Note to self: don’t introduce your father to any other fast food chains. Also, getting lost is sometimes the best thing that can happen to you…

My father fell in love with Taco Bell. I’ll say it again; he hates fast food. Yet somehow, the night before we headed out to Antelope Island, he fell in love with the food at Taco Bell.

My father also fell in love with IHOP. The morning after our stay in Salt Lake City, before Antelope Island and then starting our 300-mile drive to a tiny campground near Alta, Wyoming, he finished his plate with pancakes, bacon, and whatever else he had there within only a few minutes.

My father seemed to have fallen in love with life all over again, too…

The radio played as we were making our way across Idaho and when we caught our first glimpse of the Tetons standing tall behind green rolling fields.

We didn’t talk much. As was driving, each of us seemed to be lost in our own thoughts. Usually, back at “home”, that would mean trouble. However, today… I could see my father smiling as he was looking out of the window at the farms and hills passing by. I could hear my mother humming the melody of a song that played from the CD they brought with them from Czech.

I could tell that, somehow, we were all healing. Slowly, probably without knowing it – but we were.

We drove on the state border on North Sateline Road, Wyoming to the left, Idaho to the right. “Welcome to Alta,” the sign read. A cowboy hat sat on the top of the signpost and the Grand Teton peaked out from behind the woods. Around, horses were grazing in the green pastures and wooden hoses were spread far from each other. A sudden wave of simple happiness ran through me. And I knew that another place found its way onto the ‘places where I would love to live one day’ list.

We were about 30 minutes away from our campground. Well, we were supposed to be about 30 minutes away – if I didn’t miss the turn. I didn’t realize that I missed it until we made it to the very end of the road – to Grand Targhee Resort – and couldn’t go any farther. We’ve climbed our way up a mountain. Only then did I check the map and realized that I should have turned off the road down in the valley already.

It didn’t matter. Actually, we were all kind of happy that I missed the turn. Thanks to that, we got to see beautiful views with Grand Teton dominating the horizon behind the dense woodland. We got to see wildflowers and signs that read “share the road” with pictographs of not only cars and bicycles, but deer and hikers, too, and on one of them, someone put a sticker of a pictograph of a snowboarder.

The colors of the world seemed almost unreal there. The sky was the bluest blue I’ve ever seen. The dense wood was dark calm green and the mountain and the road itself were this vibrant tint of grey. I’ve never thought I’d ever describe grey as vibrant, but there it was, as beautiful as any other colour. The snow that dappled the mountaintops was the perfect white of the clouds peacefully sailing through the sky.

We took our sweet time heading back to the valley. Nobody minded that we took the wrong turn (or, rather, didn’t take the turn we were supposed to take).

That day, we got lost each in our own thoughts. That day, we got lost in the beauty of the land. That day, we also got a little lost on the road. But it was all well worth it. It helped us heal, just a little. Sometimes, getting lost can be well worth it. Try it.

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Thank you for choosing to spend your time joining us on the road. The previous post is right HERE. The following post from this road trip will be HERE as soon as it gets published!

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And have a day full of getting beautifully lost! 🙂