I'm gonna visit Santa Fe
In a move that's probably enormously stupid given the price of gas, I'm going to take a road trip to Santa Fe and spend some time in that city for the first time in my adult life. I'm pretty sure I passed through there once on a family vacation as a small child, but I have no memory of it. While there's I'm going to go on some hikes, and also see Meow Wolf!
I'll admit that one of the things I am most excited for is to take pictures of plants. Earlier this year I went on a major iNaturalist streak and took a picture of at least one local plant or animal every day - for over 60 days in a row. It was kind of exhausting! I spent a lot of that time working from home, so I'd often rush outside late in the day to try and find something wild to photograph. (Often, I had to find a bug on the sidewalk or something.)
After I lost the streak, I decided that I was too tired to try and start it up again, so I quit trying to put a picture on the platform every single day (though I do return now and then to do some IDing). I'm excited to go to a place with different plants and take a fuck ton of pictures again. I do find it quite enjoyable, even if I can't keep it up all the time. I think I'll also appreciate taking pictures of plants I do not already know well.
This is also going to be my first long-distance road trip since my early years in LA. The year I moved to LA, I drove between LA and my old home in the Bay Area five separate times, mostly over the course of, I think, three separate work trips. (One of the other two was for 2015 Indiecade.) I used those trips to bring a lot of my stuff down to my new apartment by hand, which saved an insane amount of shipping cost. But those trips were all only about six hours long! Driving to Santa Fe will be more like twelve hours!
Anyway, I'm excited. I can't say that taking any vacation at all right now is a great idea, but at the very least I'm not using air travel, so I won't be subject to the deranged airplane ticket price swings my friends have been telling me about. The world is insane right now!!! But I want to see the desert, goddamn it. It's right over there. It's not that far away!