I have not posted in two weeks because I am now home, the Whatever Journey on a brief hold. I cut my trip short by a week in order to tend to my feline friend left home alone and, more selfishly, to catch my breath. Van life is, at once, exciting, amazing, unpredictable and exhausting—and has left me a bit breathless. All along, my plan was to journey down through Arizona, New Mexico, then to Joshua Tree and back to the Los Angeles area. Storms through Arizona forced me to travel faster than I would have liked, but offered up some dramatic backdrops as I drove through Monument Park surrounded by fork lightning, eerily grey/green skies and low clouds that draped themselves over the enormous red rock buttes and towers. (To underscore just how scary this portion of travel was, I pulled over at one point and called my friend Donna to find out whether being in my van was a good thing or bad thing when it came to lightning.) From there, Willy and I made our way to Joshua Tree National Park, which in many ways, was the perfect exclamation point on our journey. It’s hard to describe this magical place, which is a meeting of two deserts—the Colorado and the Mojave—the former below 3,000 feet and the latter above. Each has a distinct eco-system, which translated into two very different looks and feels. In order to take it all in, we stayed five days, two on the Colorado side and three on the Mojave side, exploring volcanic rock formations, ancient plants, oases, and the myriad lizards, tarantulas and similar creepy crawlies. Oh, but the nights—they were the main attraction. The skies were teeming with constellations and shooting stars, and the grounds with coyotes, which circled the campgrounds every night. Willy, my self-assigned protector, didn’t quite know what to do with them as they ran by our van yipping and howling. He would offer up a perfunctory bark and growl, but quickly resigned himself to the fact that he was better off in the van. Coyote sounds are other-worldly, and rather intimidating, scaring our bladders into inactivity until daylight.

From Joshua Tree, we made the short trip back to where it all started, in Thousand Oaks, Calif., with my nutty West Coast family. These are my friends who, three months prior, taught me the ropes on van camping, themselves avid campers armed with a Eurovan and Minnie Winnie. Nine thousand miles and 86 days later, I had come full circle.