If you goGetting there: Mapping out a drivingtour of the West is easy using nationalparks as pivot points. A current atlasis essential, and National Park Servicemaps are also helpful. Often there areseasonable or construction delays thatonly a visit to the park's Web site orthe Ranger Station will bring to yourattention. For Antelope Canyon, headto Page, Ariz., enjoy the beauty ofGlenn Canyon Dam and book yourtour. There are numerous tourcompanies; one is Grand Circle

How our family hit the road and, in a sense,never came backWeb Posted: 07/09/2006 12:00 AM CDT

(Photos by Winter D. Prosapio/Special to the Express-News)

Sunlight glows on the curving walls of Antelope Canyon in Arizona, aslot canyon shaped by flash floods. It's off the beaten track near GlenCanyon Dam.

Winter D. ProsapioSpecial to the Express-News

I'd never taken more than a long weekend off, never camped formore than a couple of days. Yet somehow the decision to take theentire summer off as a sabbatical and travel the West for 90 days inan old Airstream travel trailer with two dogs, a cat and two children(2- and 6-year-olds) seemed completely reasonable. I needed avacation that bad.

Every single person I told about the trip was both envious andhorrified. "You're braver than I am," I heard more than once, until itgot to the point that I wondered if my husband, Adam, and I hadgone completely insane. No television, no baby-sitters, no Wi-Fi, no

companies; one is Grand CircleTours/Antelope Canyon Tours(www.antelopecanyon.com)What to watch out for: Rangerprograms. Check in at the RangerStation before taking a single step intothe park and get a list of all theprogramming taking place. Not onlywill you get a list for your JuniorRanger to start on, you'll also getadvice on making the most of yourvisit.Traveling between and within nationalparks often means no cell service orInternet access. If you absolutely mustconnect, stop in the largest communitybeforehand to get online and on thephone.Where to stay: RV parks provide fullhookups and almost always haveavailability. You can purchase 2006Woodall's Campground Directory atCamping World(www.campingworld.com). It was alifesaver, and no Internet site was asextensive. The best commercial RVparks for families were the JellystoneParks, complete with Yogi andBooBoo. National Park Service has areservation system online (NPRS)(reservations.nps.gov) or you can call(800) 365-CAMP. For some reason,on the 5th, 15th, and 25th of eachmonth the NPRS Call Center handlesan enormous number of calls, so ifyou call on those dates, expect adelay. You'll need a credit card toreserve a site. The Bureau of LandManagement provides great campinglocations for a very low cost. Butfinding them can be a challenge.Check out www.recreation.gov aheadof time to find good potentiallocations on your route. Print outmaterial or save it on your computerbefore you go, it's unlikely you'll haveeasy Internet access.Where to eat: The National ParkService does nearly everything right — but it can't cook to save its life.One notable exception was the grill at

summer camp. No way we'd all make it back alive.

Eleven weeks later, I didn't want to come back. We had becomefull-fledged gypsies, traveling effortlessly from place to place. Ourroad journal of the trip chronicled not just the sights we saw but alsothe transformation that takes place when you travel well outside yourcomfort zone.

We hit the road on June 1, 2005. We had arranged to rent out ourCanyon Lake home while we were gone, filling it with people whowere on their own vacations.

Of course, just getting out of Texas was like tearing free of theEarth's gravitational pull — it took a considerable amount of fuel andmomentum. The bulk of our travels lay outside the state, so we wereeager to hit the border.

In Pecos, we pulled into what would be the first of many RV parks,and unloaded like ants stirred from the nest. Dogs on leashes, cat ona leash (loudly meowing, protesting at being treated like a DOG),our daughters bouncing off each other with unspent energy. We allhad our jobs — Sierra, the oldest, was right at it with me, loweringthe stabilizers on the RV; Mireya, her sister, was running aroundunpacking things that didn't need to be unpacked; Adam washooking us up to our magic triad — power, water and sewage. TheParadise of the full hookup. This first stop took us over an hour, aprocess we'd have down to 20 minutes in a few weeks.

We walked out that first night under the desert sky before going tobed, talking about the constellations. I showed Sierra the greatsquare of Pegasus and the Big Dipper; but even in Pecos, since wewere so close to the highway and with the odd lighthouse-likesearchlight the RV park employed, the light pollution washed out thesky. Just wait, I said, we'll be in real stars soon enough.

We crossed into New Mexico with a stop in Albuquerque to visitfamily. It was our last house to stay in before we committed to livingin 26 feet full time. From here on out we'd stop after every fourhours on the road. After a few days we loaded up, confident the wayonly parents of small children can fake.

We were making a slow and steady journey to our first main stop —the Grand Canyon. The official tourism rest area in Arizona hadbrochures with stunning photos but curious language — "our Navajoguides will welcome you." I wondered if everyone had accepted thenotion of the West as settled territory.

It turned surreal with dinosaurs along I-40. Statues of '50s-styledinosaurs flank the highway, mouths open in what I supposed was athreatening posture. It looked more like they were hacking up aprehistoric fur ball (one of our ancestors, no doubt). I imagined

One notable exception was the grill atthe Watchtower in the Grand Canyon.The best place to eat will very likelybe your own campsite.More CoverageRVing with kids (surprise!) can be fun

Vintage Airstream travel trailersmaintain their roadworthiness, evenwhen they hit 30.

paleontologists would drive by here and bury their faces in theirhands.

We stopped at the Petrified Forest and began a summer-long stint asRanger Program geeks. We'd stumbled onto a talk on hieroglyphsand learned so much more: theories on why the Anasazi disappeared(Did the plague come through North America? Is that why virtuallynone of their culture survived?), why hieroglyphs are unlikely formsof ancient graffiti (it took days to make the most simple design) andmost important, how our 6-year-old could earn a badge as a JuniorRanger.

Now, at every stop, she had a goal to learn about the natural worldaround us.

The Grand Canyon

It was nearly a week before I could put words to the experience ofthe Grand Canyon. Probably because, for me, it wasn't about size, itwas about complexity. The Grand Canyon wasn't just one place. Inmy mind it was a huge family, filled with a wide variety ofpersonalities, faces and stories.

I never realized it would be so green; that the Colorado would looklike an olive-colored snake winding its way among noble canyonwalls. Towering ponderosa pines shade the trails along the rim, rootsstretching out over the rocks, relaxing like vacationing retirees.

The brilliant blue skies overhead played second fiddle to thesymphony of color and texture below. We could have spent ourentire sabbatical here, sketching sunsets at Hopi point, having our lunch stolen by clever squirrels, seeingelk the size of pickup trucks wandering casually through our campsite.

It was here our daughters made their first friends, watched the stars pierce the sky like lasers, and set uptheir first official sisters' camp. They were thoroughly hooked.

Yet the greatest wonder was still ahead in a place we never planned to go — Antelope Canyon.

Antelope Canyon

Sometimes it was the places in between that gave us our greatest gifts.

Antelope Canyon is the place you always see on outdoor calendars of the West — sweeping orange rock ina narrow slit canyon with shafts of light spilling down the graceful curves, creating a glow that must beexperienced in person.

Our tour guide from Great Circle Tours, Jesse, was a self-described old buzzard. As we very nearly swamup a dry creek bed of red sand in a dusty Suburban, he filled us in on his own history as well as that of thearea.

Antelope Canyon changes with every rainfall. It's a place where an inch of rain can mean the narrow slotcanyon has 10 feet of water flowing through it. The sandstone changes shapes as if rocks were still dunes,

and the ground at your feet is covered in fine sand as soft as moss.

When we entered the canyon, every step was a wonder. Walls of rock looked more like sheer curtainscaught in a late afternoon breeze, golden and soft with thin lines of thread running through. In places theshapes became so complex you struggled to understand what you were seeing. This simply could not berock. Rock does not glow. It does not form dancing curves. This had to be water — or rather, the inverse ofwater's flow. A mold shaped by the medium instead of the other way around.

Sierra and Mireya loved the soft sand and stopped repeatedly to sift it through their fingers and into a hat.When the guides tossed the impossibly fine sand in the air to allow our cameras to capture shafts of light,Sierra was impressed by how the dust would swirl up toward the ceiling.

"The sand," she said, "it goes up! It flies!"

That night a storm came in, and I dreamed of flowing waters, golden walls and sand as soft as a warmbreeze.

The next morning we headed for Utah and the land changed around us again. Orange red buttes rose upfrom the desert floor in Monument Valley in Navajo Country. The sky was a brilliant blue, with perfectwhite clouds scattered around like popcorn. Along the way we stopped in Mexican Hat, where the Coloradoturned gold in the evening light sweeping through the canyons.

Because the white sand reflects heat, you can climb the dunes at WhiteSands, N.M., even in 90-degree weather.

Arches National Park

Sierra made friends again when we stopped for a few nights just outside of Arches, in Moab, Utah, andAdam met the other Airstreamer in the RV Park. He was Richard Clark, a film editor from New Zealand(www.kiwicafe.com), with whom we still stay in touch.

I was continually amazed that we never seemed to have a chance to get bored. The kids weren't getting tosleep until 10 at night and were up at 8. I had boxes of activities and toys that were never unpacked becauseI hadn't heard those two little words — "I'm bored!"

We were doing something right here. I just didn't have a clue as to what.

Arches was the most otherworldly place we'd been to, yet something about it was so familiar. Much of thelandscape looked like the pottery of children, lovingly shaped, slanted, thick slabs of clay.

It was the size of things that was most mind-boggling. You'd hike up to an arch for a closer look and betterpicture, then couldn't begin to fill your viewfinder with it. Sapphire blue skies gleamed through golden redrock. Everywhere there were things to climb, and the sisters scrambled over boulders and up crevices.

Our next big stop was Colorado's Rocky Mountain National Park for a big family reunion, but we had a fewstops to make. We camped on Bureau of Land Management lands, the sisters covered themselves in thecool, glittering black mud of the Colorado, we picnicked at Dead Horse Canyon, and then we mapped ourway to the mountains.

The Rockies suddenly rippled before us and our trailer seemed like a huge weight as we made our way toRocky Mountain National Park. We crawled up mountains, then screamed down them on the other side.

Pine trees and water. After nearly a month in the desert and scrub we were immersed in forest. Mountainswere no longer distant features; we climbed into their laps, jumped onto their shoulders and looked out atthe ranges that stretched beyond our vision.

The national park is very protective of wildlife, with zones where you are not even allowed to stop your car,lest you disturb the animals. It was as if we were paparazzi stalking a celebrity at the Oscars.

Our wildlife scorecard was incredible since we'd begun this trip. Too many elk to count, a coyote mom andher pups, pikas (chipmunks-like rodents) at every turn, black-billed magpies checking for crumbs, marmots(groundhog-like rodents) and bighorn sheep.

Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado features magnificent cliffdwellings built by the Anasazi people.

Snow in July

On July 1 we were playing in snow on the top of the Continental Divide. We drove up the just-opened FallRiver Road, played in an Alpine hillside, slid down a patch of snow, and felt dizzy and lightheaded at11,000-plus feet.

After lunch we cruised down and saw bighorn sheep, standing perfectly still as if they were a museumexhibit. Then we came across three huge velvet-horned bull elks, lying in the sunshine looking like gasstation mechanics on a smoke break. In a few months they'll be full of testosterone, slamming into eachother over the does, but that day in July they were Alpine bums, hanging out with their backs to the ruggedsnow-capped mountains.

We got caught in a hailstorm during a hike and headed for the truck as if we were under fierce attack. Andwhile we laughed about our "adventure" once we were in the nice warm truck, I was keenly aware that theelk and the bighorn sheep just accept the sleet, rain and snow as a normal part of their day.

I don't think I would've appreciated this forest as a wild place without them. I wouldn't understand howdifferent it is from my world of roofs and doors. Wild is life within the elements; it is an intimacy with thelandscape that, no matter how primitive we attempt to be, we can never match. We can only get the briefestglimpse of it, yet within that glimpse is tremendous magic.

The reunion ended and our extended family flew back to their corners of the world, but we were justhalfway through our trip. We decided, spontaneously, to head for Wyoming.

Yellowstone

Wyoming felt like Texas, which may be why we enjoyed traveling through it so much. But then we arrivedin Yellowstone, and we entered beauty overload. The lodge pole pines at our campsite were ridiculously tall,thin pines — the supermodels of the pine forest. They stood incredibly straight, their height accented evenmore by the fact that they lose their lower branches as they grow. So, like an army of supermodels on 6-inchheels, they stood in narrow rows. It was easy to get lost among them, like a child at a dinner party where allthe legs look alike.

It took a long time to get anywhere in Yellowstone. The park is huge, literally millions of acres, and itdoesn't feel the need to clump its adventure into one spot. We were staying near the lake; the nearestgeysers were a 35-minute drive away; the canyon, over an hour.

We realized we could have spent our entire vacation here. It was exactly the kind of forest you dreamed ofvisiting — even with the damage from the fire that ripped through it 10 years ago.

We had seen so much beautiful country on this trip that at one point we felt we were beyond appreciating it.From mountains to wildlife, from waterfalls to creek beds, we had seen raw, achingly beautiful places thatdrain adjectives from you. We'd immersed ourselves in water so clear that only the icy coldness remindedyou that yes, your feet were in water. We'd camped beneath pines that surrounded us, their orange barkoozing a sweet smell in the night air. Geysers. Waterfalls. Cliffs. Forests.

You run out of places in your mind for this. The Grand Canyon. The Rockies. Antelope Canyon. Arches.Yellowstone. My God, I thought at one point, it's amazing that our brain hasn't just imploded from wonder.

Then we got to the Grand Tetons. Forget everything about everywhere we've been, I e-mailed my friends.Forget the waterfalls, the red arches, the canyon walls, the golden streams. Forget the geysers, the rainbowedmineral hot springs, the wild buffalo, elk and coyotes.

We were now in the most beautiful place of all.

Grand Tetons

You've probably seen dozens of pictures of the Tetons, of mountains rising from a pristine lake. Photos donot do it justice.

It reminded me of the experience I had with Van Gogh's "Starry Night." I had seen photos of the painting indozens of books and seen poster reproductions. I'd appreciated its beauty the way you would a postcard or abackdrop in a movie. It's not real, it's flat and deprived of presence.

Then I saw it in person and was completely blown away. I could feel the breathtaking expression of it, thephysical power of the painting the way photos could never convey. This was our experience of the GrandTetons. In person it was a regal, powerful and cleansing place. We dived into the snowmelt lakes, we rowedacross Lake Jenny, we stayed a week when we planned to stay a day. But there was another reason welingered.

This was our final stop north. It was time to head back home.

Homeward bound

The road home took us through the bright orange mountains of Ouray, Colo., rock climbing with our dearfriends in Durango, a walk through the moving dunes of White Sands, N.M., during sunset. But it wasdifferent—our mood had changed. Now we were talking about how many days we had before we got homeand what we needed to do when we got there.

While the girls were excited to go home to the "big" house, Adam and I were reluctant. I'd discovered myinner gypsy, or perhaps she had usurped me. I had my wagon, I had my traveling spirit, and I wasn't lookingforward to staying still anymore.

Somehow in the unfolding of those days on the road, our sabbatical had done what I never imagined waspossible. It dramatically changed our outlook on life, reordered our priorities and made us more complete inour understanding of ourselves. The gypsy has stayed, and with her the lessons of the road have becomepart of our life. Lighten your load. Keep your surroundings simple. Sing to each other. Laugh from yourbelly. Forgive quickly. Be together.

And get out there.

Winter Prosapio is a freelance writer living in Canyon Lake. She is working on a book about her travels.

Online at: http://www.mysanantonio.com/salife/travel/stories/MYSA070906.1Q.summer.gypsies.3fbff2e.html