How A Road Trip Rekindled My Love for Writing…and the One Crucial Mistake I Made
My passion for writing had been there all along, even though I didn’t believe in it.
Ever since I was young, I loved to write. I discuss more about that in my other article “How I Got Back into Writing After Twenty Years and What To Do if You’re “Stuck”.
I had talked about writing for years. I always had wanted to write a book, as I thought that’s what “writing” was if it wasn’t academic or educational. I was never taught in school that writing about personal experiences, or things that weren’t fictional stories or school subjects, could actually get you published and paid.
In my mind, you had to do something truly great and adventurous like climbing Mount Everest, or being a race car driver or astronaut…books were only about exciting, dangerous things.
I certainly didn’t believe my life was exciting. In 2011, my ex-fiancee broke up with me two days after Valentine’s Day. I’m happily married now, so it no longer bothers me, but at the time that was all I could think about. I wanted to travel, but I had little money, working part-time online for my parents’ business selling security cameras and equipment.
At 1:30 am on the morning of April 15th, I decided to head west in my 2007 Toyota Yaris (almost new at the time) from Fort Worth, Texas towards New Mexico. By 6:00, I was in Roswell, NM. I stopped at the local McDonald’s to get an iced coffee and yes it looks just like this:
Not finding much to do there as I had little money at the time, I decided to continue on into Colorado and Wyoming, trips which I’ll cover in another article.
This was the first thing I wrote about in a journal I had purchased just for the trip. I ended up losing it about a month later, but most importantly I realized I still enjoyed writing about my experiences.
The trip there itself was fairly uneventful, consisting of driving through the desert in the dark and trying not to fall asleep. The sunrise coming into Roswell was absolutely stunning though, and I wish I had taken a picture of it. This is close, although it had less purple and more yellow and red.
Back then, I never got into the habit of writing. This is crucial to actually becoming a good writer and getting people to read your content. I lost the journal I was using and quit writing for ten more years.
Had I kept writing even when not on road trips living out of my car, my life could have turned out very differently. C’est la vie.
This would be the beginning of many trips I would go on in the following month or so, to every region of the US except the Southeast and Pacific Northwest, so I’ve got plenty more articles for you to enjoy.