I didn't expect to fall in love with the desert. I'm a green-trees, ocean-breeze kind of person. The desert was never on my radar.
But three months into living on the road, we pulled Colletta into a boondocking spot outside Sedona, and something shifted. The sky was so wide it made me dizzy. The red rock formations looked like they'd been sculpted by someone with a very dramatic imagination. And the silence, the desert silence, was unlike anything I'd ever experienced.
Not the absence of sound. The presence of quiet.
Learning to be still
In those early months of travel, we were moving constantly. New campsite every three days. New state every week. We were running on adrenaline and novelty, convinced that the magic was in the movement.
The desert taught us to stop.
We stayed near Sedona for two weeks, then drifted south to Tucson, then west to Joshua Tree. Each place asked us to slow down a little more. The heat helped. You don't rush in 105-degree weather. You wake early, explore in the morning light, retreat to Colletta during the worst of the afternoon, and come alive again at sunset.
Calvin collected rocks everywhere we went. His collection got so heavy that James had to put a weight limit on it: five pounds per park, non-negotiable. Millie, who was just learning to walk, took her first real outdoor steps in the dust outside our campsite in Saguaro National Park, wobbling toward a cactus with the kind of fearless determination that still defines her.
Why the desert stays with you
People who love the desert will tell you it's about the light. They're right. The way the sun hits sandstone at golden hour, the reds deepen, the shadows stretch, and everything looks like it's been dipped in honey. But it's more than that.
The desert strips things away. There's nowhere to hide out there. No trees to block the view. No ambient noise to fill the silence. It's just you and the landscape and whatever you've been avoiding thinking about.
I did a lot of thinking in the desert. About what we'd left behind. About whether we'd made the right call. About the kind of parents we wanted to be and the kind of life we wanted to build. The desert didn't give me answers, exactly. But it gave me the space to sit with the questions.
The places that marked us
Arches National Park at sunrise, before the crowds, when the light through Delicate Arch is so perfect it doesn't look real. Capitol Reef, which nobody talks about but everyone should. Quiet, uncrowded, with orchards you can pick fruit from and petroglyphs that make Calvin go silent with wonder. White Sands, where Millie rolled down the dunes laughing until she was completely covered in gypsum and we were picking it out of her hair for days.
And the night skies. I can't write about the desert without mentioning the night skies. We saw the Milky Way for the first time parked outside Big Bend, and Calvin asked me if we were looking at the actual galaxy or just a picture of it. "The actual galaxy," I told him. "We're inside it."
He thought about that for a long time.
Already planning our return
We've only been on the road three months. We've seen the California coast and the wide-open Southwest, and there's a whole country still ahead of us. But already, the desert has a pull that nothing else quite matches.
When I think about where Colletta will point next, part of me hopes it's southwest again. The landscape opens up. The sky gets bigger. And I remember why we started this in the first place. Not to see as much as possible, but to feel as much as possible.
The desert has my heart. I don't think it's giving it back.
