That's like saying "Yeah, I've milked a goat." It's a unique experience, but there's not much to really say about it in a positive or negative way. (By the way, I really have milked a goat.)
I'll begin by talking about the core facts of the trip, i.e., what happened, when and where. And to help make this less confusing, I MADE A MAP FOR YOU GUYS.
...As my iTunes suddenly slaps me upside the head with "Two of Us" by The Beatles. I cannot express my feelings for this song right now, other than that I love my iTunes very much for picking the best possible song for my current situation, and I shall loop this song as I write this, much to the chagrin of anyone within earshot of the song. In fact, I invite you to listen to it as you read this blog about my adventures on the Great American Plains.
Anyway, the map.
We began our trip at 6 AM. Prior to the trip, I had not seen any of Colorado or Kansas on a map, so I completely lost my sense of direction as soon as we began going through Spanish Fork canyon. i didn't know why we were heading south, but I guess I got Colorado's position confused with Wyoming's. Yeah, I am NOT a Utah boy. I tried sleeping, but it was very off and on, and it plagued me for the remainder of the trip. We got breakfast in Green River, Utah, at the local Burger King. There was a large raven at the gas station that I wanted to take a picture of, but it flew away. I didn't attempt to take any more pictures for the remainder of the trip.
Having breakfast at that Burger King was the worst decision we made on that entire trip. I had a (fake)cheese/(fake)bacon/(fake)egg burrito and some hash browns with Minute Maid orange juice. Luckily, no one got sick enough to blow chunks for the entire trip, but given the circumstances of having fake eggs and orange juice in our systems mixed with all the changes in altitude, it was a small miracle. Seriously. We changed altitude by a thousand feet at least every hour. It left our entire family miserable for the rest of the day from the headaches it caused. The scenery was pretty, though. Many ski resorts all over. There was even a golf course that had turned its property into a long Nordic skiing trail. It looked like a lot of fun to use, and there were people sprinkled all over it, young and old. At one point on the road, there was a tunnel under a freakin' mountain. It was a long tunnel. We looked back after we left it, and people were skiing down the slopes of a mountain with a tunnel through it. Kinda surreal.
We reached Denver. I tossed out the idea to go explore downtown a bit, so we did. It was from this experience I realized, I don't want to live IN a city. Just near one. I'm totally scared to make eye contact with anyone there, or bumping into others. You know, movie scenarios where you get beat up in an alley. Maybe I just need some more city exposure, or I need to be there with the right people. Along our way around Denver, my dad pointed out places where he had spoken in the past for his work, where sports stadiums were...small tidbits like that.
At this point, the Rocky Mountains were miles behind us. You could still see them in the distance, but a haze obscured its geological definitions, so they were more shadows than actual mountains. Ahead of us were rolling yellow hills. Not as large as the hills I grew up around in El Dorado Hills, but they reminded me of them. But it's easy to say, I now know why they call this part of the United States the Great American Plains. Everything is so...PLAIN. You couldn't see very far because of the mixture of flat and hilled landscape. Compared to Utah, I felt incredibly near-sighted. It was discomforting, really.
We eventually made it to Parker, which is about an hour away from Denver. This was where my sister Kristen spent a small portion of her mission. We went out to eat at a restaurant called Boston's with a bunch of people from the singles ward Kristen used to serve in. We met an interesting guy there who liked to collect shoes. he owned over 300 pairs, and some sets were worth well over $1000. I forget most of the story about why he started collecting shoes, but I do remember, it was how he had found his real mother living in Korea (she was Korean), and she sent him shoes as gifts because that was about all she could afford or something. He was wearing Darth Vader shoes at the time. My brother liked them. Throughout the rest of the night, people came and went, hugging my sister and talking as the rest of my family ate dinner off to the side. "Come On Eileen" came on over the speakers at one point. That was probably the most important part I remember, other than that all my food had a similar, over-bearing taste, so I wasn't able to finish it.
We spent the night at Kristen's old mission home. The people there were very nice. We talked a bit with the sister missionaries living there (more like my sisters talked to them. I listened), and we went off to bed. I slept on an inflatable mattress int heir INCREDIBLY NICE THEATER ROOM with my little brother. I cannot express my complete loathing for sleeping in the same bed as my little brother. I have never been able to share a bed with that kid without having one of his cursed appendages completely flailing into my personal bubble. This time, he hit me in the face with his hand 3 times. Yet another sleepless night, only adding to the rest I lost from the car trip that morning.
For the record, high water pressure is a complete necessity to a nice shower. Guess what my shower did not have the following morning? At least it was hot...
Despite constant begging by my sister and my parents for the owners of the house to NOT make breakfast for us, they did anyway. They're very nice people. Unfortunately, guess what they made for us? BREAKFAST BURRITOS YAAAAAYY. The trauma from the previous morning's Burger Kingtastrophe still loomed in my stomach. I had half of a breakfast burrito. The orange juice they had was the real deal, so I had a couple cups of that just to drain the Crappily Maid out of my system. Man, I'm making funnies with proper nouns left and right.
We left on a very foggy morning, a motif that did not change the entire trip. Again, we woke up at 6 AM to make an appointment Kristen made with her Mission President in Colorado Springs. We were late because of gas troubles, but we still got to talk to him for a good hour and a half. he gave me very good mission advice (thanks to my dad asking for the advice in the first place); some things I already knew, and other things that I know will come in handy. I also scored some "incredibly hard-to-find missionary materials", according to my sister, which included a couple of DVDs and a missionary handbook. We said goodbye, and booked it to Kansas.
In fact, we booked it so hard, that my dad got pulled over. But I'll save that for later.
Ever since Denver, the houses had been becoming farther and farther apart. But once we left Colorado Springs, I could finally see that the place and location that inspired Courage the Cowardly Dog is in no way an exaggeration. In fact, they were lucky to even have a town that close by with all those commodities. I am literally saying we passed through a main street of a town at least every hour, and on top of that, there was little to no activity in these towns. Being the technology nerd I am, it was honestly my worst nightmare; existing in the middle of nowhere, disconnected from any top-of-the-line equipment, and little means for escape. The thought of living there makes me shudder. And by "there", I mean the Limbo between Colorado Springs and Garden City, which took us a good 5 hours to drive between.
A little girl Kristen had taught was being baptized at 4. Through strange events, my dad was going to baptize her. On the way to garden City, we taught him how to say the baptism prayer in Spanish, as well as the pronunciation. Hilarity did very much ensue.
The baptism took place, and there was a lunch afterwards celebrating my sister's return to Garden City. The food was all delicious, and was a definite rebound from the crap I'd been living on since the beginning of the trip. We spent the remainder of the day (for the most part) at the Carrera's house, a family my sister baptized after a series of miracles and such. They were incredibly nice. We played games, and it was fun to hear their broken English (since they were all Spanish, and my sister was called Spanish-speaking). The people that lived in the house were Jose (father), Ene (mother), Fernando (uncle), Emily (daughter), Bryan (son) and a couple of other people that were gone most of the time. Possibly another uncle and his wife.
That night, I slept in Bryan's room with my little brother (NOT in the same bed) and Fernando. It was a very strange night... Fernando kept asking me questions in his extremely broken English. I tried my best to understand, and we were able to communicate a little bit. At times all we could do was just say "Yeah" to things because we weren't exactly sure what the other had said. It was awkward, but there was a certain trust built.
Another foggy morning. I won't take too much time to detail all the events in Garden Springs (this blog post is already a mile long as it is), but it was an experience filled with a lot of smiles. I probably spoke an average of 50 words every hour. We attended church, where I kept quiet the entire time. We visited the homes of people my sister had converted. We returned to the Carrera's for a large feast of authentic real-deal Spanish food. As I type, my spit glands are reacting and my stomach is growling from the memory of how amazing it all was. Words cannot describe it, nor interpretive dance.
I went downstairs to watch some anime on my PSP that I had since there wasn't much else to do. Fernando came in after he had returned from his work at the local grocer. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small stick of Trident gum, and said in his broken English that his coworker had given it to him. Frankly, it is an experience I won't ever forget, especially after typing it here. It was a very friendly gesture. On top of that, it was the perfect ingredient to finish off all the bad smells protruding out of my mouth after the amazing feast I just had.
A few hours of watching anime, not-talking, and home videos later, I went to bed.
Not much to say here as well. Started the day off with a bowl of Fruit Loops. We said our goodbyes. The Carreras basically said "If you are a Staib, our home is open to you." We left Garden City at 6 AM on yet another foggy morning, with a few snowflakes. This time, I was finally able to sleep on the road.
News reports said that the mountains that we had gone through to get to Denver were closed from a snow storm, so we had to take the north route through Wyoming. We had lunch at Wendy's in Castlerock, Colorado. Castlerock is a wide, flat-topped rock in the middle of the city. That was pretty cool to see. We continued to drive. The roads home were constantly windy. I wasn't surprised to see the hundreds of gigantic windmills lining the horizon. We drove in and out of light blizzards. I tried to sleep a lot, but eventually stuck to playing Fire Emblem on my PSP. And then my battery ran out once we entered Utah, so I switched to Pokemon Black.
The sun was setting as we passed Park City and the ski jumping-slopes we had been to when the Olympics were held in Salt Lake. We came out of the canyon and into the valley as stars were first appearing, and the entire valley was glittering from the lights of homes, cars and businesses; it was truly a refreshing sight after seeing the bleak landscapes we had spent a few days in. We made it back home by 9 PM.
The biggest thing I came away with from this trip was just a sad realization. People always began conversations with me like:
"Blah blah blah So, you going on a mission?"
Yeah, my mission papers are in. Just waiting for the call.
"That's great! Maybe you'll be called here! We sure loved your sister!"
Yeah, that'd sure be interesting.
"lolololololol"
...That was basically every single conversation I had with anyone I spoke with. Because I am 19, I have this enormous label on my head that says "He is serving a mission soon." That, to them, was my existence. I am serving a mission soon. I did not have a past, or a future.
What a pitiful existence.
Sounds like an interesting trip, but still one that I would be glad to be done with.
ReplyDeleteI agree completely with your last point there. Really, what else is there to ask a nineteen-year-old who isn't in college and doesn't have a job? Gosh, I don't know. How about artistic pursuits?
I always feel really ashamed when I tell them that I haven't gotten my papers in yet. But a lot of the stuff I'm dealing with to get to that point is beyond my control and also a little bit beyond my understanding. I mostly refer to my dental issues.
But you know what? Getting pushed a little bit is nice. Not if it's too much, obviously (and talking to us about it like it's an absolute thing can be defined as "too much" in my book), but occasional reminders to not slip into complacency is nice. However... couldn't we propagate such prods amongst ourselves? Why all the outside pressure? What do they care? We have other stuff going on that's pretty important to us.