an open love letter to NPS: visiting all 63 national parks in the USA

Though the pandemic was a horrible moment in time for the world, it was a rare moment of time where life stopped a bit, particularly for me in my career when live music ceased to exist the way we were used to. Through college and into my adult career, I’ve always worked in live music. Watching artists’ albums come to life on stage has always been an inspiring yet addictive experience to be a part of. With any jobs though, there are pros and cons.. All these years I’d worked in a pretty ego heavy environment, flying around covering shows, paying for people’s dinners, all the while being over stressed, over worked and never fully feeling satiated with the accomplishments I’d reached. It was the endless obsession, hate and love that I struggled with over time.

And all of sudden with a global pandemic, it all just went away. My career had always been my number one. My first love. My first long relationship. I never thought it’d let me down. We’d invested so much in each other. We’d accomplished so much together. Nothing could destroy what we’ve built…except that was wildly incorrect.

What started as a week off from work to stop the spread lead to me losing my job alongside many others. It also meant me reevaluating my priorities completely. So many people talk about heartbreaks from people but I honestly feel like the betrayal and rejection that I felt from losing the career I loved hit harder. I felt the eyes of the industry on me, I felt the financial weight and responsibility of my bills on my bank account, I felt the shock and fear of not knowing what my future held for me and worst of all, I let my failure pull down my confidence and motivation. How long would this last? Was everything I built for nothing? Do these people even care about me when I can’t give them anything anymore?

Like many, I was starting to lose it. There’s only so many weird FaceTime drawings, TikTok recipes, Instacart fails and reality TV Zoom watching that you can take at some point.

So what’s the healthy thing to do with your problems? Run away from them? Probably not, but that’s how this started. For the first time since college, I was left with the privilege to start over. Be a beginner at trying to find a purpose again.

Every phone call check in from a music friend, however nice or malicious it was, felt like a reminder that I was a failure. I wanted to literally fall off the face of the music industry earth. And so I did. I answered no phone calls, no emails, packed a bag and started planning a trip. Why not use those credit card points, hotel credits, all that stuff you’ve accumulated from work to just try something new yourself?

So we decided to drive from Los Angeles to Denver and explore Utah. Between these two destinations we decided to visit Escalante National Monument and Zion, Bryce and Arches National Parks. Embarrassingly, for living in LA for over a decade I never had the thought of visiting these places before this trip. My best friend Gaston joined as well since he was looking to visit family back in Colorado. Once he recited that there was a “Mighty 5” national parks in Utah, my husband literally said out loud, “Why did you just tell Christine that there is a list? Now she’s going to want to complete it.” What we didn’t know was that this pandemic would affect our jobs for longer than we thought and we’d not only complete Utah’s, but the entire country’s.

Throughout it all, this trip gave us the opportunity to spend long spans of time with family, friends old and new, and let us better understand a country that is so vastly diverse and incredible. If you click the blogs throughout nooverdrives.com, you’ll get of taste each park as I started to grow into someone who realized how much I had taken for granted for a majority of my adult life.

Nomad life had to come to an end at some point and life went back to normal. We managed to make it to 44 of the 63 national parks by the time we had to get back to work, and it took a little over 4 years to finish.

So here we are, at the one year anniversary of completing all the parks. I could have never imagined how much growth, curiosity and love for this world that this experience would have given me.

It took a year later to look back and realize that this goal had kind of been this sacred, special experience that changed my entire life trajectory, not just a check list of parks to visit. It almost felt cheap to publicly celebrate, because it took questioning my future to be fully ok with not knowing the future and prioritizing what is important.