Road Trip 2010 Day 3: God made dirt and dirt will bust your ass

I rolled up to a toll booth in Illinois blasting Old Dirty Bastard's "Baby I Got Your Money" and as soon as the toll booth lady asked me for the $1.25, the chorus, where Kelis sings "Hey, say hey, baby I got your money, dontcha worry" kicked in. She didn't seem to notice.

Road Trip 2010 Day 3: The Angry Truck Driver

You see a lot of sketchy people in bathrooms along the interstate. 99% of the time, you ignore these people and they ignore you and everybody does their business and goes happily on their way. About 0.8% of the time you wind up talking to these sketchy people for some reason, and they turn out to be really pleasant, nice people (albeit with awkward weight/fashion/hygiene/what-have-you problems). The other 0.2% of the time, you wind up talking to these people for some reason and they turn out to be just as crazy as they look. Such was the case with The Angry Truck Driver.

TATD was pretty standard--beer belly, tee-shirt tucked into jeans, giant belt buckle, beard, baseball cap--except for the fact that he was washing his hands furiously in the Conoco convenient mart's bathroom. I was washing my hands as well and couldn't help but look over and notice his anxiety. He must have noticed me looking, because he said, very loudly, "This water is cold!"

I wasn't getting any hot water either, so I nodded, said, "Yeah, man," and gave a "what are you gonna do?" kind of shrug, but TATD wasn't done.

"This water is COLD!"

"Maybe we should talk to the manager?" I offered.

TATD huffed and shut off the sink, dried his hands just as ferociously as he had scrubbed his hands, said "Cold water doesn't kill fucking germs!" and walked out the door.

And that was The Angry Truck Driver.

Road Trip 2010 Day 2: Ambivalent about South Dakota

The first two times I drove through South Dakota I hated it. Kitschy tourist billboards and dinosaur-themed water parks obstructing the views of the beautiful Black Hills, crowds of gross tourists at Mount Rushmore, swarms of Harley-Davidsons and no hotel rooms--not my favorite place.But, driving through western South Dakota in the afternoon and evening of my second day, I began to reconsider. I-90 through Eastern Montana and Wyoming is empty. Like, really empty. Closes in the winter because there are no humans to plow it and it's under too much snow, no gas for 90 miles, never see another car kind of empty. This time it felt pretty good to see other people, suburban sprawl, and fast food restaurants--and Starbucks! I hadn't seen a Starbucks since Missoula, and while it's not my favorite coffee, it's a lot better than the swill McDonald's sells, which I became intimately acquainted with later on in the trip.

Anyway, I was starting to reconsider South Dakota. Maybe, in the right context, it was actually pretty cool. Any state that has Wall Drug in it can't be all that bad. I got a little less stoked when I stopped for a nap outside a visitor's center, lay in the grass, and felt something tickling my arm. I looked down to see a grasshopper the size of my fucking finger chilling on my arm.

Grasshoppers, the myth: cute, cuddly, look like Jiminy Cricket.

Grasshoppers, the reality: ugly, terrifying, look like the aliens from District 9.

It was so big I could see that it was looking at me with its beady little grasshopper eye, probably sizing me up, figuring out if it could take me. I brushed him off my arm and went to sleep.

My faith was further shaken when I reached eastern South Dakota, which is almost as empty as Wyoming. The entire region also reeks of cow poop. Eastern South Dakota is also home to approximately one thousand gajillion bugs, half of which committed suicide on my car's windshield. About one hour after the sun went down, I drove through a bug storm. It was actually pretty amazing. I've never seen anything like it. I was used to quite a few bugs splattering on my windshield after sunset--it happens--but I drove for several minutes through massive clouds of bugs that hit my car so fast and so hard it sounded like it was raining (and hard, New Englandy rain, not soft Seattle rain). I was afraid to turn my windshield wipers on and smear my windshield into a completely opaque mess of guts, wings and shattered carapaces, so I squinted through the splatter until I reached a gas station and spent a good five minutes scrubbing it down. I wish I had a working camera. Verdict is still out on South Dakota.

I would have felt pretty bad if I accidentally killed this guy. Such a gentleman.

Road Trip 2010 Day 1: Camaraderie

I planned on sleeping in my car as much as possible on the trip from Seattle to New Hampshire, because I am broke. By 11:30 on the first day I was tired of driving, so I pulled into a rest stop outside of Bozeman, Montana. I had my blanket, a rolled towel for a pillow (yep, forgot a pillow), and a big heavy wrench to defend myself in case I was set upon by a crowd of wild vagrants.

I was expecting to be a bit sketched out by the whole sleeping-at-a-rest-stop thing, but it turned out great! After some experimenting about how to get comfortable in my tiny car (pro tip: move all the luggage to the front and sleep on the back seat with your legs curled up however will work), I was good to go. And I was not the only person sleeping there, which helped.

There were at least half a dozen other cars camping out at the rest stop, including a van with a young couple and their kid (they had a mattress, though, wussies), and a few other traveling college/grad-school aged guys. I fell asleep to the roar of I-90 and the glow of the young mom's booklight.

We all woke up at about the same time the next morning, when the sunlight became too bright to sleep through. Everybody got out of their cars to stretch and look around, then we all went into the bathroom to wash up, brush teeth, etc. Everybody was smiling at each other like we were some weird, temporary I-90 family. It was great.

This is the Road Trip Again

In about twelve hours I leave the northwest for the northeast. I hope my car survives, and I hope the weather cools off a bit (Washington is in the middle of a heatwave, but the national forecast looks promising). I've been so busy these last few days, what with getting trip stuff together, Sam and Jon's wedding, and Ashley and Kili in town--the fact that I'm leaving here is just now sinking in, and it's kind of got me in a funk.

I'm going to miss the northwest, and the people in it, a lot. This has been a most excellent summer, and I'm sorry to see it go.

As for the road trip itself, I would take pictures, but I accidentally broke my camera last night at the wedding. Dad and I tried to fix it today, and Dad eventually got it to a place where it will turn off and on, take pictures, and do everything but focus, so it's basically useless. Oh well. At the very least there will be some written blog entries. I might have to supplement them with pictures I find on the internet.

So Washington people, goodbye; New Hampshire people, get ready. I'll be switching coasts soon.

Road Trip Day 6: End of the road

We made it up to Dover on the sixth day. I was surprised by how much it resembled Washington—lots of water, some hills, and trees (mostly deciduous, but hey). On our way to the apartment we crossed a bridge and saw dozens of sailboats out in the bay. Very lovely, in a very New Englandy way.

The apartment was nice, but waaaay too hot. Thankfully we have AC, so we cranked it while we lugged everything in from the trailer, hit the grocery store, and began to settle in. I don't want to bore you with all the details of food and furniture and moving in stuff, so I'll keep it short. Suffice it to say, we're here.

Updates on this blog will probably slow down now as I'm updating in real time, not catching up (sorry Chelsea, I can no longer be your ideal blogger), but I'll continue posting my thoughts, observations and ramblings. Keep reading, keep commenting (it's nice to know y'all are out there reading), and I'll be seeing you before you know it.

My new town, as seen in 1877.

Road Trip Day 5: Out east

People told me that New England was different, and I knew it would be, but I didn't think it would be this different.

We drove through upstate New York, and I did not feel like I was in America. Something about it tickled the back of my mind—the way the farms were so small, how little fences butted up against little fields and little thickets of trees. It was farmland, but compared to the country we'd been driving through for days, the unending fields of corn and wheat extending to the horizon, it was dramatically reduced in scale.

Then it hit me. This looks exactly like the French countryside Ashley and I drove through in December. But for the cars, the freeway signs and the trees, it could be France. It's a weird feeling, knowing that you're still in your own country but feeling out of place, gawking at the landscape.

The weirdness increased when we stopped at a travel oasis (I-90 is a toll road through New York as well). The people looked and acted different. They wore different clothes and different hairstyles from their west coast cousins, cashiers acted differently, everybody talked in unfamiliar accents (“Harold, wait in the caah”), and they knew we were different too. We got stares whenever we stopped. It's a weird place, this New England.

Road Trip Day 5: Double meat

In Ohio and Pennsylvania, Ashley and I were confronted by a horrifying realization. Americans are fat. Of course it's a stereotype, but on the west coast, it's a stereotype that's easy to laugh off. Sure some Americans are fat, but many of us are skinny and beautiful, right? Right? In Pennsylvania, the words “obesity epidemic” take on new meaning. It's as widespread here as the common cold.

We stopped at a Subway to get lunch and plan out the last leg of our trip. I bought a ham sub.

“Would you like double meat?” the sandwich-maker asked.

“No.”

“Double cheese?”

“No.”

“Would you like to add bacon to your sandwich?”

“Uh, no.”

“Make it a combo and pay thirty-three more cents for a large soda?”

“No thank you.”

She nodded and finished my non-double-meat-double-cheese-added-bacon (yet still huge) sandwich. On the way into the bathroom I noticed a Subway advertisement. “Double your meat and get a free cookie!” And to think I could have had a free cookie.

Road Trip Day 4: Never go to Maumee, Ohio

We stayed at a Motel 6 in Maumee, Ohio. The only reason we stopped at the motel, hidden behind a strip mall of mini golf courses and low-rent beauty salons, was because we were both starving. On our way in, a fat man in sweatpants threw a styrofoam cup into the bushes (everybody litters in Ohio, it's weird). The hostess ignored us while we checked in. There was bulletproof glass in the hallway. In our room—accessed via a narrow, stained hallway—peeling stickers reminding us to use the deadbolt and warning us that Motel 6 was not accountable for stolen property coated the door.

Ashley had a monster of a headache, and we were dying of hunger, but Maumee had little to offer. There was a Chicago-style pizza place next to us, but we'd ordered pizza into the hotel room the night before, so we skipped it and drove across the freeway looking for something, anything. Hunger eventually forced us into a Frisch's Big Boy.

The food was sad and greasy, the waitstaff was composed of Maumeeians in their 40s and 50s, and Ashley's headache was so bad she was nauseous. I stared at my cheese steak sandwich. The people in the booth behind us were massively fat and having a loud conversation full of Star Wars puns and references. (The woman related a story about how she accidentally cut somebody off in traffic and responded to the shouted “Nice driving, Princess!” by yelling “We all drive like that... on Alderaan!”)

Needless to say we crashed early and left Maumee ASAP.

Apparently there is one cool thing in Maumee. We didn't see it.

Road Trip Day 4: I Hate Indiana

Chicago was beautiful, but the traffic sucked. Driving the trailer through rush hour traffic in a huge city after three days of country was really nerve-wracking, plus it was easy to get distracted by all the awesome old brick buildings and cool skyscrapers. Chicago is gorgeous.

And then we crossed into Indiana. Gary, Indiana, right across the state border. It's like the city of Chicago squatted over the border and took a giant, industrial crap. It's nothing but train tracks, water treatment plants, piles of dirt, and sadness. For miles. The less time I spend on Gary, Indiana, the happier everybody will be.

Lovely Gary, IN

Interstate 90 is a toll highway through the state, which basically means it's a giant express lane to get out of Indiana as quickly as possible. There were few exits, and no major cities along the road. We stopped once, for gas, in a tiny mom and pop gas station that also sold fireworks, where we were the only customer. I walked in the door, looked up, and was faced with a huge confederate flag. In Indiana? I thought, and I hit the bathroom and filled my water as quickly as possible. The bathroom was full of pretty nasty graffiti, and a sign from the management that begged the vandals to stop because children used the restrooms as well (+5 for the courteous sign, -250 for the confederate flag). I looked up and saw scrawled across the ceiling in big black letters, “CRIPS.”

Soon we left Indiana, and its haze and industrial scuzz behind, and we entered Ohio. Ohio! Round on the sides and high in the middle, Oh-hi-oh! Things were looking up. Until we stopped for the night in Maumee.

Road Trip Day 4: I <3 Wisconsin

Dear Wisconsin,

I knew I would love you from the moment we stopped at the visitor's center and you had recycling bins. Yours were the first we'd seen since Washington, and they made me happy. Then there were the trees, the hills, the (small) mountains, the lakes and rivers--it all felt like home. I even found a public radio station and listened to the moderator interview a professor about Iranian politics. Wisconsin, you were a welcome reprieve from the never-ending corn fields of Minnesota, lined with their Bible verses and "Life begins at the moment of conception" billboards.

You've got good cheese, and mustard, and tasty cranberries. You've got a great college town (Madison) and friendly people. Your electoral votes went for Obama. I wish I could stay. But I'm just passing through, following I-90 down to the Illinois border, where Ashley and I turn on Sufjan Stevens' album "Illinois" and fork our money over to the toll booth lady. Goodbye Wisconsin.

Until we meet again,


Ian

Road Trip Day 3: Where the heck is Wall Drug?

There it is.

Wall Drug is difficult to describe. Signs appear for fifty miles beforehand—and a few scattered ones in the empty parts of Wyoming and Montana—advertising free ice water! Fudge! Five cent coffee! Tyrannosaurus Rex! Free coffee for Vietnam vets! Homemade pie! Yes, Wall Drug has every good thing in the entire world.


When you get there, Wall Drug turns out to be a kind of weird tourist trap. But not just any tourist trap! It's a tourist trap so large, so weird and entertaining, that an entire town of other, smaller tourist traps has sprung up around it. It's like a drug store, a museum, a gift shop and a playground all rolled into one place. Ashley and I wandered its halls, sampling the five cent coffee (surprisingly drinkable), eating the fresh-baked doughnuts (delicious), looking at the hundreds of 19th century photographs of South Dakota and the American West, examining the huge concrete jackalope and the stuffed buffalo, and feeding money into the mechanical band (those robots do a mean version of “Bad Moon Rising”).


It's one of the few roadside attractions I don't feel gypped spending time at, because there's so much, and it's all interesting. There's even an entire room dedicated to photographs and newspaper clippings of Ted Hustead and his family, who have run Wall Drug since the early 1930s, and are basically the reason anybody stops in the tiny town of Wall, SD.

It's way too much to take in, and we would have loved to spend another few hours there, but we had a cat overheating in the car, so we had to leave. On the way out, however, we stopped at a gas station— overrun with bikers, just like everything else—and purchased a Sturgis 2009 Rally souvenir beer, which I plan to try out in a live video on this blog. Technology allows us to do such useful things, doesn't it? I could go on for so much longer about how amazing Wall Drug is, but instead I'll shut up and leave you with some pictures.

Harleys everywhere


Jackalopes

More Jackalope.

Road Trip Day 2: Fellow Washingtonians

I-90. Love it or leave it.

In Wyoming, we pulled off the freeway to gas up and drove past a couple of hippies, a man and a woman, walking into town. He wore long hair and a guitar thrown over his back, she was in a skirt, dreads, and a Grateful Dead tee shirt. When we saw their nalgenes, we knew they were from Washington.

Nobody carries nalgenes around outside of Western Washington (and maybe parts of California). As we proceeded further and further west, we got weirder and weirder looks for filling our water bottles at soda dispensers and water fountains. In the New Hampshire welcome center, a man actually stared at me as I filled my nalgene from the tap. But I'm getting ahead of myself...

The woman smiled at me as she filled her nalgene at the soda fountain in the gas station convenience store, and I didn't see them again until Ashley and I were ready to pull out. Then the woman, sitting in the shade of the convenience store's awning, called out, “Hey, which way are you guys going? West?”

“No, sorry, we're going east.”

“Oh, I saw the Washington plates and thought you were going home.”

“Sorry, we're headed for New Hampshire.”

We said goodbye and got on the road. “I wish we could just turn around and let those hippies sit on top of our trailer, all the way back to Washington,” Ashley said.

Road Trip Day 2: Clerks

Outside our motel in Drummond

Whew. I'm catching up on the road trip business as fast as I can so I can move on to actual life in NH. Sorry for the flurry of posts--soon I'll slow down.

Everybody in these Montana towns seems to know each other. The night before I saw the motel clerk chatting up the good old boys about trucks, and before we left Drummond that morning we stopped at a gas station where the clerk and the customers all seemed to know each other. I guess that happens in a town of 318 people (thanks Wikipedia) where the biggest thing that happens every year is a cattle meet.

Montana's mountains flattened out and we drove, drove, drove. Montana is BIG. I-90 stretches for 552 miles across the state (again, thanks Wikipedia) and for more than half of them there's not much to look at. We stopped in a town called Columbus to buy food, and felt like total out-of-towners when we got lost and bumped our Taurus and U-Haul trailer through tiny residential streets, searching for the grocery store. When we did find it, we rushed in to locate the bathroom and speedwalked a full circle around the store before realizing the bathroom was right next to the entrance. We bought our food and checked out. The clerk, an older woman, had a friendly chat with the woman in front of us about finances, the economy, and her job at the supermarket--they knew each other. When we got to the front of the line she stopped talking, ran our food through the laser and shoved it in bags, and wouldn't make eye contact. She only responded to us when I asked if I had to sign the receipt. At first I was puzzled--what had brought this on? There could be a number of things:

The rude clerk left me in a bad mood for the rest of the drive out of Montana. Were we really such obvious foreigners? And was it normal to treat foreigners with such disdain? Then I realized what had probably brought this on: Ashley's dress. The woman glared at it a few times. It's a red dress, very cute, not too flashy, but definitely out of place in Columbus, where most of the women (and all the shoppers in the IGA were women, many with kids) wore mom jeans and blousy shirts. I don't think the red, slightly low-cut dress went over well in the little town full of rural Montanans, kids, and churches.

It made me think about standards of taste. What is perfectly acceptable in Western Washington (Ashley wore the dress to her sister's wedding for God's sake) is viewed as too dressy, too revealing, too whatever, in other parts. It made me nervous for arriving in New Hampshire—I might have to relearn all these little social codes I'd never really thought about. I might piss people off without even realizing it. More thoughts on stuff like this as it comes.

Here's a lovely brochure from the Sky Motel in Drummond:

Road Trip Day 1: Montana at night

Montana was big, beautiful, empty, and, on a Saturday night, full of highway patrol. I saw at least one every mile. One followed me for ten miles and made me nervous, even though I knew I wasn't speeding (damn trailer slowing me down) or doing anything illegal. I pulled into a gas station and he followed me there too. We nodded at each other as we pumped our gas. Lightning flickered over the hills—Montana is gorgeous.

Also poor. Pulled up alongside the gas station was an RV with a table out front. A woman ducked in and out of the motor home and her children milled around the table. The cop walked over to them and asked, “What are you guys selling today?”

“Mugs,” said the boy.

The girl yelled, “Tee shirts!”

“Great. Where do you guys live?”

“Over there,” one of them said, and pointed up between two hills. “We're going home soon.”

The cop and I were the only people at the gas station, and I hadn't seen a single car pull off the interstate to investigate the little mountain town—they couldn't have been getting much business.

We drove to Drummond, Montana and stayed in the Sky Motel, which looked sketchy at first glance. It was seedy, the upstairs rooms could only be accessed by walking through the front office and up a tiny flight of stairs, and there were three good ol' boys out front talking trucks with the counter girl. There was some confusion among the staff when I tried to rent a room, and the counter girl—who they all called Booger—got really mad and said “Shee-it” under her breath. The room was great, Clementine was glad to be out of the car, and we were glad to get some sleep. If you're ever passing through Drummond, MT, I recommend the Sky Motel. Day two, with rude grocery store clerks and thousands of Harley Davidsons, is coming soon!

Road Trip Day 1: Your cat has died of dysentery

On the first day of the drive from Seattle to New Hampshire, there was a moment in Eastern Washington where I thought that this must be what hell feels like. Ashley was asleep, the iPod was playing some tired David Bowie song I'd heard a million times before, and the air was so hot it brought up those weird mirages on the concrete. For a solid twenty minutes I felt like a zombie. This is what hell feels like.

I wasn't the only overheated one. We stopped at a gas station Subway and ate sandwiches in the shade of the building (near a sign that read the time and the temp—107 degrees!). Our cat, Clementine, was in her carrier, acting kind of drunk and weird. Her nose had white flecks all over it and she was rolling around over and over again. She had pushed her towel all the way to the back and was lying on the bare plastic. We gave her an ice cube and moved on.

In an hour or so, we noticed her panting. We didn't get a picture of a cat panting, but it looks a lot like this:

Now imagine that but with the cuteness replaced by panic and fatigue, and you have a pretty good idea of what our cat looked like.

I had never seen a cat do this before, and it freaked me out. That can't be normal, right? I assumed she was dehydrated, but we couldn't get her to drink. About this time, the car was overheating from driving up a mountain in the Idaho panhandle so we pulled off into the Mullan Tree national historical site to give the car a rest and help our cat. We didn't know what to do (we weren't even sure she was dehydrated, although we assumed she must be), so we wound up holding her on her back, filling soda caps full of tiny cat-sized drinks of water and pouring them into her mouth. She looked pissed, licked the spilled water off her face, and fell asleep for a good five hours.

Later I looked up the symptoms. Turns out she was dehydrated—seriously dehydrated. If we had waited a few more hours we would have had to take her to a vet to get an IV, and since there's a severe lack of vets in the mountains of Idaho, our cat would probably have died.

Is it weird that this makes me feel somehow badass, like a pioneer crossing the country, enduring hardships, close to death? Like in Oregon Trail: Your cat is sick. Your cat has died of dysentery. Ashley drowned while fording the river. Well, the cat lives, and is currently climbing in and out of a box that I haven't unpacked yet.

If you want to know about dehydrated cats—and don't we all?—go here.