honeymoon out west!
sunday, august 4th, 2024.
Earlier this year, my wife and I got married. Well, we finally went on our honeymoon the last week of July! My folks graciously watched the little one so we had to squeeze the honeymoon in before school started again last week. My goodness have I a lot to write about it, but I'll keep this post more concise than my infodumping nature would ordinarily allow. 😅
Long story short: we went ham with funds we'd saved, flew from Atlanta to Chicago, took the California Zephyr to San Francisco, spent three days there and flew back home.
We had an absolute blast on the train ride— it was super nice to have someone else do the drivin' out west, of course, but my god! the views from the train window were something else. Riding through the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevadas was as gorgeous as we had hoped, but the beauty of Utah took us by surprise and was a personal highlight of the train ride. It's basically no-man's-land out there— enormous stretches of uninhabited Bureau of Land Management land with almost no human-made stuff aside from the train tracks we were riding on. And the mountains, mesas, and plateaus were so colorful it was surreal! I had no idea how much beauty there is in "desolate" land!
Alas, I have no editor to trim my post length down, so I've got to cut myself off. Suffice it to say— if you ever have the opportunity to take a cross-country train trip through the United States, take it! I'd do it again in a heartbeat if I could afford to. If you want to experience it more from your computer or phone screen, there's plenty of footage on YouTube but I can't impress upon you enough how much you have to experience it first hand!
San Francisco was another life-altering experience for us, I can safely say. I went in with a bunch of preconceived notions about all the techbros taking over Silicon Valley and how kitschy & touristy the whole area would be, but the city opened my eyes. It is, and remains despite plenty of gentrification, a working class place that really captures the essence of what it means to be American.
It is the kindest, friendliest city I have ever been to. We struck up conversations with a lot of folks, and every conversation left our hearts full and us bettered by having shared it.
I could rattle off all the tourist checkmarks we checked— and oh, did we check them!— but the people we got to meet were the experience we cherished the most about our honeymoon.
That said, all is not well in San Francisco. Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," which I read one morning while looking out from our hotel room onto Columbus, still rings true today:
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
That is to say, there's plenty of people experiencing homelessness in San Francisco. I have thoughts about the social makeup and support systems of San Francisco and, really, the whole of the U.S., but that's a whole-ass conversation and a half of its own.
So anyway, we were definitely looking through Zillow listings on our last morning in the coffee shop before we departed back to our sultry-hot, languid, currently very rainy Deep South. Cogs of the mind got a-turnin' and I think my wife and I may end up in San Francisco later in life.
Oh, also— my wife and I got some walk-in tattoos to commemorate our honeymoon at Two Cranes Tattoo. We're very happy with our ink and the experience. I got my bicycle on my forearm. I wanted something to grab attention and declare my love of the concept of the bicycle. A conversation starter, as it were!
We've had a week to come down off of the high of our honeymoon— now we're settling back into the routine of life, the taste of a beautiful shared experience still on our lips with memories that will surely last our lifetimes!
Until next time, be well. :)