Vacations Recap 1
Alternate Title: And Now For Something Comprehensible
So, we drove to California.
.
The night before we went shopping for a host of raw vegetables. The car was loaded with a folding tent, air mattress, sleeping bags, five identical plastic bags with food and utensils, the water carrier, the ice chest, two suitcases, five CD jackets, and the engagement ring stashed inside a knotted tarp at the bottom of my Emergency Car Box. Also the spare tire, which I had an amnesia attack as to the status of in Nevada. and it was hilarious.. sometime after Nevada.
Packing took a long time and I put it off. There was agonizing over which hardcover books would fit in my one backpack allowed. And several hours not only last-minute CD burning, but last minute downloading. Not to mention the staying up all night trying to finish System Shock 2. This led to us leaving at about 1 PM instead of 8AM or so.
That was made possible, or at least not a bone-crushingly tiring error, by my decision two days ago to skip Seattle, which gave us three days each way to go there and back, no problem. That in turn was made possible by getting last-minute cancellations on two separate Seattle housing offers. And that was a good thing. I stopped being bothered by that when it became clear that it was probably a blessing in disguise. Though the 12-hour driving days looked easy enough on the map to make my testosterone twitch - (back in the day, you didn't pick cities to *stop* in ahead of time, you just pulled over when no one was safe to drive) (and that only happened every *other* day) - they were still fairly tiring.
We left, forgetting the pump to our air mattress, and didn't realize it for days. Our first stop was to Wallmart. I bought a dippy fan that never came out of the box and a variety of snacks. The best thing of the greedy, visceral type about the trip was the snacks. We're usually pretty snack-restrained around here. Even going cheap, healthy and Ashley-Friendly (dried fruit, pretzels, tortilla chips, etc), it was a rush. My Master Plan to keep expenses down included:
1. bring a cooler full of groceries for lunch for the week(s)
2. Camp.
3. Use my $250 in free gas cards I got from credit card reward points.
4. No gas station snacking.
We held to about one and a half of those, but anyway I got off to a bad start by forgetting that you can't just toss raw vegetables directly on top of the ice and expect them to be edible when the ice melts.
But that was all ahead as we zipped through the Spinach Capital of the World and the nuclear reactor on our way to the Oklahoma border. I tested out my first real-time microcassette trip self-recording in years and found myself funny. We pulled onto some bumpkin state highway in Oklamhoma for the sights and drove through worn-out downtowns, soy fields and farmstands. We re-entered the highway around the Muskogee turnoff. I bought a large stash of independently produced pork rinds. Ashley took the wheel, beginning her impressive streak of always being at the wheel when we drove into sunsets. Before that got uncomfortable, we drove through huge stormfronts in the Great Plains, with wind turbines stuttering across the few hills and catching the low sun. I took about 30 pictures.
Towards the very end of Restaurant Standard Time we drove all the way down a small Oklahoma main drag till the road ended at Lupe's Mexican Restaurant. I ate the first Mexican meal I can remember admitting I liked that had no fajitas. We got back on the road, over the Oklahoma border and into Amarillo, Texas, where it was too late to eat the 72-ounce steak (free if you eat it in under an hour) the billboards had been promising. Three or four tense loops around the highway and we gave up and went to a Motel 6, despite it not being the literally cheapest hotel around. This was our alledged One Hotel Night Per Half-Voyage, and this Motel 6 shall be known as the Good Motel 6. (The bad Motel 6 six story features insects). This motel 6 was ok, once the foolish people playing Korn in the parking lot went to sleep.
Day 2
We'd been up after midnight, and I let Ashley sleep while I bucked the car gently through flooded streets to Wallmart to refill the ice cooler. My cheese was wet and looked like a goner. Amarillo has turn-off lanes with wide gutters, and intermittent storm drains every 50 yards. It fitted the chilly, stormy sky. I sat in the front seat and tried to write, watching the a hand-painted van and its live-in occupant make breakfast. Eventually I woke Ashley, repacked the gear, and we made sandwiches in the crumbling expanse of pavement behind the motel. Then we checked out and re-roaded.
It didn't take long - within half an hour of Amarillo, I think, when the familiar vegetation dropped out like an elevator, and we were in scrubland. We were psyched over the change in vegetation and the entrance to the desert. I was so psyched that I decided to evacuate I-40 against and try to drive on "Old 66"- known well from Steinbeck, Kerouac, etc. A riddle: if 66 was "discontinued", as the tourist info said, then why were there signs for it every twenty minutes or so? The answer was that it seemed like every 20'th minute of it had been taken out. You could drive on it for about ten minutes and then you'd be forced back onto I-40. You could then get off again, if you wanted.
The 66-side diners and tourist traps in Eastern New Mexico aren't doing well. I helped them out in Techumetican, and again in Santa Rosa (ice cream!), but they're still probably in trouble. Several towns there seem to have been preserved in ice since 1958 - malt-shoppe architecture, missing letters, fake tropical decor, vintage automobiles. Everything except people in quantity. Worth seeing. So anyway we lost quite a bit of time bumbling on and off 40 until Ashley took the wheel just on the far side of Albequerque, which I remember as hot and ugly. Might have been the line at the truck stop. Life ain't fair. I bought a lot of fizzy drink and tried to nap off my headache. Ashley continued through very little habitation into Arizona as I plotted and re-plotted our gas stops, our likely arrival time, expenses to date. I also took a lot of pictures of scrub, low mesas that were one-upped by later scenery, and a rest stop with large signs warning of snake. Ashley drove upwards right into Flagstaff as the sun went down. Flagstaff shocked us with trees, alpine-tourism, visible young people, and a general mountain-hippie air. We eventually found Tara's apartment after several false starts. She had taken several days off to move to a bigger apartment from work and night school, and thus let us take her out to dinner. We looked up a steakhouse online, since I had been blithering about steak since missing out on the five-pounder in Amarillo. Our steakhouse had an attached trailer park and local theater students, I swear, who sang country the whole meal. Tara said they had college credit. I got tipsy, ate a huge steak and paid for everything. We went home and collapsed immediately on the bed Tara insisted we take. While Tara studied. I owe Tara a thank-you card and feel guilty weeks later about how little fun she got from our stopover. We didn't catch up much, either, between the eating and the passing out.
Day 3
In the morning Tara decided she couldn't lose half a day to go to the Grand Canyon, and I decided I could lose half a day and still make California (Ash wanted to see the canyon, and I didn't want to sleep till Cali). The drive up from Flagstaff was, for the first three miles, an irritating tangle of road construction. And then, for the next forty, surprisingly, touchingly pretty - a pine and white birch national forest amidst all the desert. We drove through a fake town with a Flinstones campground to match yesterday's dinosaur museum that Ash refused to stop at. Ash was great at not stopping for terribly tacky roadside tourism. I was very poor at it. Then we hit the Canyon National Park, gaining a weeklong license like the one I eventually had my sister trade to Adam Weinberg. We headed north to the first stop and parked well outside the full lot. The place wasn't really packed with tourists, because it's hard to pack the Canyon full of anything, but it was heavily populated. Ashley nearly dropped my camera into the canyon - it bounced once on the hard walkway and all the batteries and detachable bits went everywhere. The camera survived, though. We did a lot of staring in awe and I read a lot of wildlife info signs, which I like. Then we piled into the car and drove east along the rim. The traffic was mostly gone after a mile, and we ate lunch somewhere alongside the canyon, on some rocks, along a turn-off. The wind blew harshly into the gorge. Crows the size of my arm hopped boldly towards us and squawked for food.
We weren't supposed to feed them, so we turned around and left the canyon. We rejoined I-40 and entered a very unpopulated area, with the few gas stations marked in red. There was an empty, abandoned one for every successful Shell outpost. I don't remember much until the Arizona border, except the yellow sage thinning and shrinking until the border, where a large man-made lake brought a glimpse of green and even suburbia, though it never came closer than twenty miles. At the California border, a state checkpoint confiscated my green peppers. Apparently they sometimes carry some kind of fruit borer. Or something-borer. This was a bummer. It was very, very hot, over 110 F, and the gas prices rose to reflect the emptiness. I remember Needles, California, because you could see the whole town from the highway's slight elevation - and the desert opening out behind the town, into nothing. I hadn't seen that sight since I was about four.
Souther California near the Arizona is a wasteland. We drove about 100 miles before hitting .. Boltsville? Bartel? The entrance to 5, anyway, with another hundred miles or so to Bakersfield. I bought a cheap pair of shades and looked over my shoulder a lot. Ashley took the wheel and drove north on 5, at first through farms, tiny roads with hand-lettered farmstands, no customers, than through full-sized highway, then up some genuine mountains as the sun got serious about setting. The rocks lit the sun, and it seemed urgent to get to the top by dark. Eventually, in dusk, we descended into Bakersfield, big enough to make a sea of glittering lights. It felt like the real California was about to start. We ate IHOP and frowned at the remaining X hundred miles.
I drove the closing segment, and don't remember much. Flat, empty highway on 5. A strange burst of traffic when we connected to the populated coast, around midnight, full of crazy people just leaving work, or so I imagined. I remember mapquest taking me through the docks and airports of Oakland, around two in the morning, smoking heavily and feeling the alienness of the surroundings. Alameda, next door, had picture-perfect Sesame streets even at 245 AM, and we coasted to a stop in one of the cul-de-sacs and looked around in befuddlement for Adam's house. I found a key under a mat as promised, woke one of his roomates asleep on the couch, found Adam's empty room and collapsed in it.
Day 4.
Ashley and I woke late and went back to sleep. Woke later and cleaned Adam's kitchen. Met his roomates - a skinny caviar waiter and an amiable Kevin-Smith-lookalike stoner who gave me wrong directions to an oil change place. I left Ashley for more sleep while I wandered around downtown Alameda until I found someone who would charge me 55 dollars for an oil change in only two hours. They had to have the oil delivered. When the first place you they don't do oil changes, but that guy parked in the lot stop has his own place that you can follow his car to find, I recommend you politely decline.
I mean, he had a business card, but.. if I'd known how to find the main street again, I'd probably have walked out.
I eventually made it back home, and Ashley and I walked from the house down to Alameda's empty beach. It was at least forty degrees, maybe fifty, cooler than the desert and the wind lashed at our legs. In other words, it was totally inhospitable for sunbathing, so we walked. Found pretty rocks for each other - I meant to keep mine forever and didn't. We ate at a vegetarian restaurant with a menu full of substitute meat that totally fooled us until it was explained, and were set to curl up with a movie when Adam called to tell me he was going to miss his connecting train. So I left pretty much immediately for San Fransisco. I had one of those I-feel-exotic drives into late-night San Fran over bridges and along coasts. Got stuck in what I thought was a road being closed while I was driving it, as a cop wove back and forth across the road at ten miles per hour. Eventually found the airport. Adam and I talked about women and System of a Down until he fell asleep trying to direct me home. Eventually we made it home and crashed.
This is a lot of typing. Like, short-story-length. and my recovery software is finishing up (if I could meet Steve Jobs right now, I would kick him in the nuts). So I'll resume this later.. maybe.
So, we drove to California.
.
The night before we went shopping for a host of raw vegetables. The car was loaded with a folding tent, air mattress, sleeping bags, five identical plastic bags with food and utensils, the water carrier, the ice chest, two suitcases, five CD jackets, and the engagement ring stashed inside a knotted tarp at the bottom of my Emergency Car Box. Also the spare tire, which I had an amnesia attack as to the status of in Nevada. and it was hilarious.. sometime after Nevada.
Packing took a long time and I put it off. There was agonizing over which hardcover books would fit in my one backpack allowed. And several hours not only last-minute CD burning, but last minute downloading. Not to mention the staying up all night trying to finish System Shock 2. This led to us leaving at about 1 PM instead of 8AM or so.
That was made possible, or at least not a bone-crushingly tiring error, by my decision two days ago to skip Seattle, which gave us three days each way to go there and back, no problem. That in turn was made possible by getting last-minute cancellations on two separate Seattle housing offers. And that was a good thing. I stopped being bothered by that when it became clear that it was probably a blessing in disguise. Though the 12-hour driving days looked easy enough on the map to make my testosterone twitch - (back in the day, you didn't pick cities to *stop* in ahead of time, you just pulled over when no one was safe to drive) (and that only happened every *other* day) - they were still fairly tiring.
We left, forgetting the pump to our air mattress, and didn't realize it for days. Our first stop was to Wallmart. I bought a dippy fan that never came out of the box and a variety of snacks. The best thing of the greedy, visceral type about the trip was the snacks. We're usually pretty snack-restrained around here. Even going cheap, healthy and Ashley-Friendly (dried fruit, pretzels, tortilla chips, etc), it was a rush. My Master Plan to keep expenses down included:
1. bring a cooler full of groceries for lunch for the week(s)
2. Camp.
3. Use my $250 in free gas cards I got from credit card reward points.
4. No gas station snacking.
We held to about one and a half of those, but anyway I got off to a bad start by forgetting that you can't just toss raw vegetables directly on top of the ice and expect them to be edible when the ice melts.
But that was all ahead as we zipped through the Spinach Capital of the World and the nuclear reactor on our way to the Oklahoma border. I tested out my first real-time microcassette trip self-recording in years and found myself funny. We pulled onto some bumpkin state highway in Oklamhoma for the sights and drove through worn-out downtowns, soy fields and farmstands. We re-entered the highway around the Muskogee turnoff. I bought a large stash of independently produced pork rinds. Ashley took the wheel, beginning her impressive streak of always being at the wheel when we drove into sunsets. Before that got uncomfortable, we drove through huge stormfronts in the Great Plains, with wind turbines stuttering across the few hills and catching the low sun. I took about 30 pictures.
Towards the very end of Restaurant Standard Time we drove all the way down a small Oklahoma main drag till the road ended at Lupe's Mexican Restaurant. I ate the first Mexican meal I can remember admitting I liked that had no fajitas. We got back on the road, over the Oklahoma border and into Amarillo, Texas, where it was too late to eat the 72-ounce steak (free if you eat it in under an hour) the billboards had been promising. Three or four tense loops around the highway and we gave up and went to a Motel 6, despite it not being the literally cheapest hotel around. This was our alledged One Hotel Night Per Half-Voyage, and this Motel 6 shall be known as the Good Motel 6. (The bad Motel 6 six story features insects). This motel 6 was ok, once the foolish people playing Korn in the parking lot went to sleep.
Day 2
We'd been up after midnight, and I let Ashley sleep while I bucked the car gently through flooded streets to Wallmart to refill the ice cooler. My cheese was wet and looked like a goner. Amarillo has turn-off lanes with wide gutters, and intermittent storm drains every 50 yards. It fitted the chilly, stormy sky. I sat in the front seat and tried to write, watching the a hand-painted van and its live-in occupant make breakfast. Eventually I woke Ashley, repacked the gear, and we made sandwiches in the crumbling expanse of pavement behind the motel. Then we checked out and re-roaded.
It didn't take long - within half an hour of Amarillo, I think, when the familiar vegetation dropped out like an elevator, and we were in scrubland. We were psyched over the change in vegetation and the entrance to the desert. I was so psyched that I decided to evacuate I-40 against and try to drive on "Old 66"- known well from Steinbeck, Kerouac, etc. A riddle: if 66 was "discontinued", as the tourist info said, then why were there signs for it every twenty minutes or so? The answer was that it seemed like every 20'th minute of it had been taken out. You could drive on it for about ten minutes and then you'd be forced back onto I-40. You could then get off again, if you wanted.
The 66-side diners and tourist traps in Eastern New Mexico aren't doing well. I helped them out in Techumetican, and again in Santa Rosa (ice cream!), but they're still probably in trouble. Several towns there seem to have been preserved in ice since 1958 - malt-shoppe architecture, missing letters, fake tropical decor, vintage automobiles. Everything except people in quantity. Worth seeing. So anyway we lost quite a bit of time bumbling on and off 40 until Ashley took the wheel just on the far side of Albequerque, which I remember as hot and ugly. Might have been the line at the truck stop. Life ain't fair. I bought a lot of fizzy drink and tried to nap off my headache. Ashley continued through very little habitation into Arizona as I plotted and re-plotted our gas stops, our likely arrival time, expenses to date. I also took a lot of pictures of scrub, low mesas that were one-upped by later scenery, and a rest stop with large signs warning of snake. Ashley drove upwards right into Flagstaff as the sun went down. Flagstaff shocked us with trees, alpine-tourism, visible young people, and a general mountain-hippie air. We eventually found Tara's apartment after several false starts. She had taken several days off to move to a bigger apartment from work and night school, and thus let us take her out to dinner. We looked up a steakhouse online, since I had been blithering about steak since missing out on the five-pounder in Amarillo. Our steakhouse had an attached trailer park and local theater students, I swear, who sang country the whole meal. Tara said they had college credit. I got tipsy, ate a huge steak and paid for everything. We went home and collapsed immediately on the bed Tara insisted we take. While Tara studied. I owe Tara a thank-you card and feel guilty weeks later about how little fun she got from our stopover. We didn't catch up much, either, between the eating and the passing out.
Day 3
In the morning Tara decided she couldn't lose half a day to go to the Grand Canyon, and I decided I could lose half a day and still make California (Ash wanted to see the canyon, and I didn't want to sleep till Cali). The drive up from Flagstaff was, for the first three miles, an irritating tangle of road construction. And then, for the next forty, surprisingly, touchingly pretty - a pine and white birch national forest amidst all the desert. We drove through a fake town with a Flinstones campground to match yesterday's dinosaur museum that Ash refused to stop at. Ash was great at not stopping for terribly tacky roadside tourism. I was very poor at it. Then we hit the Canyon National Park, gaining a weeklong license like the one I eventually had my sister trade to Adam Weinberg. We headed north to the first stop and parked well outside the full lot. The place wasn't really packed with tourists, because it's hard to pack the Canyon full of anything, but it was heavily populated. Ashley nearly dropped my camera into the canyon - it bounced once on the hard walkway and all the batteries and detachable bits went everywhere. The camera survived, though. We did a lot of staring in awe and I read a lot of wildlife info signs, which I like. Then we piled into the car and drove east along the rim. The traffic was mostly gone after a mile, and we ate lunch somewhere alongside the canyon, on some rocks, along a turn-off. The wind blew harshly into the gorge. Crows the size of my arm hopped boldly towards us and squawked for food.
We weren't supposed to feed them, so we turned around and left the canyon. We rejoined I-40 and entered a very unpopulated area, with the few gas stations marked in red. There was an empty, abandoned one for every successful Shell outpost. I don't remember much until the Arizona border, except the yellow sage thinning and shrinking until the border, where a large man-made lake brought a glimpse of green and even suburbia, though it never came closer than twenty miles. At the California border, a state checkpoint confiscated my green peppers. Apparently they sometimes carry some kind of fruit borer. Or something-borer. This was a bummer. It was very, very hot, over 110 F, and the gas prices rose to reflect the emptiness. I remember Needles, California, because you could see the whole town from the highway's slight elevation - and the desert opening out behind the town, into nothing. I hadn't seen that sight since I was about four.
Souther California near the Arizona is a wasteland. We drove about 100 miles before hitting .. Boltsville? Bartel? The entrance to 5, anyway, with another hundred miles or so to Bakersfield. I bought a cheap pair of shades and looked over my shoulder a lot. Ashley took the wheel and drove north on 5, at first through farms, tiny roads with hand-lettered farmstands, no customers, than through full-sized highway, then up some genuine mountains as the sun got serious about setting. The rocks lit the sun, and it seemed urgent to get to the top by dark. Eventually, in dusk, we descended into Bakersfield, big enough to make a sea of glittering lights. It felt like the real California was about to start. We ate IHOP and frowned at the remaining X hundred miles.
I drove the closing segment, and don't remember much. Flat, empty highway on 5. A strange burst of traffic when we connected to the populated coast, around midnight, full of crazy people just leaving work, or so I imagined. I remember mapquest taking me through the docks and airports of Oakland, around two in the morning, smoking heavily and feeling the alienness of the surroundings. Alameda, next door, had picture-perfect Sesame streets even at 245 AM, and we coasted to a stop in one of the cul-de-sacs and looked around in befuddlement for Adam's house. I found a key under a mat as promised, woke one of his roomates asleep on the couch, found Adam's empty room and collapsed in it.
Day 4.
Ashley and I woke late and went back to sleep. Woke later and cleaned Adam's kitchen. Met his roomates - a skinny caviar waiter and an amiable Kevin-Smith-lookalike stoner who gave me wrong directions to an oil change place. I left Ashley for more sleep while I wandered around downtown Alameda until I found someone who would charge me 55 dollars for an oil change in only two hours. They had to have the oil delivered. When the first place you they don't do oil changes, but that guy parked in the lot stop has his own place that you can follow his car to find, I recommend you politely decline.
I mean, he had a business card, but.. if I'd known how to find the main street again, I'd probably have walked out.
I eventually made it back home, and Ashley and I walked from the house down to Alameda's empty beach. It was at least forty degrees, maybe fifty, cooler than the desert and the wind lashed at our legs. In other words, it was totally inhospitable for sunbathing, so we walked. Found pretty rocks for each other - I meant to keep mine forever and didn't. We ate at a vegetarian restaurant with a menu full of substitute meat that totally fooled us until it was explained, and were set to curl up with a movie when Adam called to tell me he was going to miss his connecting train. So I left pretty much immediately for San Fransisco. I had one of those I-feel-exotic drives into late-night San Fran over bridges and along coasts. Got stuck in what I thought was a road being closed while I was driving it, as a cop wove back and forth across the road at ten miles per hour. Eventually found the airport. Adam and I talked about women and System of a Down until he fell asleep trying to direct me home. Eventually we made it home and crashed.
This is a lot of typing. Like, short-story-length. and my recovery software is finishing up (if I could meet Steve Jobs right now, I would kick him in the nuts). So I'll resume this later.. maybe.