Edward on Tour

 Ikigai : the reason for which you wake up in the morning

found through this TED talk with Dan Buettner

I giggle every time someone accidently walks past the doors a little too closely.

But I mean it really snows at the Grand Canyon. I thought, you know, southern rim of the Grand Canyon in Arizona, it’ll be nice and warm so I’ll camp out. Awesome.
It was dark by the time I got to the campground and the campsite itself was covered in two feet of snow. Although I’ve never been camping by myself, I’ve got a decent general idea of how to go about setting up for a night, but I was not prepared for this.
There was a couple from Vancouver preparing space for their car and tent by kicking the snow away, so I tried doing the same at the neighboring campsite. We were the only people at the campground, kicking out space from two feet of snow first for our cars, then for our tents. My gloves were no match for the snowy five degrees, and I took several breaks in the car to rewarm and reevaluate. After two and a half hours, I had my tent propped behind my car, but couldn’t get it staked because the area I had cleaned was (or seemed to be) asphalt. I called Ariella. “It’s way too cold. Can you find me somewhere to stay tonight?" Thunderbird Lodge wasn’t too expensive and the reviews online say that it doesn’t get any closer, so I took my tent apart and shoved it into the back of my car. My room at the lodge was warm, and the next morning, when I came out to where I had parked, I realized that “doesn’t get any closer" meant I had spent the night two hundred feet from the canyon itself. The vast darkness—and possibly my mood—had hidden it from my view. At some point though, during my snow-clearing adventure, I looked up. The nearby sky was spray-painted and even the dimmer stars peeking out from behind the night outnumbered anything I’ve ever seen. Even my shivering foul facedness smiled.

I am traveling with more notebooks than I could possibly know what to do with. In one, a few weeks ago, I wrote that I was fighting the urge to be ready to hurry things along and go straight to Florida to be with my family. Now that I’m here with them, it’s nice to have been able to relax for the past week and let the past two months settle in my mind a little. I’ll post stories at random – either as I think of them or as I write them out.

So far, I’ve travelled over ten thousand miles.
Now, with over thirty six thousand miles on my leased car, I’m over miles, out of warranty, and over a thousand miles from home with a year and a half left on my lease.

Have I also mentioned that I don’t have a job to go back to?