the Malaysian Cowboy

(the main video)

(the epilogue, of sorts)

Today’s Flickr Gallery | August 2nd: Dallas to Houston-HOME!

Over the course of this trip, I’d gotten used to heading out on the road at progressively later times. While the first day started with me leaving home at the ripe hour of 5:30, I left yesterday for Dallas at only 11 am. Granted, not all drives were the same length, but, I’m pretty sure as the days wore on and I became progressively tired, I made up for that by getting just a little more shut eye when I could. Today was, however, a bit different: I was headed home!

Leaving Rebecca’s place at the ripe hour of 8:30, I made one stop for gas along the way, but otherwise pressed on. As such, I’m going to leave most of the explanation to the video above, and the epilogue below, which will end up doing most of the heavy lifting in this post.

All told, once home I snapped a shot of the GPS totals for the miles travelled, hours driven, and all the other fun stuff. 4,685 miles. It’s only four simple digits, but behind that number’s an awesome, truly memorable trip.

Emptying my bags later, I laid out all the tangible souvenirs I had accumulated over the course of the trip. A little bit of a mess, but it definitely tells part of the story. Much later, Keesh and I popped a bottle of champagne Mom had gotten for my return

In a way, it feels weird that I’m not going to be continuing with the onslaught of daily videos, photos and blog posts. For a long time I talked mightily of it but wasn’t quite sure myself whether I would actually follow through. Now that I’ve done it, what I can tell you, is that sometimes you just have to do something without thinking too much about it. I can hardly do justice to it all with just a few simple sentences, so rather than try, I’ll leave you with a massive thank you to everyone that made this trip possible, big and large: Mom, Dad, Keesh, my friends Rafaela, Julia and Rebecca, and everyone else that I’ve talked to about this trip either before, during, or after. It was a blast. Thanks for reading and keeping up with my blog, and if you ever do find yourself bored at random other points in the future, chances are I’ll be here blogging, so feel free to come back. For now, this cowboy’s signing off!

Today’s Flickr Gallery | July 26th: Las Vegas to Green River, UT

After a good amount of sleep, I woke up this morning and figured I needed a bit of a different breakfast. And by different I mean I had myself some of that Tazo tea I keep seeing everywhere with my cereal, along with a muffin. My nerves and head had been a bit shaken by the heat, tiredness, and general malaise that Vegas seems to give off when you’re walking around. I can’t say if the tea helped, but I definitely was able to brush off that tiredness relatively quickly.

On my way back to the room, I got a text from Dad telling me it’d be prudent to do the usual checks on the car. I generally check the tire pressure every other day, but I figured the oil, coolant level, and washer fluid might as well be added into the mix, since I hadn’t looked at any of them since leaving Houston. As it turned out, it appeared the coolant in the car was just a smidge low—not low enough to set off the alert in the car, but it still looked a bit off to me. Theoretically, it could have been this low all the while I’d been driving (after all, how often does your coolant just vanish into thin air?), but with the 115˚ weather yesterday, I had already seen three cars sidelined with smoke billowing from the hood, so I wanted to be safe. Despite my writings to the contrary in the prior post, I was fortunate to be in a city as large as Vegas, as it made finding a dealer for BMW coolant very easy.

So, after about an hour of scrambling and a trip to get the coolant, I was finally ready to make a move for Green River.

The drive through the desert was relatively straightforward, as I headed northeast on I-15.

I passed through Arizona for about half an hour, during which time I found some more canyons and desert, stopping to take some shots…

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Plans

If the depth of your well
Is defined by the length of your thought,
Understand that it’s in the complacency of our days
That we often calculate our trajectories.

With anxious negotiation
That forgoes a level of reassurance,
It’s easy to confuse nascent attempts at progress
With deepening regress.

Indeed,
Of moments taken at face value,
We’re often astounded at the little which appears.
Drawn, instead, to our ever-present fears.

Surely the day will come
When your clarity is once again restored.

When clouds that were once barriers
to such lofty considerations,
Will find themselves porous,
Bringing water that will

surely ease
the journey to the top.

Oh, of plans, it must be said,
They are made to endure.

When I originally wrote this, I must confess I was mostly concerned with deriving some self-confidence, rather than making it any sort of commentary on life.

Having said that, the more I consider the events around me, I continue to find myself returning to those last two lines. As I look around this sprawling college campus, I see a sea of people: some know exactly what track they’re on, while others are barely hanging on, struggling for stability and direction. Regardless, what keeps everyone going, fundamentally speaking, is the notion that just as the past has come and done it’s bidding, the future—be it a minute from now, a year from tomorrow, or a decade from graduation—holds a significant amount of potential.

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