Desert Drives: Mad Love

I am back from a visit back to Vancouver. During my visit, I went on a road trip with Jane, Megan, and Michelle from Salt Lake City to Palm Springs. It was during this trip that it was confirmed, I am so absolutely in love with these girls. I'll gush more about them later, but here is what we saw and did:

Spiral Jetty. I must have fallen asleep when this was talked about during art history, because I had no idea about its existence until we came here. We got super existential about its meaning and the artist, only to learn later that may not have been the case at all and was probably more straight-forward and a bit lighter than we thought.

Antelope island. We saw no antelope but did see buffalo, ate philly cheesesteak sandwiches and drank root beer floats (which like many things on this trip, is more than we would consume in recent history and were total throwbacks).

Megan was the most adventurous out of all of us and as you can see based on me taking the picture, I was the laziest haha.



Zion National Park. We camped there for a couple of nights, did some hikes. It is stunning and a completely different planet. But the heat was unreal. If I could have, I would have been doing this all the time:

Photo by Megan Lau

From Utah we drove to Las Vegas and had an obnoxious buffet (where we had promised to look out for each other and make sure that we paced ourselves, but that went out the window right away and I was so full after the first go round and suffering by the time we left). We played slots (where I made and lost 10 dollars) and went crazy at the outdoor selfie booths near our hotel.

After Las Vegas we went to Palm Springs where Michelle won the ultimate bingo prize, watched the best rendition of 'Pony' by Ginuwine by this hipster white dude, drank the best pina coladas I've ever had (strong but tasted like delicious icey juice!), ate at a Jewish deli where the food looked like it was on steroids but was tasty as tasty could be, went and got some salvation (and by salvation, I really mean mind-numbing heat that gets you making promises in your head for some respite):

When we got back to Vancouver it was like, was that even real?

In a way I thought it was going to be scenery of Zion, the expanses of the desert, the vibrancy of Salvation Mountain and getting to do it with my closest friends that was going to move me and really make the trip, but it turned out it was them - Jane, Megan, and Michelle that completed me and made everything, well everything and all the other stuff became a (really) nice backdrop to that. 

So many teenage girl dreams were fulfilled on this trip. But the most important one, the one that I most longed for when I was in junior high and high school was feeling that I was part of and really had my own group. I mean, I was always part of a group of girls and we would have good times, share meaningful things and all that, but I always felt like I was on the outside looking in. After this trip, I could see that back then I could never completely relate to them and feel as comfortable and unguarded as I do now with these girls. I would look at a couple or some of the girls in the group and see how close they were, how fulfilling that was for them, but just not quite feeling that and wanting it so badly. Without question, I felt it on this trip and I can't tell you enough how much it meant to me and to have these girls as my nearest and dearest. If you know them (which I'm sure a lot of the readers of this blog do), you'd know they tick all the boxes of ultimate girl pals (and then some): funny, smart, intelligent, kind.

Photo by Megan Lau

I was so sad to leave them and I miss them so much right now, but it's a lot/enough to know that we (there's no other way to say this that isn't cheesy) have each other and that there's a lot to look forward to when we're together again, which I hope is real soon. xoxo.