“Total Freedom and Beauty”
“You stand there for a while and take it in, try to photograph it, but you just can’t capture it because the land is so massive. The land goes on forever,” says Nanci Veenker, AAA member about Moab. Veenker and her husband took a road trip this past September in an RV from their home in Federal Way to Utah. Read their road trip story and how they fell in love with the scenery at the destination as much as the adventure to get there.
In late September 2021, my husband and I pulled our new travel trailer to Moab from the Seattle area. We drove from Federal Way through Washington and Oregon, cut through Idaho and then made it to Utah where we met up with another couple from Bozeman, Montana, and spent several days camping out in Canyonlands National Park and Arches National Park near Moab. Those two parks for me were unexplainably spiritual. In the light of this pandemic, it was a feeling of clean air and no virus, total freedom and beauty. You stand there for a while and take it in, try to photograph it, but you just can’t capture it because the land is so massive. The land goes on forever.
I have been told this before by a couple of different people, that once you get there, it is just an awesome feeling that you can’t explain to anybody else, but you’ll know it when you feel it. There were these gigantic boulders that weren’t arches but made a cavern of sorts, from the rocks and the sand that was formed over years. The acoustics are beautiful because of the way the rocks are put together.
We got up one morning before sunrise so we could see everything as the sun was coming up, and hiked to Mesa Arch. We had to hike to get up close to most of these arches. The sun came up kind of early on that side, and it lighted up the bottom of the arch. It looked golden. I had a big camera with me and my iPhone, and I took a million pictures. It was just crazy beautiful. It takes your breath away. As you look through the arch (in the pictured photo), for ever and ever, there were all these rock formations that looked like somebody just chipped away and did them by hand.
If I was back in Utah, I would make an effort to go back there, but there are more parks that we did not get to, in and around that area that I have heard are just as amazing. That was our destination but, had we had more time, I would have made an effort to see more parks. But I would go back, absolutely.
–As told by Nanci Veenker to Victor Whitman
–Top photo of Mesa Arch by Nanci Veenker
