Jackson, WY

I think I've finally reached the West. As in cowboys and Indians, cattle brands, gun racks and no vegetarians. For everyone who wondered: it's in Jackson, WY.

The West Coast obviously is not the West; and Texas is a thing unto itself. Montana felt more like the North. Last night, I ate bison carpaccio and elk chops at The Gun Barrel, which featured an entire stuffed buffalo in the lobby and an extensive gun collection. My drink had a plastic rifle in it. They decorated with antlers, and not in an ironic way. Then I went to the Million Dollar Cowboy Bar. They had saddles instead of barstools. You could get nachos with either bison or elk.

Jackson, in addition to being a ski resort in winter, is the gateway to Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks. I can tell you that the best time to visit a national park in the summer, any national park, is about 7 am. After 9:30 or so, the crowds get untenable. Grand Teton is gorgeous, full of the grandeur and majesty I've come to expect from national parks. Yellowstone was a total let-down. Grand Teton centers around the most impressive mountain range I've ever seen, towering over plains and a crystal-clear lake; Yellowstone is full of trees and flat swamplands that spit steam and hot water. Not even pretty trees, at that--the park was full of miles upon miles of dead, blasted trees, leftover from a wildfire a couple of years before. So here I am, oohing and aahing at the pretty mountains, then I turn a corner and get to look at dead trees and swamps.

Oh, plus, the National Park Service in its infinite wisdom has decided that summer, the peak of the tourist season, is the proper time to tear up the one road that runs through each of the national parks. Picture this: a two-lane road which is the only point of access. You tear up all the asphalt for a several-mile stretch, stripping the road down to mud and gravel; then you send one lane of cars through at a time, picking their way through mud at 2 mph while working on the other lane, letting the cars in the other direction pile up for miles. What retard came up with this idea? Why in God's name can't they work on the roads in the off-season, or at the very least at night? So now I'm enjoying the mountains, then I have to wait in a line for thirty minutes, then I have to plod behind an RV in the mud for another thirty minutes, THEN I get to look at dead trees and swampland. In a long line of pissed-off people because there's some RV up ahead that can't go more than 20 mph up a hill. RVs should be banned from national parks. I'm serious. There's too much car traffic as it is, especially since there's only one two-lane road per park. Ban the RVs and the campervans and all the yahoos towing boats, that'll cut car traffic in half. A huckleberry margarita and a steak sandwich revived my faith in humanity.

Driving frustrations aside, I seem to have found my mojo again. I've figured out the next steps and how to finance them, so now all I have to worry about is the idiot in front of me. I keep thinking about doing this road trip, or a similar sort of road trip, in a slightly different permutation. Alaska to Patagonia? Across Canada? On a motorcycle? Maybe my second book can be a rewriting of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance," from a girl's perspective...