Six Days of Solitude- Destination 1- Palisade

Adventurers: MeDuration and Difficulty: N/A. Trailhead: N/ANotes: I had worked too many days during the summer so I had to find time to take leave later in the year. The only downside was that since these days were during the school year, I couldn't find anyone who could go with me, so I embraced that idea and enjoyed six days of solitude. I left Saturday morning to drive to other side of the state to start my journey. I hit horrendous traffic which added two hours onto my already long drive. (See traffic selfie above) However, I was so jazzed about the adventure that was before me, I wasn't really bothered by the wait. Due to this added drive time, I arrived after dark which made things a bit more challenging. Being in the dark, on a remote BLM road, while pulling a pop-up could have been disastrous but I lucked out and found somewhere to camp that only involved a small amount of scraping.

After only about an hour of sleep I heard a loud pick-up truck pull up near me. Keeping in mind that I'm in the middle of nowhere at this point, you can imagine the butterflies that quickly overtook my stomach. When a dark figure got our of the truck and began to approach my car, I decided to take the "kill them with kindness" approach instead of the "kill them with my shoe" approach. It worked well because as soon as the dark figure heard my voice, it was clear that he was just as nervous as I was. However, he was clearly more drunk. :)

"Mam, were fixin' to have a party with about 30 people, can we have it here?"

"Um, where would I go?"

"You can party with us, I swear I"m of age."

"thanks but I'm too old to party in the dessert."

"Well, do you care if we party here?"

"Um, where should I go?"

---silence---

"Okay, I'll go."

"Thanks mam, you can come back to party if you change your mind, we have a lot of beer."

I drove down to a small turnoff that had been occupied earlier but lucky for me, they left. After trying to fall back to sleep as several more loud trucks drove by and tunes that would not have been my choice were blaring, I began to think about the future. What would happen, at 2a.m. when they were all leaving? Would they, with their drunken logic, come knocking on my car to thank me for moving? To no avail, I couldn't stop thinking about this so I hopped over