Completing a journey 50 years in the making

Everything needs a conclusion, a final period, a closure. That applies to movies, books, games, careers and life itself. As it turns out, it also pertains to travel.

In August of 1972, I started a travel journey that didn’t conclude until a few weeks ago. It was a journey that spanned 50 years. Fifty years. That’s hard to believe, but it’s true.

A little backstory at this point seems appropriate. My parents, born in the early portion of the last century, liked to travel. They mostly preferred states that were either bisected by the Rocky Mountains, touched by the Rocky Mountains, bordered the Rocky Mountains or had to be traversed to get to the Rocky Mountains. So, it may come as no surprise to you that most summers of my youth featured two-week road trips and vacations to the Rocky Mountain states of our great American West.

We were budget travelers, so we camped a lot, ate at roadside park tables, cooked on Coleman stoves and drank from the always-at-the-ready thermos. Despite our numerous visits, we could never get enough of our adventures in and around the Rockies, as we always came away with grand memories.

The summer of 1972 (wasn’t there a movie by that title?) saw my family double-down and go all-in with the annual sabbatical. Two weeks became three, and before we knew it, the Rocky Mountain theme was extended into Canada, with Banff and Jasper National Parks becoming our ultimate goals.

It was a 1,931-mile drive due north from our home in southeast Texas to Jasper, Alberta. However, our trip was anything but the proverbial shortest distance between two points. In retrospect, we probably logged about 2,600 miles one-way, as Santa Fe, New Mexico; Telluride, Colorado; Moab, Utah; Salt Lake City; Sun Valley, Idaho; Stanley, Idaho; and Glacier National Park in Montana became stops to experience along the way.

The epic cross-country (countries) journey with our travel trailer became a series of chapters bound together into a single journal. Ten of us were along for the adventure, including me, my mom, my dad and my sister, plus two friends, three grandparents and an aunt. The family pets (i.e., two dogs and two cats) also joined us.

We crammed into two vehicles — a two-speed ’64 Pontiac Tempest LeMans, which pulled the travel trailer, and a loaded ’69 Pontiac GTO — and started our grand getaway.

Given the somewhat limited power and pulling capabilities of the Pontiac Tempest LeMans, the youngsters (myself included) and one of the loyal canines would pull out at dawn to get a head start. Eventually, we’d reconnect with the rest of the group in our agreed-upon destination, relying on old-fashioned planning, map reading abilities, common sense, confidence and faith to light the way.

As we traveled, we made a point to take in and fully experience each location we visited. We rode bikes from the Santa Fe campground to downtown, checked out the Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City on a Sunday morning, camped in Yellowstone National Park, soaked in the calming and therapeutic hot springs in Montana, ice skated on the outdoor rink in Sun Valley and admired the unique color of the water at Lake Louise, among other highlights.

While we crammed a lot into that trip, by the time we crossed the border, much of it became a blur.

Other than our time at Lake Louise, specifically, the Canadian part of our adventure felt like an incomplete overview of the area. It was as if we’d run a marathon but the last half-mile was never experienced and the finish line was never crossed. We were so close, but we ran short of time and money, resulting in our coming up about 150 miles short of our ultimate planned terminus of Jasper.

Ever since that brief visit to Canada, I have lived in sort of a traveler’s limbo. What was out there that we didn’t get to, and would I ever return to see what we’d missed? We had been so very close to completing the journey that it didn’t feel right to never finish what we’d started all those years ago.

Related: 2 years of … all of this. A golden-age traveler looks back, and now forward