By Pablo Lock. Peninsula 360 Press [P360P]
I don't know when I started planning our trips and when they ended up being like this, so different, so unique, so ours. I think it was after the third or fourth trip or suddenly when I started to have that feeling that our vacations ended early as soon as we arrived at our destination.
What I am sure of is that our holidays began weeks before, from the moment I started planning. Long before the date I began to consider different options, although what I was doing was simply delaying our arrival at our destination. I took absurd, elliptical, senseless routes in order to delay our arrival.
Many times we went in the opposite direction to our destination, trying to cross that river where gold seekers used to camp, we detoured to see a sunset on that hidden beach or to cross that great national park we went away from the route.
The truth is that I was very happy on those trips where at the same time as I was driving I was telling them real or fictional stories, I was telling them about the books I had read, the movies I had seen and although my versions often did not resemble the originals, I managed to capture their attention and kept them captivated while they tried to guess the outcome.
And as we began to travel through valleys, cross deserts, climb peaks, and visit ghost towns, I announced my next story. And although my audience often disagreed with the twists and turns of the stories, and even less so with the endings, I never gave in to their requests to amend the plot.
And all those stories were of course accompanied by our background music. And of course, music was also part of the trip planning. I tried to select different types of music for each trip: pop, rock, boleros, some classical music, but the song that could not be missed was one that for some reason was always present, a nostalgic song that without saying much told us so much. An unmissable song without intending to. A song that perhaps evoked different things in us but that in the end united us.
That song revealed to me the reason for my trip, but not just one of my vacation trips, but the reason for my great trip, the reason for the trip of my life, the great trip that had changed the destiny of our lives, a trip that began 20 years ago, a trip with no return, whose destination we continued to build as we moved forward.
And now, listening to that song again, as the one my daughter chose for her graduation, I couldn't help but remember our trips, long for those moments, reminisce about “the trip” and feel again how good it was to be there, inside the car, driving, discovering destinations, telling stories, writing history.
For those who come to San Francisco
Summertime will be a love-in there…
San Carlos, August, 2020.
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