What It's Like To Take The Leap (Part 1)

EXPECT THE UNEXPECTED  

I had never even camped before. Yet here I was. In the middle of the Redwood Forest. Five hundred miles from the place I called home my entire adult life. I had planned for 4 years for this moment. In those 4 years I prepared myself for a time when things would get so hard that I would want to quit. I knew at some point that I would second-guess this big idea of mine and wonder what in the heck I was thinking all those years ago. I knew that I was doing something big, something scary, something risky. What I didn't know is that everything that could go wrong, would go wrong just 12 hours into my 9-month expedition. 

I thought I was industrious by previously researching the sunset time for Crescent City. It was expected to be 7:52pm on that life-changing night of August 31st in Northern California. What I didn't anticipate, because I am not a camper, is that it would get dark a lot sooner than that. I didn't know that, because I also didn't know the redwoods were the tallest trees in the world which I now know to mean that when you are surrounded by them, you get very few hours of daylight. The glorious 2 hours I thought I had, disintegrated into an ashy pile of minutes right before my eyes. When shadows were already long at 6:29pm and I was running out of gas still 12 miles of windy road away from my unreserved campsite, my first sense of panic set in. I had lost cell service. Maps was a complete loss. I'm pretty sure it devil-laughed at me when I searched for gas stations.  

Now that I realized the dire situation I had somehow put myself in, I rolled up the windows, turned down the music and removed my sunglasses in the quickly-dwindling daylight. I white-knuckled myself down the unfamiliar road contemplating how I missed all the preventative measures for this could-be fiasco. 

The exhiliration I once felt finally setting out on this solo adventure, suddenly sank with my stomach. A few seconds earlier I was singing at the top of my lungs to Wide Open Spaces. The sun on my face, windows down, my long hair flying around, bouncing off my sunglasses. From behind I must have looked electrocuted with my hair being sucked out the window on my left and sticking straight up through the sunroof.  My dreams were precisely "taking the shape of a place out West", I imagined my future, "finding a dream and a life of my own, seeing new faces. But what it would hold for me, I hadn't yet guessed". 

Now, I had found myself in the middle of nowhere having to choose between running out of daylight or running out of gas. The thought of trying to set up my never-before-used camping gear in pure darkness, in a never-seen-before place under never-experienced circumstances, with no cell phone service, made me panic so much that the thought of running out of gas paled in comparison. So I urged on, hoping that if I did make it to camp, that I could actually camp there.

I couldn't even enjoy the bits of ocean view along Highway 101...the whole reason I detoured off my route in the first place. I was starving for daylight more than any scenic view. My focus was on the tick-tock of minutes getting higher as the sun got lower. The road got windier and the decline got steeper. I put my car in neutral to save gas while driving downhill. The first bit of relief in 20 minutes past over me with the darkening shadows of the Reds. The campgrounds Kiosk ahead shining like a beacon of hope. Its rays of light reaching out as if arms welcoming me into a safe embrace. But that was just the beginning of a very long night...

                                                           TO BE CONTINUED