By Pablo Lock. Peninsula 360 Press [P360P].
I don't know at what moment we started planning our trips and that finally they are like that, so different, so particular, so ours. I think it was after the third or fourth trip or all of a sudden 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 vacations started weeks before, from the moment I started planning. Long before the date, I would start to shuffle through different options, although what I was doing was simply delaying our arrival at our destination. I would take absurd, elliptical, meaningless routes in order to delay our arrival.
Many times we went in the opposite direction to our destination trying to pass by that river where the gold prospectors used to camp, we went out of our way to see a sunset in that hidden beach or to cross that great national park we went off the road.
The truth is that I was very happy on those trips where at the same time I was driving I was telling them real or fictional stories, I was telling them about books I had read, 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, go through ghost towns, I would announce my next story. And although my audience often disagreed with the twists and turns of the stories and even less 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 unintentional song that could not be missed. A song that perhaps evoked different things but that in the end united us.
That song was revealing to me the reason for my trip, but not 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 of no return whose destiny we continued to build as we went along.
And now when I heard that song again as the one chosen by my daughter for her graduation, I couldn't help but remember our trips, longing for those moments, remembering "the trip" and feeling 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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