PART ONE + PART TWO

A two-parter conversation with my dear friend, life coach, and brilliant host Elizabeth Johnson on her podcast about what can unfold when we find our own way back to love. We talk about love, of course—but through the lenses of travel, New Orleans, life, and death because Elizabeth has a way of opening all that up.

As we talked, I actually forgot that people would hear it, which makes the best podcasts, I think.

I start seeing billboards for “The THING” just outside Tucson, Arizona, on my way to the New Mexico ghost town I’ll be sleeping in tonight. The relentless signs are likely white noise to anyone that drives this particular stretch of U.S. Interstate 10 regularly. But for someone like me, breaking new ground, the incessant messages to take exit 322 act as a hypnosis that no amount of willpower can fight to keep me from pulling off when it comes.

I’ve always been a sucker for a “lookout point” exit sign, and the one I took that morning in Northern California was as much a welcome escape as it was a promise. I’d spent the last hour testing my faith while barreling down the I-5 freeway in a dense fog, unable to see beyond a car-length in front of me. The short road up to the point lifted me out of the fog and dropped me off at the top of a hill littered with broken beer bottles and some haphazard fire piles. But it delivered a clear view of the freeway with all the semi trucks roaring by, and the sun just over the horizon.

Shipping your own car to a final destination and having your body transported separately via airplane to meet it is a thing people do when they move across the country. It wasn’t something I wanted to consider because I knew I’d end up jealous of my car and all it got to see without me. Part 1 of my trip from Seattle to New Orleans.