Roadtripping 101, part I: Auspicious Beginnings
Every now and then, God drops a person into my life like a flash flood -- out of nowhere, huge impact, gone just as fast. Normally the meeting is random, and the chemistry is instant. It doesn't happen often. oceanic was a great example of that. Recently, it happened again with Liz.
In a nutshell, Liz is a beautiful, sharp-witted, well-grounded 20-something woman from Cork, Ireland. She has a degree in golf course maintenance and she travels the world working on courses, living in gorgeous places and spending most of her time outdoors doing honest work. She was enlisted in the army in Ireland, and has a love of firearms, a no-nonsense spine, and a thoughtful depth that I get along with swimmingly. We met at an archery range, and a week later you'd have thought we'd been friends for years. We bring out the mischief in each other, the kind of inspiration that lights a fire and makes you want to take on the world in well-storied ways.
So of course, a week or two later, she informed me she was moving to Vancouver. Why not? Sigh.
She also informed me that she was planning to make a real old-school roadtrip out of it, and that dammit I should take a week off and join her. And oh, I wanted to, but I couldn't take the time until May at the earliest, and she was heading west the first week of April.
Ever have one of those spontaneous moments when you don't really have the time, and you don't really have the money, and you really should tend to other things first, and it's not really the wisest idea, but it's really now or never? Yeah, I tend to jump on those. I haven't regretted it yet.
Thus it was that late one Friday, after drinking with her coworkers and having deep and meaningfuls in her boxed-up apartment, I booked tickets for the following weekend. Landing in San Jose Friday night, leaving Vancouver on Sunday evening. 1,083 miles of road in between.
Liz left on Sunday night, sent off from my place in style, with a dodgy Sebring and nothing but a laptop with Microsoft Streets and Maps software to get her to where she was going. Which, incidentally, was 1) The Badlands, 2) Yellowstone, 3) The Grand Canyon, and 4) Las Vegas, before arriving in San Jose. If she weren't so hardcore, and such a trooper, she never would have covered the ground to make all those stops and meet me in California on Friday. However, she is those things, and she arrived at my terminal about 5 minutes before I walked out the arrivals door.
The plan that I had hatched, with the help of oceanic and, oddly enough, Dave Shea, was to sleep on the plane, and be ready to drive through the night, up inland route 5. We could make it to Portland by the morning, scoop out to coastal route 101, and have some glorious Pacific Northwest scenery for a few hours. Then back in to 5, through Seattle, and then the last couple of hours to the Canadian border and Vancouver. Saturday night? We'll see where we are. Sunday, lunch with Dave and some orientation to the city, followed by my hasty departure. Ohhhh so little buffer zone. Does that ever bode well?
Well, the hitch turned out to be that Liz had her heart set on seeing the redwoods. So 101 it was, with no chance of reaching Portland by morning, and no longer any sense of how our timing was going to work out. After a quick stop in San Francisco for dinner, a latte with 6 shots of espresso, and a pack of cigarettes in case I started to fall asleep, we got underway.
