Mr. Pencil and I have reached a beautiful equilibrium of joint travel. This year’s week in the American Southwest was a perfect synthesis of this: the traits that make travel broadening for me, the wildness of David’s exploratory whims and the driving curiosity that spurs us both.

Both of us love to be outside, to learn about the new things around us, to seek out the secrets and the quiet things about the land we’re in. David has a stripe of exploratory bravado: off-roading, surmounting tall obstacles, fifteen-mile hikes. I seek culture: This trip’s obsessions were pictographs and ancient native civilizations. The pull-and-push of David’s sturdiness versus my occasional yen for the urbane come off as great adventures. This trip included a scampering, pouncing and sand-dusty trek up one of the most beautiful and isolated slot canyons imaginable, as well as sun-warmed reclining with cucumbers on eyes in the spa of a 5-star Reno resort. Variation keeps us happy, keeps us excited.

Wonderful, rock-top camping

We do have some consistent tricks of our trade, and this trip helped us cement our next phase of exploration tactics. Required always: 4WD vehicle and good-scale atlas maps of the terrain (our personal preference are Benchmark Maps; DeLorme atlases are decent, but Benchmark’s representation of information hierarchy is nicer, and they’re based in Medford, Ore.). David’s excellent ability to engage strangers in various locales (and to think he’s nominally an introvert! I’m terrified of strangers, socially) gains us hints of little-known wonders. I tend to bring books and buy them along the way: geological backgrounds, decoder references for rock art. I want to learn, learn, learn and see. We do a lot of that, with me trying to keep my camera–it tends to swing on its strap like a pendulum both fragile and weighty–from flinging itself into the rock I’m jumping from. I think it might be time for a harness-like attachment.

Our travel epiphany: We don’t need to act like we’re going on an epic backpacking odyssey. We have our car. We’re slowly jettisoning our (well, mostly David’s) elite alpine gear–tiny tents, compact sleeping bags, delicate and inter-nesting minimal cookware. Instead we have adjusted into the balance of exploratory, but car-based camping. This trip we took a bigger tent, almost big enough to stand in, with a solid footprint. We brought a queen-sized aero-bed that could be inflated in less than a minute using the power inverter in our car. We’re starting to re-stock our “camping box” with actual cooking implements and pans. Why not? We were still able to camp on the top of a mountain-like rock. We camped on the beach at Lake Powell. We still had a fire, we still wore headlamps and warm fleece. But when it came time for retiring: normal bedding on a queen-sized bed. I gotta say.

At some point on this trip David and I realized that we are the ideal Subaru demographic. Not the actual demographic, necessarily, but the stream-fording, off-roading, beach-camping, adventuring idealized commercial lifestyle. Is that good? Is it bad? I know not.

The Subaru lifestyle at Lake Powell. The Subaru is acting as a windbreak. It was a tempest.