I recently moved from Minnesota to El Granada, California--a small city south of San Francisco. I made the trek in a small Honda Civic with two of my best friends. Here we are at the Grand Canyon, having our photo taken by an elderly man from Great Britain. You can't see, but Robbie isn't wearing shoes.
Abby, Peter, Robbie.
The trip was an incredible journey: 10 days, 9 states, 7 cities, 50 driving hours. The memories are a blurry mess of snow, sun, mountains, never-ending highway, cases of beer and bottled water, and our trusty road atlas.
"What I finally did was I said, I'm going to get out of this town and I'm going to go out West." -Bruce Babbitt
I wrote a letter to a few friends about the trip, read on if you like.
We got a late start on New Year's Day, and Abby's little Honda Civic was jam-packed. I brought only a fraction of my clothes, some books, toiletries and my laptop--all crammed into a duffel bag and the backpack I took around Europe.
Our first stop was Omaha--forgettable, just stayed overnight with a friend from Marquette and got on the road early in the morning.
The second stop was Denver where we stayed with my Uncle Clyde and his family. That's where my only 2 cousins on that side of family come from, but they are a few years older, and one has a 6 year-old daughter, and it was fun to hang out for a bit, but we're just from different worlds. My Uncle did tell some hilarious stories about when he took trains all over California in the 1960s when he was 16 with his buddy, Pete. I also found out that my Aunt Jani, who also lives in Denver, moved out the San Francisco sometime in the 1960s and was heavy into the hippie scene. She's now a cartoonist and an environmentalist, and is on the board of directors at a donkey rescue farm. I'm not kidding. Maybe there's more of my mom's family in me than I knew. Anyway, the best part of Denver was the day we spent hiking in the snow in the Rockies. It was just the three of us and a case of Coors Light and some elk and deer. A pretty cool feeling of being totally isolated.
Robbie and Peter hiking in the Rockies.
From Denver we drove to Santa Fe and stayed with my dad's college roommate, Tom, and his wife in this gorgeous house that overlooks the low mountain range to the South. Tom has had a million different jobs, but now owns his own software company. Santa Fe itself is a great place with interesting building restrictions. No building can be over 3 stories, and all buildings within the city limits (including McDonalds and gas stations) must be constructed in one of three specific styles--all pueblo/adobe red-brown with a lot of wood and rounded edges. It has a very high Mexican-American and Native American population and the city really tries to celebrate those cultures. It's definitely a place I'd like to come back to in the summer, it was pretty cold because the elevation is a half mile higher than Denver.
After Santa Fe, we drove to the Grand Canyon where we celebrated my birthday with plenty of drinks and meal that was straight out of a bad movie in the hotel restaurant. The hotel we stayed at was right on the Canyon rim, and we did several different hikes into the Canyon, but got nowhere near the bottom. I talked to a park ranger for a long time about how the Canyon was formed, and she used a lot of analogies about cheesecakes and sandcastles. Apparently she thought I was five years-old. And hungry. We spent only one night, but two full days there, and then made the quick drive up to--Las Vegas, Baby!
The Grand Canyon.
I had been to Vegas once before with my family when I was 12, and all I remembered was the water park and that the hotel smelled liked cigarettes, so it was pretty cool to go back at 22 and know I could blow all my money in five minutes if I wanted to. Driving into the city on the highway, we rounded this bend and came over a hill and there it was--the City of Lights. I could not believe how incredibly bright it was, the city stretched for miles in this orange glow, it really looked like the whole place was this wide, flat valley of burning embers.
Well, we got into our hotel at about 11PM, and after a quick catnap, pre-gamed with some Captain Morgan and hit the Casino floors by midnight. The three of us were dressed in these ridiculous matching women's terrycloth polo shirts we got from Wal-Mart, and we decided we were going to go into every casino on the strip, no matter what. The plan worked fine for Abby and I, but after the second casino, we realized Robbie was a helluva lot more drunk than we were, and while Abby and I were around a Roulette table, Robbie mysteriously disappeared and his cell phone was off. Trying not to worry, Abby and I continued to lillypad across the roulette tables--where it is easy to double your money, and then promptly lose it all. Eventually, around 5:30 in the morning, Robbie called us back. He was sitting alone on the front steps of the Belagio. Abby and I caught him a cab, which he took back to the hotel, and then split breakfast with the cab driver who was from Uganda and was trying to make his way in the U.S. When Abby and I sobered up, and finally came to the last casino, it was 10:30 AM and we had broken even. It was a wild night, and something I won't do again for a long time, and it's probably a good thing there are no pictures of the night.
Sitting in our hotel room at 11 in the morning we decided to forget about sleep, and hopped into the car, tired, unshowered and slap-happy. We headed straight west into California along Highway 15, just south of Death Valley. It was here that we finally dropped significantly in elevation, drove through some peasoup-thick fog and came out on Highway 1, the beautiful winding strip of asphalt that runs up the California coast. After a restful night in a hotel, we made a long, slow, final travel day of driving up Hwy. 1, stopping for a few great photos, and finally arriving at Lani's house just in time for dinner.
Driving the coast was one of the greatest experiences of the trip. Picture skinny roads, with turns so sharp you have to slow under 10 MPH, sheer, crumbling rocks to the right, and steep drop-offs to the left that cut right down into crashing waves of the Pacific, which is stretching deep, blue and shimmering with sunrays, back, back, back to the horizon.
So that was the trip. Since then, Abby and I have been settling into the little guest room in Lani's house. I've taken two jobs--one coaching lacrosse for a first-year program at a great high school up in the city called The Urban School (urbanschool.org). It's a really progressive student-led, interactive, community service-oriented school, so right up my alley. And, you never know...coaching leads to meeting rich parents which leads to...? I'll also be SAT tutoring, also for rich kids, in South San Francisco, mostly on weekends. Otherwise I've applied to work for the Man as a 2010 Census taker, which could be fun. Days around here mostly consist of applying for a few summer writing internships, living on pasta and cheap beer, and reading Hemingway and the NY Times on-line. Hope all is well wherever you are. Be in touch.
Photos as we entered each state:
Robbie. Hanging on every sign. Except the last few. Was he tired or just too short?
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