Useful Daydreaming

The line between my work and play has long been more than a little fuzzy, but lately it would be tough to separate daydreaming and doing my job. A few days ago I mentioned the Rebel Trout Trek, which my 10-year-old son Asher and I will be taking together this summer. Because summer lodging fills up early in many of those cool Western mountain places that we'll be visiting, now is the time to make reservations. Because one stop leads to another, I sort of needed stops laid our fairly well in order to start reserving rooms. Therefore I've been doing a lot of gazing at Google maps and reading about places like the Madison River, California's Eastern Sierra and various little lakes in the Colorado Rockies. And being pretty bitten by the trout bug, I can't really read about places like that without finding myself doing more than a little daydreaming.

Although I've been planning this trip for a while, and the whole route has been of my own design (with valuable input from friends who have fished some of the same waters) I don't think it has quite sunk in how many "bucket list" places Asher and I are going to get to sample in a few weeks. The river names are legendary. Madison, Big Hole, North Platte, Deschutes, Sacramento, Owens, Provo... Just to name a few.

Of course, I don't expect my bucket list to get shorter. It'll actually get longer because of the regions we'll see only quick samples of and the waters we'll pass near enough to learn about but not have time to fish. That's not a complaint. In fact it's a good thing. Next time I'll know better what I want to see more of, and I'm guessing it will be a more targeted trip back to one or two of the areas Asher and I will visit this summer.

There I go again. I'm more than four months out from this summer's travel, and I'm already daydreaming about the next trip!

#RebelTroutTrek