Road trip -- end of last day

I'm back in San Francisco. I unloaded the car and returned it to the rental car place by the airport, Cris giving me a ride home. On the way home we went grocery shopping.

Miles driven: 5620
Motels stayed in: 10
States driven through, in addition to California: 13
Time zones visited, in addition to my own: 2
People visited: 3
Pictures kept: 253
Coffee drunk: 11 days x approx. 24 oz. per day = 4 1/8 gal.
Number of mornings I had to scrape snow off the car: 2

Here's the whole route:
B: Wendover, UT
C: Ogallala, NE
D: Vermillion, SD
E: Bellevue, NE
F: Des Moines, IA
G: Clear Lake, IA
H: Eagan, MN
I: Staunton, IL
J: Olathe, KS
K: Colorado Springs, CO
L: Gallup, NM
M: Laughlin, NV
N: Barstow, CA

Road trip, end of day 10

I started fairly early from Gallup, NM and plowed down Interstate 40 on my way to Barstow. It took about three hours to get to Flagstaff, where I had brunch, and after that I encountered about a hour's worth of light snow going through the mountains between there and Prescott. But I knew the temperature wasn't below freezing, so I wasn't worried.

I just want to say how helpful the internet has been on this trip. Whether it was me planning my route the night before, or at times stopping in a McDonald's to check weather conditions or look for a motel -- and a lot of McDonald's have free wi-fi now -- it's been extremely helpful. Sometimes I even called voncookie to ask her to look up something for me when I was en route and couldn't find a connection.

After I came down off the mountains, the desert started looking like the Mojave Desert I'm familiar with. I decided to take the scenic route -- old route 66 between Seligman and Kingman in Arizona. And it was really beautiful out there. The clouds were still low, and it was drizzling much of the way, but there are no giant billboards, and almost no traffic. It was like driving through a national park at 65 mph.

After that, I still had no patience for Interstate 40, and for some reason I really wanted to play roulette. I can't explain it, but it was a strong urge on my way out, though when I went to a casino in West Wendover the first night, all I did was futilely plop $20 into a slot machine to no avail. But today I found myself descending a steep slope on an Arizona state highway, from elevation 5000 to elevation 500, down to the Colorado River. You cross a bridge over from Arizona to Laughlin, Nevada, a town consisting entirely of huge casinos and a few shopping centers, with no fanfare, no "welcome to Nevada," because, well, it's kind of obvious.

I went in search of a Bank of America ATM to get some money with which to gamble, and then walked into one of the casinos at random. Having never played roulette in my life, I stood watching for a while before jumping in. Somehow, no doubt through beginner's luck, I turned $60 into $140. Actually I was up to about $163 before sliding back and then quitting before I fucked up too badly.

Having actually beaten the house, however trivially, I got the hell out of Nevada and drove the rest of the way to Barstow. I got a great desert sunset too.

Tomorrow I'll drive to San Francisco and home. It's supposed to rain.

Road trip, end of day 9

This morning I had to choose between taking I-70 through the Rockies, or taking I-80 as I had done when I came out, or taking a southern route. The weather forecast for the northern routes was very snowy, and though I came on this trip to find snow, I do have to be back at work in a few days and I couldn't really afford to get stuck overnight a thousand miles from San Francisco. So I decided to take I-40, which goes through Flagstaff.*

I headed south out of Colorado Springs, quickly leaving the parts where snow had fallen last night, and drove south until I got to Santa Fe. There I had lunch at a Mexican restaurant in a shopping center, which was ten times better than I've generally been eating, because I had fish tacos and the ingredients were fresh and good. It is true that they got my order wrong at first, and after the waiter had taken away the mistake, I said out loud to myself, "How could they get that wrong?" whereupon the woman next to me said, "At least the proprietor seems to be sober today."

Then south some more, across the New Mexico border and past Raton. I went through Raton in 1976 in the middle of the night, and at the time I got the impression that it was sort of clinging to the side of a mountain. It didn't seem nearly that precarious today. Maybe in 1976 I was at some out-of-the-way gas station. I do remember that I had just woken up, and it was cold at night even though it was late May, and the guy who was doing the driving explained we were in the mountains. I really had no idea which way was up.

Then I turned west on I-40 at Albuquerque. I had another decision to make: stop in Gallup at sunset, or keep going another three hours to Flagstaff. The fact is, last night I was really exhausted by the time I got to bed. So I decided to stop early tonight. The fact is that I'll return on Sunday even if I did tackle another three hours tonight, so I decided to take it easy on myself so that the last full day of driving tomorrow would be more pleasant.

Driving through Colorado and especially New Mexico was just beautiful today -- the red mesas, the snowy mountaintops, the dramatic clouds, the rain showers seen in the distance, the grassy foothills.

* Actually it's supposed to snow tomorrow in Flagstaff anyway, so I might get snow in any case.

Road trip, end of day 8

In the morning, I met a friend from Open Salon for breakfast in Kansas City, after which we took a fast spin around a few of the city's really nice neighborhoods. Man, there was a lot of money in Kansas City in the first part of the 20th century, judging by those buildings. I was able to take a few pictures before my camera ran out of batteries.

Then it was west through Kansas. "Trig" told me "You'll see plenty of Kansas," and was he ever right. It took all day to drive across. And I didn't dare speed, because there was a highway patrolman every 20 miles or so.

Kansas started out rolling hills and sorta treesy, and by the time you get to the western border, it's completely flat and there isn't a tree in sight that wasn't purposely planted by someone.

There was no snow at all on the ground all through Kansas, at least on I-70 today. When I got into Colorado and the sun set, I got a little snow. I wound up in Colorado Springs just as it started coming down for real.

Perhaps the strangest site today was the horrible black eye on a waitress in a diner in Salina. Poor thing.

Road trip, end of day 7

I spent much of today on a nostalgia trip visiting the places in southern Illinois where I spent my childhood. First I swung by the Mordor-like town of Roxana, the site of the (now former) Shell Oil Refinery where my father worked and where I actually lived for several years as a tot. Yes, along with several other families, mine actually lived inside the refinery fence in "staff houses." We were among the last families to live there; after we moved in 1963 they tore down the houses, which had stood from the 1920s. In this picture, where you see a red brick building on a low rise, that's actually where the houses were.

But the visit was not a complete waste of time, as there is actually a very well-stocked museum just outside the refinery gates, utterly filled with memorabilia from the refinery itself, from jackets and coveralls worn through the years by workers, to photographs of self-consciously smiling men looking at huge pipelines, to pictures of them bowling and playing baseball. Staffing the museum was an ancient, bent woman who identified herself as the former secretary to the refinery's manager during the years I lived there. She did recognize the name of my father, who was one of the managers.

In 1963 we moved to nearby Edwardsville, a very Norman Rockwell-ish small town. It was only about five miles away, but the hellish environs of the refinery were unseen and (more importantly) unsmelled. We lived in this house until January 1970, when we moved to Texas.

I spent a few hours driving around the town. I had visited once before, in 1995. At that time -- 25 years after leaving -- the town struck me as still rather like the town I had left behind. But today -- 15 additional years later -- it was much more unrecognizable. There has been a lot more development in the last 15 years than in the 25 years before that. The thing that really blew my mind was a new commercial development on the other side of a small wooded ravine where I spent endless hours playing when I was 8, 9, 10 years old. Seeing the ravine from the edge of this development -- a spot where there had not even been any roads when I was a child -- was a very surprising perspective.

I took a lot of pictures of the most historical things I could find in the town. Then I finally left. The town of my childhood is really no more.

After that I drove west across the Mississippi into Missouri, which I spent the afternoon crossing, arriving finally in a Kansas City suburb after dark. Here I am staying in a Hampton Inn, which is really nice, but a little expensive.

I used the gym, and then I drove to a nearby shopping center to find something to eat. For the first time in my life, I went to a Hooters. I'm sure the bizarre scantily clad waitresses are well known to everyone. It's just like being in a strip club, except they aren't quite naked, and they're not going to get naked. Instead, they bring you spicy buffalo wings or, in my case, a mahi-mahi sandwich which was actually very good. Otherwise, the girls are pretty much the same (though prettier), all false-friendly and bending over to give you a good look. Luckily there are huge televisions hung about the room at ceiling level, all showing sports; it's easy to just sit and look at these so you don't feel you are being unnecessarily exploitative.

Road trip, end of day 6

This morning I reversed my path through Minnesota on I-35 back down to the place in Iowa I had stayed on Sunday night, and then I veered east through Iowa, down to the Quad Cities, and down past cities like Peoria and Springfield, to a desolate exit on I-55 near a town called Staunton, and another Super 8 motel, this one in a somewhat unnecessarily grand building that I suspect was originally built as a Holiday Inn. When I checked in, I turned on the TV, and this is the first motel I've stayed at which didn't have the Weather Channel as the first thing that popped on.

It was snowy all the way down, snowy on the ground that is. The sky was perfectly clear all day long, brilliantly sunny and windy and cold. I saw a couple more spin-outs, one of them along a strangely unplowed mile of freeway in Illinois. That short stretch was the only part of the nearly 600 miles of freeway I drove all day that was covered in snow and ice.

The countryside didn't vary that much today. It's either very flat and covered with snow, or rolling hills covered with snow. Today the rivers and creeks I saw in Iowa and Illinois were not frozen, as were all the rivers I saw Sunday and Monday in Iowa and Minnesota. The other surprising thing is just how much rural countryside there still is in the U.S. I feel like I've seen fewer than expected suburban housing developments, like the kind you see in California.

I've driven more than 2700 miles so far and I'm just over halfway through the 11 days of my trip. Tomorrow I'm going to check out my old home town of Edwardsville, Ill., which I have only been back to once since I left in 1970, and that one time was 15 years ago.

Road trip, end of day 5

Not much driving today -- just the 140 miles from Clear Lake, IA to the suburbs of Minneapolis, and then into the city. After scraping the snow off the car -- not so difficult, because it wasn't really frozen on, and it was just a matter of brushing a lot of powder off the car -- I got on the road. I saw a few more overturns, because the morning was as snowy and windy as the previous afternoon. But the weather calmed down by the time I arrived at my hotel in suburban Eagan. I had time during the day to do laundry and exercise in the hotel's exercise room.

Then it was into the city to meet my friend Alexis, who is a local celebrity of sorts, author of the relationships advice column in one of the weeklies, as well as food critic and budding restaurateur. We've known each other for several years, since she wrote a fan email to me after reading my work, but we'd never met. After dinner at a Minneapolis bar-restaurant, she gave me a comprehensive driving tour of the interesting parts of the city, and threw in St. Paul for good measure. She didn't even know how much I like to be taken around like that. If only I'd had a better night's sleep in Clear Lake, I might have been a little bit more lively too.

Tomorrow, a big driving day, all the way down almost to St. Louis, Mo.

Road trip, beginning of day 5

Here's my car this morning:

Of course all that snow around the car has been accumulating for a week. In the Des Moines Register this morning there was a story about how cabin-feverish Iowans have begun attacking each other with snow shovels.

I bought a scraper.

Road trip, end of day 4

After my coffee with C.F. in Des Moines, I came out of the cafe to brilliant sunshine. The snow had stopped. But before I'd left, I'd looked on the internet at the radar for the area, and saw a storm coming down from the northeast. It would cross my path as I headed north.

I got on the freeway anyway and took I-35 north across northern Iowa. At first it was easy going; then the wind picked up and began blowing snow across the road. As I was in the leeward lanes -- the southbound lanes were more exposed to the wind -- I wasn't too worried. But toward sunset, after I'd been driving about an hour, I began to see cars that had run off the road. I had seen the same thing in the morning, and in fact asked C.F. about it, and she said that the cars with florescent green streamers on the aerial were those which had been checked by the highway patrol and their occupants rescued if necessary. Those cars were waiting for tow trucks and might have been there for a few days, she said.

At first I saw cars like those, with the green streamers, but then I started to see cars which actually had people in them. then I saw two cars off the road with one overturned. And then I realized there was a stretch of about half a mile, on a broad, sweeping curve, where about 10 cars had gone off the southbound lanes into the hundred meter-wide snowy median. WTF! When I looked back over my shoulder at the mini-diaster -- there were already emergency vehicles arriving -- I saw that the setting sun was right in the eyes of these people in the southbound lanes as they rounded the curve. (Here is the only picture of a crashed car I was able to take.)

Fuck, I thought. How come all these people -- presumably locals -- had gone off the road and I was still on it? Was the sun in their eyes really that bad? I started to get a little paranoid -- was there some danger lurking around the next bend that would claim a dozen cars from my lanes?

The wind was clearly getting worse. It was getting dark. A man on the radio said it was ten degrees. C.F. emailed me and said to get gas now because it was going to get really cold and I didn't want to be outside the car. I drove another half hour, exited at Clear Lake, and got a motel room, another Super 8. Drifts of snow two feet tall were piled up on either side of the driveway. It is like the freaking South Pole here, and I'm not even in Minnesota.

At this exit is the first Denny's I've seen since Nevada. One of the illusions shattered for me during this trip is the ubiquity of Denny's. Also Starbucks -- until today at midday I hadn't seen one since Salt Lake City. I hadn't had a decent meal since breakfast, so I headed for the Denny's. I personally had no traffic disasters; in fact, my rental car, a Ford Focus, is handling like a champ. (The approximately 20 cars I saw today that had gone off the road were of all types and sizes, so clearly having a "heavy" car does not necessarily mean you won't spin out.)

Road trip, middle of day 4

I'm at Java Joe's Coffee House in downtown Des Moines, Iowa, to meet a contact from Open Salon. Java Joe's is a funky wood-floored place in a historical brick building, an establishment that would be totally at home in 1970s Austin, Texas. There's even an attached theater space.

This morning I drove through some beautiful snow-covered Iowa countryside -- rolling hills, more trees than Nebraska, the occasional beautiful Victorian farmhouse. It was snowing lightly but steadily, and accumulating anywhere a car or truck wasn't traveling. When I pulled off at a rest stop -- and there are AWESOME highway rest stops here that are like little airport terminals, complete with cubbyhole workstations and free wifi -- the parking lot and sidewalks were snow-covered.

While driving I listened to an awesome polka show broadcast from northeastern Nebraska -- the same area I drove through yesterday. This show was like everything "A Prairie Home Companion" pretends to be, but for reals. People would phone in requests and dedications and talk about the falling snow, and there were funky local commercials. It was a totally great show, broadcast from 9:00 a.m. to 1:00 pm every Sunday. Was it AM 900? Yes! the All Star Polka Show on KSJK.

Road trip, end of day 3

I started the day in the dusty, grimy truck stop/motel area of Ogallala, Nebraska, tootled down I-80 some more, and finally left the road at Grand Island. Heading northeast and then north, I went through towns like Central City and Columbus before approaching the Missouri River. The last twenty miles or so were more interesting in terms of the stress of the driving -- snow blowing across the road made me pay attention.

The farther north I got, the more snow I encountered. I crossed into South Dakota at Yankton, then visited nearby Vermillion, home to the Univ. of S.D., because @voncookie has applied for a job there. Kind of a nice town. See the pictures.

Then I planned to go all the way back down to Des Moines, Iowa. But on my way down I-29, it started drizzling a little. Knowing the temperature was at or below freezing, I was afraid of encountering ice on the dark highway, so instead of Des Moines, I ended up in a suburb of Omaha. I'll hit Iowa tomorrow.

I really enjoyed the snowy landscape today.

Road trip, afternoon of day 3

I'm in Vermillion, South Dakota, home to the University of S.D. There's about a foot of snow on the ground, a brisk wind, and it's about 30 degrees. The sun should set in about an hour, but the overcast is so thick I'll never see it.

I drove north through Nebraska to get here, through rolling farm country. The snow got deeper the farther north I drove, first along US 30 and then US 81, and the last 30 miles before the South Dakota border there was snow blowing across the road. But none falling. I crossed the border at Yankton, where I took a few pictures, then headed 20 miles down the road to Vermillion, where I found a small, nice, used bookstore downtown. Then I found the university campus and drove past it and took a few more pictures. Now I'm in a McDonald's across the street.

There are zero pedestrians braving the cold wind. I won't blame them.

From here I'll drive into Iowa, might make it as far as Iowa City.

Road trip, middle of day 3

I'm in Columbus, Nebraska [map], a medium-sized small town (for Nebraska). About 90 minutes ago I finally turned off I-80, around the halfway point between San Francisco and New York, and turned onto US 30, which goes northeast for a while. The US highway parallels the train tracks, and in the 90 minutes I saw four long freight trains. I drove through tiny towns with one gas station with a convenience store attached, one grain elevator, and a collection of houses. Usually there are two brick buildings on what used to be the center of town, but the highway is often a few blocks away from those. Other times, such as Central City, you go right through town.

Between towns it's flat farmland. Rolls of hay lie on the edges of fields, long irrigation contraptions stand on spindly legs, and a few inches of snow lies between rows of brown stubble. In western Nebraska there was almost no snow, but there's much more the farther east I get.

The day turned very gray, but checking the radar I see that a storm is to my northeast, and since I intend to drive due north from here along US 81, I think I'm going to miss it.

Road trip, end of day 2

I got up around 7:00 a.m. in Wendover, Utah, a place which in the light of day looked just as horrid and ugly as it did at night, only without the glamor of the casinos' neon lights. Eating only an energy bar and taking a coffee from the motel lobby, I took off eastward across the Utah salt flats. I got breakfast in Salt Lake City, zoomed into the mountains east of there, and up into the very high desert country. All along, I had great luck with weather. Either the bad weather stayed to the south, or it blew through before I got to a particular spot.

I hit the Wyoming border about 11:30 and all continued clear. It was only after I left Rawlins and started climbing up even higher that I went through my first bit of weather. Around a place called Elk Mountain, I went through about ten minutes of blowing snow and snow showers. But it wasn't bad -- the visibility was never less than, say, half a mile. And it was over in ten minutes. I did see an overturned big rig.

All in all, Utah and Wyoming were really beautiful. There was slow all along the roadside, until I got into far eastern Wyoming, when the land started flattening out and (no doubt) dropping in elevation. I crossed into Nebraska around sunset, and kept going another couple of hours until I got to Ogalalla, which was enough driving for a second day.

In Ogalalla I went looking for a place to eat, and made a really bad choice. I went to a local pizza/pasta place, or that's what the sign said. Inside they had a huge buffet full of the kinds of things you might imaging a high school cafeteria would put together for a soup and salad bar, and they also had everything that was on the menu was also on the buffet, so I said I would do the buffet. The only thing I could really face eating, besides some canned corn, was the pizza. And the pizza was like... Imagine if a church youth group decided to have a pizza night. And a couple of the girls in the group were industrious, and wanted to do it right, so they actually practiced. They made practice pizzas through trial and error for two weeks, and when the time for the pizza night came, they served what I found on the buffet. The choices of pizza were: Cheese; Hamburger; "Special"; and "Taco." The last one was full of canned green olives. Everything was just horrible. Man.

I started uploading pictures I've taken along the way. A lot of them are shot from the driver's seat of my rental car, obviously. A few times I got out into the cold wind and actually took a picture and tried to level it correctly.

Road trip, end of day 1

I got off to a rocky start today. The rental car reservation I made turned out to be at a rental car agency that didn't want me to drive the car outside California. Hey, maybe that's why the 10-day rental fee was so cheap! So I made my way to the main rental car terminal of San Francisco airport, courtesy of the first agency's courtesy clerk. He kept up an entertaining New York-ish patter about how his van didn't have the right kind of license to drop off and pick up passengers at the airport, he was only supposed to take people to and from the on-airport rental car center, but he didn't want anyone to miss their flight and maybe we could give him $5 each since he could lose his job if he got ticketed for doing it. We all gave him $5, he didn't get a ticket, everyone was presumably happy. Except I had to pay three times as much for a real unlimited-mileage rental car.

Slowed by this event, I didn't get out of the city until 11:00 a.m. But I still made it all the way across California and Nevada today. Taking Interstate 80 all the way, over the Sierras and through the high desert of Nevada. The strange thing about Nevada is that the borders look just terrible. Anybody who has seen only Reno-Sparks probably thinks Nevada really looks terrible. But the high desert is beautiful.

Then when I arrived in Wendover, the impression it gives at night is of a casino at the bottom of a strip mine. There are these bare rock cliffs -- that's all you can see. I hope it looks a little better tomorrow, but so far it's giving Reno a run for its money.

Most fortunately, the road was dry, and once you get into Nevada, practically no traffic and a 75 mph speed limit. So I made up some time.

I will now go blow $20 in a casino. That's my limit for Nevada.

Day 1 of the snowy trip

I'm leaving this morning for my trip across the country, or at least to the Mississippi, to research my book. It's a cool morning in San Francisco, mostly cloudy, a weak sun appearing from time to time. My friend Jeanne should be calling me soon to take me to get my rental car.

I packed last night in an enormous duffle bag that is at least four feet long. We ordered it thinking it would be more like an overnight bag but neglected to look at the dimensions. When it arrived we made a lot of jokes about how you could carry around a small person in there, but in the end we decided to keep it, since most of our luggage is extremely crappy. This is its first trip.

I dreamed I was at Holden Village, where they had decided they were going to embark on a major initiative taking care of orphaned babies. Everyone got one. Mine was named Alexy, and the main thing was to keep carrying it around, feed it, and keep it warm. (Changing the baby was not part of the dream.) I put Alexy down under a chair once to get some more food, and the cat came up and curiously sniffed it.

Weather along the way looks perfect for the first day. I'm going to see how far I can get on the way to Salt Lake City, but I might go only as far as Elko or Wendover. I'm tempted to drop down instead and go on Hwy. 50 through Nevada, since I've always wanted to do that, but I don't think I'll really have time.

I'm still getting over a cold, but my coughing is more productive, as they say, which tells me things are breaking up.

Journey coming up

I'm about to take my first long vacation in a long time, and my first really long road trip in over 30 years. On Thursday morning I'll be packing up a rental car and heading over the Sierras on my way to Salt Lake City. And from there I'll go anyplace this side of the Mississippi where there's snow. In fact I'll even go as far as Indiana, since it's flat and it still counts as the Midwest.

For ten days I'll be driving around the Plains and the Midwest to find falling snow. Ideally a snow storm or a blizzard. the idea is to research a section of the novel I'm working on, Knock Yourself Out. In part of the book, the main character gets stranded at the O'Hare Hilton by a blizzard and winds up trying to drive across the country back to California. On the way he gets slammed by yet another blizzard.

Since I have precious little experience driving in snow, and no experience driving in the Midwest in the winter, I'll set out to learn. the idea is not to cover the entire Midwest, but pretty much anyplace reasonably flat that's getting slammed by snow. I have only one person I want to visit on the trip, my heretofore online-only friend Alexis, conveniently located at one corner of the area I'll be covering, in Minneapolis. So it won't be a very social trip. But I do hope to find out a lot about snow and the middle part of the country and what it's like out there.

Previous research trip: to Bangalore in 2007 for my novel Mango Rain.

technorati: travel, road trips, driving

Netflix, may I kindly say 'Fuck off'?

Mark, based on your interest in "3:10 to Yuma" ...

We think you'll enjoy "Spartacus: Blood and Sand"

Is this kind of shit supposed to endear Netflix to me? Did they really award somebody one million dollars to improve their recommendations? Can I turn it off somehow?

Does anybody at Netflix know the meaning of the verb "to patronize"?

Change is a-comin'

I recently received an email from Google's Blogger service, which powers this blog, that they are doing away with support for blogs which publish using FTP, of which this is one. They said that fewer than half of one percent of their users' blogs were of this type, and though it was the state of the art when I began it in 2001, time has obviously passed me by.

So I'll be trying to figure out a way forward for the site. Since I've been blogging per se less and less, maybe the blogging function is no longer the most important, I dunno. We'll see.

Meanwhile, what have I been doing lately? I went to L.A. with VonCookie last weekend. When I came back I got the flu. This week I'm going on my trip to the Midwest to research part of the novel I'm working on. And I finished bringing out my novel Make Nice through the Lulu self-publishing site, so if you've been dying to read that book which I worked on from 1997 to 2003, and which I almost got published fer reals, but didn't, you can pick it up there. I'll have a more formal launch of sorts later.