Full Moon Road Trips!
Almost all year long, magazines and newspapers get clogged full of "themed" travel stories -- offering advice on spring time drives, where to go for a long weekend, or a summer family vacation. Now, in what may well be a first for the much-abused genre of blogosphere travel writing, I am thrilled (well, pretty happy...) to share with you one of my favorite subsets of the road trip world: the full moon drive.
Looking out my window, I see a huge great "harvest" moon rising, and while others may have trouble sleeping (or even go baying at the silvery orb), the moonlight makes me want to hit the road. Though almost any road will do, some roads look better by moonlight than others. A wave-washed coastal drive may be magical, a cruise around a lakeshore can be the ultimate in romance, but for me nothing is more memorable than a full moon road trip I took some years ago along the famous "Loneliest Road in America", old US-50 across Nevada.
It's a fantastic road in almost any conditions (except perhaps during a wintery snowstorm), and I still get shivers thinking back to an all-night solo drive I took along the Loneliest Road from Lake Tahoe east toward the Utah Canyonlands -- the angular mountain ranges stood out like sawblades on the horizons, while in the foreground the moonlight sparkled on the sandy desert washes and endless sagebrush plains. All the way I tuned the radio to the spooky melange of America's most unusal radio station, KTNN AM 660 , where the DJ alternated Navajo chants with a psychedelic range of pop hits by Jimi Hendrix and the Who. You can hear the signal for miles (hundreds and thousands of miles, depending on conditions), and as chance would have it this weekend marks the annual Navajo Nation Fair in Window Rock AZ, which gives one more excuse for a spur-of-the-moment getaway.
Happy Trails,
jj
Almost all year long, magazines and newspapers get clogged full of "themed" travel stories -- offering advice on spring time drives, where to go for a long weekend, or a summer family vacation. Now, in what may well be a first for the much-abused genre of blogosphere travel writing, I am thrilled (well, pretty happy...) to share with you one of my favorite subsets of the road trip world: the full moon drive.
Looking out my window, I see a huge great "harvest" moon rising, and while others may have trouble sleeping (or even go baying at the silvery orb), the moonlight makes me want to hit the road. Though almost any road will do, some roads look better by moonlight than others. A wave-washed coastal drive may be magical, a cruise around a lakeshore can be the ultimate in romance, but for me nothing is more memorable than a full moon road trip I took some years ago along the famous "Loneliest Road in America", old US-50 across Nevada.
It's a fantastic road in almost any conditions (except perhaps during a wintery snowstorm), and I still get shivers thinking back to an all-night solo drive I took along the Loneliest Road from Lake Tahoe east toward the Utah Canyonlands -- the angular mountain ranges stood out like sawblades on the horizons, while in the foreground the moonlight sparkled on the sandy desert washes and endless sagebrush plains. All the way I tuned the radio to the spooky melange of America's most unusal radio station, KTNN AM 660 , where the DJ alternated Navajo chants with a psychedelic range of pop hits by Jimi Hendrix and the Who. You can hear the signal for miles (hundreds and thousands of miles, depending on conditions), and as chance would have it this weekend marks the annual Navajo Nation Fair in Window Rock AZ, which gives one more excuse for a spur-of-the-moment getaway.
Happy Trails,
jj
posted by Unknown at Thursday, September 07, 2006
1 Comments:
Its amazing. About every two weeks I get to drive home from some friends who lives about 100 kms. away. Its always pretty late and the roads are often vacant, but a full moon can make this trip much better.
You caught the essence of these drives. I can imagine how this drive affected you. Driving alone with some "special music" and a beautiful moon contemplating over life.
Hmm...perhaps it could be recommended as stress-relaxing ;)
Dennis B. Petersen
Denmark
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