and it drops off and this gnarly, crazy, endless landscape as far as your eye can see. And then on the right-hand side, it's exactly the same while you're driving this spine of road that ebbs and flows, and whoops, it was mind-boggling. So I laughed to myself. One of the stretches of road I threw up on Instagram was me laughing while I'm driving and it was just joy. It was just sheer joy.

(17:05): So definitely highly advised, to repeat that stretch of road in a vehicle. A buddy of mine did a similar stretch of Utah Road on his motorcycle. And he and I were comparing notes and I'm pretty sure that his highlight was the same stretch of road that mine is to. An impromptu plugged, unplugged guitar acoustic set in Santa Fe would be my proudest moment. Last night, my brother and I, we'd made it all the way back to Santa Fe. We're pushing two hundred and two twenty-six hundred miles by this point. So we're on our home stretch, 300 or 400 miles left. And we pull into town into Old Town Santa Fe. And if you've been there, it has these really massive old alacia, this church, and then this quad next to it. And then all these really cute shops. I don't know how long they’ve been there, but definitely let's say late 1800 or early 18 hundreds maybe late 17 hundreds.

(18:07): So r really cool feeling vibe while there was this homeless guy playing guitar and a gal he was with. And I told my brother, I'm like, Dude, we could do this. We're just as good as they are. Let's go give it a try. So we went and first found a watering hole and had a beer and just kind of washed off some of the road and then just got our game on and said, Dude, come on. Let's go back to the bus. Let's grab our guitars and let's do it. So we did, and it also, I think made it up onto the Instagram account. So we fired up the guitars and made some impromptu signs and just did a couple of riffs and played through three or four songs that we knew whether together or individually and made our first dollar in tips.

(18:51): So it was super rad and it was just fun. It was just sheer fun. Definitely the proudest moment of the trip. An unplanned, unexpected highlight was sleeping on my son Holden's couch. He lives in Costa Mesa. And what was really cool is I've never stayed at my son's place before. We've been out to California a lot and we sleep in hotels together or he's at our home or you know, we meet at someone else's. But his homes have never necessarily been great for accommodating guests. Well, he and his buddy, his roommate invited me to stay. And so I'm like, Yeah, you know what, I will, I'd love to sleep in our bus. I love to do that, but yeah, you know, I would love to stay at your place.

(19:43): So just going to sleep, waking up, and just realizing, you know what, this is my son's like, he paid for every nickel of this. He is self-supporting and on his own and making his own way in the world, and he made room for me. And it was really cool. It was definitely a highlight moment for me. So fellow travelers that we met along the way, we met three different sets of folks and they're all individually worth notating, but I think my favorite one of the three was we were in Death Valley National Park and Death Valley is the hottest place in North America. High temperatures in the summer range around 140 degrees and it has a section of it that is at sea level and then below sea level. So the below sea level part gets down to like 267 feet below sea level.

(20:41): Well, why is that unusual? Well, it's in the mountains. It's not supposed to be below sea level or even at sea level. So the fact that basically the deepest part, it used to be a lake, and now it's just a dried basin. Well, this is some really out-there place. It is hundreds of miles wide, 150, 200 miles wide by 200 miles long inside the national park. And this place has been habited after the Native American Indians. Then when the white guys showed up sometime in the 1920s, they were doing gold mining, and eventually, if you've ever heard of Borax, it's like a comet-type cleaner. They started mining what became Borax out of the stretches of Death Valley. So this is a really rugged, hot place, really far from everywhere.

(21:50): Well, a VW bus that was made in the 1970s that's air-cooled, is not the most conducive vehicle, especially in the hot temperatures of the summer. But even this time of year, luckily there are cool mornings, but you can cruise through. Well, we ran into another bus and this guy in his family Noli, Yvonne Dra, and Kira I think is how I'm saying it, they're from Spain and they were in a 1976-ish, yellow VW bus. And they have been here in the States for a while traveling between Alaska, Canada, Mexico, and the rest of the west. And they were really cool folks. So we got pictures with them, pictures with our bus, with their bus chit-chatted, and then I looked up their Instagram account so you could check them out, and looks like they're maybe even still in Death Valley hanging out.

(22:42): One of the things that they told us was they had seen a handful of other VW buses along their trip and they said, of the eight of them, which ours was included in that number, six of them were being towed. So only two of 'em were actually running and operating. I am proud to say that our bus was proudly operating, as was theirs. So definitely check them out. A transcendent moment I wanna share with you. And what I mean by transcendent is that it rises above, it transcended, it went beyond, it went deeper than it went bigger than the specifics where my brother and I have not visited together, Our childhood home of Bishop California since he was six years old and I was nine, so we're both into our forties, so quite some time. So this is the first time we'd been back in our hood and went and retraced these steps of where we grew up, where we came from, what our life was about, what we were up to.

(23:48): Met with some family friends, and had dinner with them in two different sets. Went to the place where I worked in college, which is owned by one of these family friends, it's called Cardinal Village Resort. I'll put this in the show notes as well. And it's an 8500-9,000 feet old mining camp, turned fishing lodge, turned family heritage experience. And so I worked there about 19 years ago when I was in college or actually longer ago than that, I guess that was the last time I visited. And my brother and I checked at all these places. The trailer park we grew up in as kids, the elementary school. We went to all these places and it was really cool for him and me because it really helped us remember what we love, why we love it, and why it was a big deal.

(24:48): Okay, a couple more. The quirkiest, Find along the way. We went to the Petrified National Forest, which is in Holbrooke, Arizona, and I highly recommend going. It was, I think my fifth national park of the trip in total, highly recommend checking out the park. It's super rad. But in town what was really cool and quirky and worth checking out is the wig Warm motel. Yes, you can sleep in a teepee, that's the gig. So this Wigwam Hotel was started, first there was a chain of 'em It looks like. I did some research on them and this one was the last of eight in different cities throughout the country. It's fixed on the famous Route 66 highway. It's about 70 bucks a night for two people and it's really cool.

(25:51): So picture the Cartoon movie Cars with Lightning McQueen and all those characters.it's a great movie. And picture the Cozy Cone. that's the name of the hotel in Radiator Springs in the movie Cars. I am telling you this Wigwam Hotel is straight out of cars the movie, they must have sent their guys there and were like, you should go check this out. So the Wigwam Hotel slash Cozy Cone motel really cool, talk about a highlight of the American West and of the classic Route 66 era, the 1950s sleep in a teepee. We had a bus, so we didn't sleep in it, but it's on my list for the time that we go back and check it out. All right, let me give you a quote that was just fun.

(26:49): My favorite quote from our trip. So we were asking a guy in Bishop California where to buy a fishing license. We wanted to go fly fishing that afternoon on the Owens River. And his response just made us crack up and laugh to ourselves after we left, he said, Well,, you know East Line Street? Yep. He goes, All right, well just drive outta town and look for the big chicken . We're like, What? The big chicken? What do you mean? He's like, Yeah, did you see it? I'm like, Yeah, I saw it. What is it? He goes like, Well, they have a printer there, this is Small Town usa. You can print out your fishing license there. So just go Outta Town East Line and look for the Big Chicken Boy only in the West.

(27:32): That's what I have to say about that. All right a couple of last finals here. Our favorite soundtrack moments. Let me give you a couple. I can't be satisfied by Muddy Waters. Oh my gosh, I just listened to it again. Seriously, gnarly, cool. The late 1950s, sixties cut rendition of it, The Muppet movie, 1979, The Kermit The Frog, and Fozy The Bear Singing a movie right along. that was a throwback for us from my brother and I's era when we lived there in Bishops. That was fun. We listened to Sun House in the Death Letter Blues, so definitely some blues themes here. Chocolate Jesus by Tom Waits. Whoa, that was really good. He appeared on Letterman. It's been watched like 9 million times. So really cool. Then Mississippi John Hurt. You got to walk that Lonesome Valley. Some really solid tunes there, and those are worth throwing in your Next Road Trip soundtrack list.

(28:40): All right, so for Curiosity Starters, Wild, Some Desert Southwest Field Guide. So I have it sitting here on my desk. I've used it now a couple of times and I keep pulling it out. I'm gonna get ahold of these guys and have them as podcast guests cuz I'm really curious about how they roll and why they roll and why they do it this way. But it's basically, maybe if you use some slang, you would say it's like the Hipster's guide, but what I like about it is I don't think that's actually entirely fair because it's, it's really kind of a throwback. So it says “Praise for wild, some for tireless seekers of the, of the authentic, the Wild Street Journal, charmingly throwback, National Geographic Traveler.” So it has this type set that looks like something that came straight off of a typewriter.

(29:32): It's really cool. It has all these desert Southwest destinations. And in the opening, what it says is people don't take trips. Trips take people. John Steinbeck, the writer who first inspired Wild Sum, wrote those words in the American Epic travels with Charlie, another great book. They capture the core belief of the book. You now hold in your hands that unforgettable experiences are born from the unexpected and road trips, most especially beg the traveler to write plans and pencil and trace routes on the fly. Made the stories in these pages stoke this kind of adventure. My kind of people friends, I hope you've enjoyed my recap for you, my field guide invitation into our 3000-mile wandering. And I'm gonna leave you with one big idea that in all of this time behind the wheel, this windshield time that I thought about was what's right about my life? And I spent some time thinking about it and thinking about, you know, what's been right about my life? And I wanna leave you with this question for you. What's been right about your life? And when I realized for me, that what has been right about my life all along, starting when we were in Bishop California, was that I've always lived well. And that this trip reminded me and reminded my soul about what's right, about my life, what has and always has been right and well and adventurous about my life.

(31:20): I wonder if you asked yourself the same question, what would you find? What has been right about your life consistently? It's just in the DNA of the story that you live every day and it's easy maybe to forget. But I can tell you in this 3000-mile Sojourner's journey gave me a lot of time to reflect and think about what has been right with my life. And I am celebrating what is right about my life. I hope you'll do the same friends you can do this. It's out there. It's waiting for you. Adventure is waiting to be had for the bold and the adventurous, for the audacious, for the daring, for the curious, soulful questions. It happens. Keep going.

(32:18): You've been listening to Work Life Play. If you like what you've heard, please do us a favor and rate us on iTunes. It really does help. You can get more information about this and other episodes at aaronmchugh.com. Thanks for listening. Thanks for being part of this adventure, for being part of braving the pioneering work of discovering sustainable work life. Play rhythms, love your work, live your life, and play a whole lot more. I'm Aaron McHugh. Keep going.

*We’ve done our best for this transcription to accurately reflect the conversation. Errors are possible. Thank you for your patience and grace if you find errors that our team missed.