Another Summer Come and Gone

My 9-year-old niece Callie recently reprimanded me for my blog being way out of date, so I’d better get to it.

My summer as an active travel trip guide for Backroads in Yellowstone/Tetons has come to an end. This adventure started out in the beginning of June with three weeks of intensive training in Salt Lake City in the ninja art of preparing elaborate meals for 25 out of the back of a trailer in the wilderness, driving a sexy 15-passenger van with trailer attached, and racking a bike on top of it in under 60 seconds. I spent training with a group of 27 other freshmen, extraordinary folks (below, with the backdrop of the Tetons) who were then scattered over the globe to places like Ireland, Hawaii, Portugal, Switzerland, Croatia, and the Czech Republic.

Humble and sophisticated self-named TBTGE (The Best Training Group Ever)

Backroads does high-end one week trips all over the world, and the Tetons and Yellowstone in Wyoming were to become my home for the summer. Welcome to my office:

Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone

Lower Canyon Falls

Geothermal hot springs

And of course Old Faithful. After all these years there's still a man behind the curtain pushing the button every 90 minutes or so.

Don't mind me...

Buffalo: Truly amazing creatures with a fascinating history. Used to be 30 to 60 million of them roaming our continent just 150 years ago and we managed to almost wipe them out. Yellowstone spearheaded our first endangered species success story, protecting the 25 buffalo that existed in the park at the turn of the century and increasing their numbers to currently around 5,000.

An animal jam on the road

Yellowstone sunsets

Half of the trips I helped lead were family inn trips, half were family camping. The term “camping” must be qualified however, as purists may scoff. For the guests, a Backroads Deluxe Camping trip means being attended by a team of 4 Backroads leaders, three elaborate hot meals a day, wine and appetizers before dinner (albeit out of plastic cups), hot showers, a camp assistant to set up your tent and roll out your sleeping bag and extra-thick sleeping pads, and guided hikes, bikes, and kayaking trips through the parks. For me and my leader team it meant playing chef, bike mechanic, knowledgeable local expert, and entertainer of kids all at once. It meant 18 hour work days, cooking three meals a day out of the back of a trailer, and what’s popularly known among us as “permadirt”, the result of camping for a week with one shower, making for a layer of grime on your hands and feet that only starts to dissipate after your third post-trip shower. A camping high: I’m pretty mean with a dutch oven now...coffee cake, lasagna, chocolate mousse, roasted veggies. A camping low: The nasty black eye I got a few weeks ago from my face being crunched between the van and the van door due to an unfortunately-timed gust of wind. I told the guests that my co-leader Joel took some action b/c I wasn't pulling my weight around camp.

And then there were the inn trips...spas, long dinners with guests at nice restaurants, bison steaks, 600 thread-count bed sheets, hot showers every day. Nice.

The guests: Pretty much across the board wonderful and interesting folks. Somehow I've developed this assumption that I don't like kids/am not very good with them, yet interactions with the kiddos ended up being one of my favorite things. I met a 10-year-old who has a better vocab than I do (using "vile" and "parody" in everyday conversation), a 14-year-old pilot, and a kid with a photographic memory (kind of scary when you're only mostly sure about some of the details you're spouting off).

On the job with guests.

One of my most excellent leader teams: Joel, me, and Tanya

When not on trips I lived at the leader house in Jackson Hole, an old dilapidated ranch house with bunk beds jammed in every corner to accommodate the 20 leaders rotating in and out, and a septic and hot water tank designed for one. Its saving grace was that it was set on the banks of the Snake River, very convenient for frequent tubing excursions. Also went home twice, once for a wedding, once for the funeral of a dear family friend. Also had the opportunity to go out to Portland to see my brother John, dear friends Adriana and Monique, and travel bud Kieran.

Amazing Adriana, daughter of my close friend Monique, my former roommate and boss from when I taught in Guatemala in 2003. This girl melts my heart.

Some of my favorite moments this summer:

-Inner tubing down the Snake River with a group of my colleagues, putting in right from the backyard of our house, drinking PBR out of Twizzler straws. The 3 bald eagles that followed us much of the way down the river was icing on the cake.

-Leading a group of left-leaning Bay Area adults on a bicycle ride through the Tetons on a less-traveled dirt road and being left in the dust by VP Cheney’s entourage of 5 black Escalades (in town for a little R&R) and their subsequent heckling comments.

-Cooking a stellar meal for 27 people on my first camping trip.

-Singing and playing guitar around the campfire for guests.

-Getting paid to drive a company vehicle on my own from Berkeley, CA to Salt Lake City, on the way spending a day perched on a rock overlooking Lake Tahoe on a perfect day, and then watching a huge wind and lightening storm whip across the Nevada desert as I drove straight into it.

In reality it’s been a summer of both highs and lows, feeling the weight of needing to make some major life decisions, asking big questions about future and where I want to be, a clear sense of exhaustion setting in from a lifestyle of constant mobility, never sleeping in the same bed for more than a few nights at a time, living out of a backpack, feeling the urge to slow down just when everything seems to be speeding up. A lot of you may be saying "yeah right, Susie", but Susie may find herself with a permanent address sooner than later.

I’m blowing through DC right now for just a couple days and then am off again to Guatemala for several weeks! I’m taking a small group of friends and family down for a week, a trip that’s been in the works for several months, I'm very psyched for it. I’m doing it under the auspices of my own company to see how I like doing this sort of thing on my own, with a long-term vision of perhaps doing service trips for families with adopted Guatemalan children or with high school groups in the future, a possibility that could actually co-exist with this whole settling down idea. Lots of decisions to make, priorities to determine...watch this space.