Blog Amateur | Cross-Platform Essential |

For the first six days, everything went exactly to script. We saw the Petrified Forest (Dad took 200 photos of rocks). We ate at a diner where the waitress called us “hon.” We sang “Sweet Caroline” so many times that Sam threatened to jump out of the moving vehicle.

I didn’t have a compass. I didn’t have a GPS signal. All I had was a sunburn and a stupid sense of direction. But I pointed left, and he turned. blog amateur

Sam woke up. “Whoa,” he said.

We stayed for forty minutes. We didn’t take a single picture. Then Dad turned the car around, the map still useless in the back seat, and we drove home the long way. For the first six days, everything went exactly to script

“We go back,” Dad said. His knuckles were white on the steering wheel. I didn’t have a compass

That was the whole point of the trip. My father, a man who still prints MapQuest directions and keeps a Thomas Guide in his glove compartment “just in case the satellites go dark,” had planned every mile of our two-week journey from Seattle to the Grand Canyon and back.