This morning, we had an urge to leave the house and hit the open road, so we went out for a drive. We brought our camera in case there were any fine photo opportunities to be found. Although there was a lot of burning going on and the Hope area was sort of socked in with clouds, James did get a few nice shots.
On the journey, I was thinking about how nice it is to be able to just sort of jump in the car and go see beautiful scenery. Realistically, where we live now is nicer than many of the places we used to vacation.
As I was sitting there watching the colorful trees go by, I ruminated on why we like living here and why other people tend to last about 6 months before they freak out and run screaming back to whatever urban center they came from.
My theory is that it has to do with trees. To live here happily and be willing to put up with the various inconveniences (and there are a lot of them), you have to really, really love the trees. For us, being in the trees feels "right." In fact, when we lived in Southern California, we had to go visit trees about once a month in order to retain our mental health (we called it a "getting a tree fix").
Now that we live among the trees, our road trips can be pretty short. For example, on today's journey, we went up Trout Creek Road, mostly to find out what's up there. Not surprisingly, the answer is basically a lot of trees, so we had fun.
Actually, we don't need to go on road trips to visit the trees. They are always right here in our back yard, which is extremely convenient. Amidst all the inconveniences related to living here, there is one really BIG convenience: proximity to the trees. And we like that.
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