This morning we set out from Washington, D.C. for the final leg of our long trip, heading for my sister’s house in New Hope, PA, but first we had to drop our trailer off at a storage yard I had located in nearby Frenchtown, NJ, about 20 miles away.

Our drive was easy. Last night we prepped, flushing the tanks, taking out trash, packing up clothing, and doing as many other chores as we could to ready the trailer for storage. The weather was perfect for travel, the truck is running well, and we were excited to finally arrive, spend time with family, and live indoors again.

My only trepidation was routing – the roads near the river tend to be narrow, winding, and they often cut through villages and towns designed more for horses and carts than the nearly 50 feet and 6 tons of steel on four axles we were hauling around. Most of all, I wanted to avoid crossing the river on one of the many local bridges, many just barely wide enough for small cars to squeeze past each other. Since we were heading for Frenchtown, our route up River Road on the New Jersey side – a faster, less claustrophobic road than its counterpart across in Pennsylvania – looked doable without too much trouble. It’d only be about a ten mile stretch and my recollection of that piece of road was favorable.

After our first couple of miles up River Road, in spite of cruising at the speed limit I had a big truck riding hard on my tail so I pulled onto the shoulder to let him pass, and then proceeded on our way. As we came around a bend in Titusville, I was initially confused by what was in front of us, and slowed down quickly. There was a large truck like the one that’d just passed, stopped in middle of the narrow two lane road, with some dark smoke coming out of it. My first thought was that it had broken down, but quickly the situation became clearer as we saw several people running towards the truck with fire extinguishers.

I pulled our truck and trailer off the highway and before I was even fully stopped, Stephanie had jumped out, ran back into the trailer, grabbed the fire extinguisher and was sprinting towards the scene to help along with the owners of the house and the business next door. I briefly went to follow, but as the scene became more apparent knew I couldn’t leave our child without one of us.

In front of us on the highway was a large dump truck, with flames growing rapidly around it, on the wrong side of the road, and another vehicle crushed between it and a wall. Fire was climbing up from the truck to engulf a power pole, live lines were already hanging across the road where the pole they connected to had been snapped in half and laid across a lawn. The truck was traveling in the same direction we were, had hit the pole on his right and then cut across the road in front of another vehicle, nearly disintegrating it. We arrived seconds later.

As much as Stephanie and the others tried, there was nothing they could have done to change the outcome, and thankfully none of them were injured in the act. A conflagration enveloped both vehicles, with fuel spilled all over the road, and all we could do was pull back to distraught safety. It wasn’t until later that I realized the truck driver had escaped injury, but there was never any chance for the occupants of the other vehicle.

Out of respect for everyone involved I’m not going to go into greater detail, but as we understand it one of the victims was a veteran firefighter in the very department which had responded to the scene. The tragedy of the situation is still beyond comprehension and I know that the shock hasn’t nearly worn off.

I can’t pretend to understand the South after just a few weeks, but I’ve been an American my whole life and this concerns all of us, in every corner of this huge country.

There is a strong tendency to “other” the African American experience – I just did it, right there – and nowhere is this more glaring than in the telling of the history of black liberation and the treatment of its heroes, both in the story of the Civil War and a century later in the struggle to win full Civil Rights.

The epic tale of the liberation of tens of millions of Americans is the greatest triumph of justice over oppression we’ve known here, greater even than the American Revolution itself. Hundreds of years of bondage and brutality, enshrined in the foundations of our political and economic systems, ended through the extraordinary heroism and sacrifice of so many.

Harriet Tubman. John Brown. Frederick Douglass. W.E.B. Du Bois. William Lloyd Garrison. Martin Luther King Jr. Rosa Parks. Warriors, thinkers, organizers, leaders whose accomplishments, sacrifices, and contributions to justice for and freedom of Americans in every way the equal, at least, of Jefferson, Washington, Franklin, Paine, Roosevelt, and so on. Yet it seems an inescapable fact that we don’t venerate them as a nation to nearly the same degree. Their stories are told not as American History, but as Black History, as Civil Rights History. They are treated as figures in their small chapters of our narrative, not as universal heroes of the American republic.

American History will be healthier when towns that aren’t demographically black are as likely to have a Tubman Blvd. as a Washington Blvd., when Rosa Parks is recognized with monuments in places she never visited, when putting MLK Jr.’s face on our currency is seen not as an act of political correctness gone amok, but rather that it’s about time.

As we depart for New Orleans this morning, the question has become: where to next? We are winding our way to the Philadelphia area, but until now our route has sorta defined itself. Avoid the cold. Go roughly eastward. Seek out beauty, but don’t push too hard.

Once we hit New Orleans for a week, we’ll have some real decisions to make as the number of equally viable routes grows by an order of magnitude. Do we stay as far south as possible until hitting the east coast, then head up? Do we cut up Mississippi and Tennessee and see Graceland? Explore the Ozarks, Appalachia, Bourbon County? See it all and extend our trip by another month?

My wife’s great great grandfather discovered a massive cave system under the same farm in southern Minnesota where we were married, so the Mystery Cave – and others – have been part of the family lore ever since.

Having married into a cave family, it was only appropriate that we make a trek to one of the most impressive cave systems in the US, the Carlsbad Caverns.

Day 1

Saying goodbye to the Baxters

We left on Monday, February 5 after an early morning Bake n’ Broil feast with the wonderful Baxters, who’ve been such a big part of our lives the past few years.

I ran a couple last minute errands, returning my cable modem and picking up two replacement blade valves for the trailer. The pregame was finally at an end.

Stephanie drove the first leg out of LA, and other than some missing cotter pins and a quick learning curve with the weight distribution hitch, it was an uneventful hundred miles or so. I took over in Cabazon and had a much more exciting first few miles, with heavy crosswinds, too much speed, and not enough tongue weight. We got through it, and then I managed to trigger a Check Engine light in the truck. Thankfully I bought an OBDII reader and Google helped us figure out that it was the Mass Airflow sensor, something I could deal with a little later.

Pipeline over the Colorado (and our campsite)

We landed for our first two nights on the banks of the Colorado River, our last nights in California for what may be a long time.

Cats are surprisingly OK.

Day 2

A quick dip in a cold tub

Hanging out in Blythe, I took apart the air intake, cleaned the Mass Airflow Sensor, put in the proper heavy duty air filter for the truck, and other chores. The Check Engine light extinguished, everything else seemed to be running well.

I flew the drone for a bit, and we managed to get confused about the time thanks to camping right along the border of two timezones.

We took a dip in the (cold) hot tub.

Day 3

We hit the road, crossing into Arizona. Our plan was to meet up with friends in Phoenix, before heading to Tucson for a few nights, but our plans changed and we ended up finding a place out in Benson.

After a long drive, we dropped the trailer off, then turned right around and went back to Tucson for burgers and drinks with Jordan at Lindy’s on 4th. I had the Kush, topped with raspberry preserves, green chiles, bleu cheese crumbles, and bacon.

Day 4

Cousins at Deep Sky Winery in Sonoita, AZ

Jordan came out to our campground for pancakes in the morning and then we all rode together to Sonoita for wine tasting. I crashed my drone 10 seconds into a flight I was trying to keep quiet about, having not asked permission. Fortunately the crash only hurt my drone, so I didn’t end up having to ask forgiveness either.

After a great day we feasted at the Steak Out, and then headed back to camp. Jordan drove home late, having work in the morning like normal people.

Day 5

Tombstone

We spent the day in Tombstone, and then came back to camp to get ready to hit the road again.

Stephanie got another desert nose bleed, right after passing through a Border Patrol checkpoint.

I fixed the gray water tank’s blade valve, narrowly averting disaster.

Day 6

Our plan to stay halfway to Carlsbad, NM for a few nights was cut to one night when we saw the facilities. We left first thing the next day, heading to Alamogordo instead of staying another moment in Lordsburg.

There was one one big positive to this stop – we filled the fresh water tank to see if it’d help stabilize the ride at all, and it turns out it made all the difference in the world.

Day 7

White Sands Missile Range Museum

On the way to Alamogordo we stopped at the White Sands Missile Range museum, which we all thoroughly enjoyed. We headed into Alamogordo, which turned out to be a lovely little town, and we wished we could stay longer.

Lunch was at the Hi-D-Ho drive-in, an original 1950’s joint with really great burgers. Waze pronounced it “Hawaii D’ Ho”, which I found amusing for hours.

White Sands National Monument

Our campground host offered us sleds to take to the dunes, so we hopped back in the truck and headed for another sight we wouldn’t regret. The White Sands National Monument was a mind-bending place, sand dunes so soft and snow white the brain doesn’t quite know how to process it.

Exhausted from such a wonderful day, we hit the sack early so we could get up and haul ass to Carlsbad, eager to see the caverns.

Heading up to Alamogordo for the night we had to cross the White Sands Missile Range, and couldn’t resist making a stop when we saw they had a missile museum.

Sadly the V-2 exhibit was closed but the open grounds brought back a flood of recognition from my childhood interest on military hardware and, of course, rockets.

Totally worth it.