Traveling for adventure in California and Arizona


Something that I've always enjoyed is traveling. My adult life has been spent in places with some of the most amazing scenery on earth, including Santa Barbara, California, and especially Arizona. Arizona is so beautiful that there's a popular magazine called "Arizona Highways" that people enjoy all over the world.

But most of the people I've ever met hate traveling. Now don't get me wrong, it isn't as if they walk up to me and grab me by the lapels and say, "Brad, I hate traveling!" but I can tell by what they do, and how they talk. I'll see if I can explain.

Most of the people that I talk to about going places have talked about how quickly they got there. They will say that they drove "12 hours straight" or something like that. And while I understand that to them I'm asking about their destination, I'm really not - I'm asking about what they saw, and did, along the way. That is, traveling.

But I do know people who enjoy traveling, and nowadays I call them my "history adventurers". For them, the adventure begins the moment they hit the road, or take their first step under those incredible Arizona skies. They see mountains, and scenery - the stuff that photographers take picture of for the magazine Arizona Highways. They see what people who are only concerned with destinations never really see.

And I understand that destinations matter. Sadly, what I found out when I started traveling from destination to destination that it all looked pretty much the same. All airports looked pretty much the same - I would go from a waiting room into another waiting room. People would ask me why I didn't like to travel, and they would miss the point. I travel every day, for adventure.

So if you ask me how quickly I got from Los Angeles to Phoenix in 1989, and I say that it took me three days, you may think that I'm joking. But I stopped along the way. I stopped in San Bernardino, I stopped in Palm Springs, I stopped in Indio. I rode the tramway to the top of San Jacinto Peak. And every time I've done that trip back and forth I've stopped at Desert Center, and climbed on the caboose. I've known a lot of people who drive all night, just staring at taillights and headlights. I've rarely heard of anyone who stops to admire the Milky Way, out in the desert, which is astonishing to see IRL (In Real Life).

Yeah, I know that I've been out of step with just about everyone else, going back to when I was a kid. And every once in a while I've tried to be "normal" - and then something catches my eye, or fires up my imagination, and I'm back to adventuring. If you want to try it, please come along with me, it's wonderful.

Image at the top of this post: At Desert Center in 2016.
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