Just a week ago, I was sitting on a large rock nine thousand feet above sea level on the side of a dormant volcano in California, with a spectacular view of high mountain lakes, and fields of pink-striped snow beneath me, and the Sierra Nevadas fading blue in the distance to the south.   It was a view, and a perch, that I had never expected to acquire, and couldn’t have imagined at the start of a “wing it” vacation with my eighteen-year-old son only days before.

 But there I sat anyway, with solitude and grandeur and incredibly clear air surrounding me, marveling that all had sparked this particular journey was five minutes of conversation with a couple from California at a scenic overlook in Yosemite who suggested that a visit to Lassen Volcanic National Park shouldn’t be passed up.

 Tennessee William’s tragic character, Blanche DuBois, got at least one thing right in A Streetcar Named Desire, I thought as I watched a red-tailed hawk fly past at eye level and basked in the sun, waiting for my son to nimbly conquer the summit and bring back pictures. Depending on “the kindness of strangers”—at least while traveling—can often turn out pretty well.

 I’ve made it a family tradition to take each of my children somewhere interesting “out West” for a week before they leave for college, and now this was the “caboose baby’s” turn. After summer ends, I’ll have an empty nest, and a lot of things in my universe will change. But this pre-college trip had been a fixture for years. With the older three, I had managed to visit the Grand Tetons, the South Dakota Badlands, the Grand Canyon (and rafted down it as well), the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas, red rock canyons near Sedona, Arizona, and Bryce Canyon and Zion National Parks in southern Utah.

 The one thing that characterized the earlier trips, though, aside from a lot of hiking, was that I usually had a pretty good idea of where we’d be staying most nights. National parks, Indian reservations, hotels, they were usually waiting for us, guaranteed long before with a credit card.

 This trip was a bit different, though. For one thing, we were headed for the West Coast, which was absolutely unfamiliar territory to me. For another, I’d been juggling too many plates in the air to rough out any sort of an itinerary or do more than flip through the travel guides at night right before falling asleep. Two weeks before we left I finally booked us our first three nights near Yosemite National Park, and figured we’d wing it after that for the next six. Flying into San Francisco, flying out of Portland, heck, we’d surely find something to do in between!  This was the most seat-of-the-pants adventure I’d undertaken in years.

 I think that the older I get past…let’s say thirty…the less I need to reinvent the wheel to discover something interesting, and the more often I ask other people what they’ve already found. I first put this theory into practice last year, when I hit the wall in frustration at the length and ferocity of a Midwestern winter, phoned a friend a couple of states over who was beset by the same malaise, and arranged to meet in Peoria for a mad dash to the Gulf of Mexico and a couple of days of some coastal warmth. I took the path of least resistance and the advice of a gal who works in my courthouse, and booked us a room in Gulf Shores, Alabama, which was a perfect destination. Asked at the Tourist Information office what the favorite beach was of the clerk at the counter, and parked ourselves there with our picnic lunch, lazing like lizards in the sunlight and kneading the squeaky, perfectly soft sand under our fingers. Asked an elderly guy at the beach who looked like a local where we’d find a good seafood dinner, and followed his advice right on up the street and into the restaurant he’d pointed out. We weren’t disappointed at any turn.