Pic of the Day: SAloon

Good morning.

A SAloon, just off I-40.  We stopped for gas across the freeway.

Just a moment on a much longer voyage.

Somewhere in America.

They Call Me..."Roadie"

Often I find myself caught between two worlds, two sets of expectations. Often this is reflected in the kind of traveling I like to do, and what sort of planning accompanies each event.

On one hand, I am every bit the starry-eyed glitz and glamor jetsetter my minds' eye would like to believe that I am. (I'm not, but have enough credentials and miles under my belt to make it a stretching of the truth versus an outright lie.) (As I write this I am parked in an underground parking garage in Beverly Hills, escorting a screenwriter friend of mine around the various production companies in LA -- as a traveler, I've been to New York, Paris, Monte Carlo, St Barth's and Las Vegas, among other glam destinations. And consumed far more martinis in exotic locations than my liver would care to admit.)

And the truth is, I like a lot of the trappings of that kind of thing. Yeah, it makes me shallow and self-indulgent, but there's something to be said for the luxuries in life. If, of course, you can afford them.

Road Trip!!

On the other hand, there is a very strong part of my personality which is driven towards the humbler and more adventurous experiences in life -- and in most ways, these can be the more enjoyable and rewarding activities in a lot of different ways. Camping in a tent the day before going white water rafting is the sort of intimately personal and challenging pursuit which tells you more about yourself and your craft than does an evening in a bar tossing down expensive liquor. Give me a beer, some marshmallows and a campfire and I'm good.

All of which drives the decision making each and every time I go to plan a trip. Next years' adventures are already well into the planning stages and are, for the most part, circled around cultural and/or luxurious destinations. But in conversations with friends I've come to realize how many of the important memories come from times when the subject is the adventure of getting your hands dirty, and not in the glamor of a given situation.

For example...

If you ever plan to motor west...

I have driven or been driven across the continental United States more than a half dozen times. The three most memorable -- those which made the greatest an impact on my perspective and worldview -- involved the settings and events instead of just the participants. The first, with my father in 1971, had a profound effect on my understanding of this country. We alternated between campgrounds and low budget motels, more for the adventure than the cost involved. The car was a bright yellow 1966 Corvair Corsa, earning it the nickname "Chiquita". My father and I would set up tent in roughly half of the places we stopped, while every other night we would check into a Travelodge or Motel 6 or Holiday Inn to wash the grime from our ears and get a good night's sleep. We also experimented with small, local diners versus the now-omnipresent fast food chains which now seem to clog every interstate off ramp and were, even then, plentiful. 

Miles to go before I sleep

This set the tone for my own future long drives, particularly when it comes to food. Though there are times when fast food is the only option, I find it anathema to the very concept of travel and cultural experimentation. If every meal consists of chain store burgers and fries, why bother packing up and heading down the road in the first place?

The second of my three memorable trips across country occurred a decade and a half later when I set out on a solitary trip from Washington, DC, to attend college in Los Angeles. The car was an aging, green Triumph TR7 -- itself the source of a couple of sideways misadventures during the drive. It was on this particular adventure I discovered my own tendency to push forward rather than stop and rest. It's not a good habit, and in the intervening years I've forced myself to take breaks and stop for the evenings rather than push on. 

The worst of these marathons occurred on the first day of this particular voyage. In planning, I had intended to drive for six to eight hours before stopping for the night. Best laid plans, I guess. 

I left the DC area at 9- ish in the morning -- I had a final summertime dentist appointment before getting back to school for the semester. By the time I'd reached the southern border of Virginia it was beginning to grow dark. My plan was to make it to just outside Knoxville, Tennessee, before hunkering down for the night.

The Simple Stuff...so good!

But I kept going. I passed through Knoxville, following interstate to the South, changing plans and deciding I would overnight in Chattanooga. By the time I reached that town, however, I decided to continue on, stopping for a very late dinner at a little diner in the tiny northwestenmost chip of Georgia. Despite the late hour, and the nearly 16 hours I had been on the road, I pressed on, convinced I could make it well into Louisiana before the next morning. And I likely would have, had fate and a faulty alternator not stopped me for a day in the tiny town of Union, Alabama. (Town is an overstatement.) 

Since that point I've made an effort not to be so focused on the distance traveled as I am on the terrain at hand.

The third and final drive was in 1995 with my wife, who at that point had never seen the center of the country -- aptly, if derogatorily referred to as "flyover country". That trip, more than any other, allowed me to see the world through someone else's eyes. To see things as new and different, and seeking to find those things that make each and every place unique unto itself. I don't care how many minimalls or Walmarts or McDonald's may pop up, you can always find something that tells you about the local culture. Of what it might have been, even if it now is no different from somewhere just down the road or across the country.

The view from ground level

And it is those things, usually available for a shoestring budget, that full fare, you will never see except perhaps from the window of your luxury hotel. As much as I might love a three star restaurant, I will learn much more about a place in the $2 diner three blocks up and just around the corner.

Just sayin'.

ROAD TRIP: Sea to Shining Sea

There is nothing like a road trip.

Getting into your car and just driving off to adventure can be, in and of itself, an exhilarating experience. It's a form of freedom with a long tradition starting with perhaps the first motorcar as it chugged it's way into the nearby mountains for a picnic, and culminating -- at least from a distance and endurance standpoint -- in the annual Dakar, an offroad rally race covering five to seven thousand miles across entire continents and through at-times hideously forbidding terrain.

Fortunately, we have well-paved roads if you stick to the main thoroughfares, but where's the fun in that? (Kidding.)

Meteor Crater

In addition to what must number in the hundreds of "regional" road trips, through New England, the Yukon, the Eastern Seaboard, up the California Coast and through the southwestern desert, among many others, I have driven or been driven end to end across the United States a grand total of six times. In cars that ran the gamut. 

The first trip, or at least the first I can remember and is generally accepted as such by the rest of the family, was in 1971 when my father and I trekked together in a 1968 Corvair Corsa from Newport Rhode Island to Seal Beach, California (a town just south of Long Beach). I was ten, just learning to properly use a camera, and at first bored by the long times in the car. It wasn't until a day or two into the trip that I realized the terrain was changing and that this, indeed, was something above and beyond a long time locked in a car.

Departing, O'Dark Thirty

At the behest of my grandfather, my dad and I kept a daily journal of the adventure, which eventually was paired in an album with photographs from our trip. My pictures could easily be identified by the shaky blur of ten year old fingertips on the shutter, an error my father noticed and corrected, but not until a number of "shaky Jake" photos were committed to film. I learned a lot on that trip, far more than a simply flyover would have permitted. Holding the camera steady and slowly pressing the trigger, for instance. Another was that you don't order hamburger steak rare, no matter that the word steak appears in its name. I learned about the petrification of wood at the Petrified Forest, and stood in wonder at the edge of Meteor Crater -- and even moreso on the rim of the Grand Canyon itself. I toured the interior of Hoover Dam, a marvel for a ten year old heavily into this sort of thing. And further down the road Interstate 40 was, at this point, still incomplete, requiring a side trip which first allowed me a glimpse -- in the distance -- of Las Vegas. We didn't stop, of course, but rocketed through and kept heading for the coast. By journey's end my mind had been expanded, and in all likelihood the event that began my love of the road trip.

My first drive solo across the country was in a 1976 Triumph TR7. Not the most reliable of cars in the best of times, it expressed some consternation at being lead through the paces, finally breaking down in Union, Alabama, which boasted a business day population of maybe ten people, including tourists. A gas station and a diner were the only visible buildings, and being a young and naive kid I managed to get myself squarely between two feuding service companies -- ending in my being thrown off the property by the station owner until he was calmed by a long distance call from my father. I should have been more aware of my surroundings and suspicious when the first mechanic eyed my car and its California plates, keenly observing that my Triumph was "one a them Japanese cars, ain't it?" 

Eight hours in Alabama's blazing August sun pretty much ended any desire to return to that state -- apologies to the Alabama Tourist Bureau, but trauma is trauma by any other name and is something that shouldn't be trifled. (Oddly enough the car experienced essentially the exact same problem three days later in New Mexico. Having gone through all of my cash to get my car out of Union, I was near panic as I pulled into a gas station off the highway. Three minutes after popping the hood, the mechanic reached down and shoved a loose plug into place. The engine immediately roared back and he sent me back on the road at no charge. "Sometimes those connectors come loose in these kind of cars". And yes, I know I was probably taken advantage of by the locals who spied a stupid kid in a foreign car with west coast plates. They saw me coming. Caveat Emptor.)

The Painted Desert

Santa Fe

The next time I crossed the country, and the last time as of this writing, was in the company of my wife, who had never seen much of the interior. We made an outing of it, having gone back to purchase my father's Acura Legend in the DC area and needing to get it back to Long Beach. So, in many ways we duplicated the drive I took with my father so many years previous to this one, and took the time out to go spelunking in Virginia's Skyline Caverns just outside Front Royal, then driving a long stretch of the similarly titled Skyline Drive through Shenandoah National Park. Rather than race across country, we took our time. It was wonderful to just be together for the week, but also to take time to visit things from the sublime (a return, for me, to the Grand Canyon) to the ridiculous (yes, we've been to Graceland). During the drive we encountered a fierce Arkansan downpour, a wide blue sky through Oklahoma, and the blazing sun through the Petrified Forest. By this time I had discovered the camera, and while digital was still many years in the future, managed to pop out a few pretty decent 35mm shots from my old Pentax. At that point I was largely self-taught, and hadn't yet become proficient in post-work. But in spite of the odds, think I did pretty well representing the best of our trip.

The beauty of having crossed this nation so many times is that you become aware of just how spectacular our scenery is. There's a majestic beauty to the Great Plains, for example. It's an amazing landscape which many might find boring, but in truth is a profound demonstration of just how big this land is. Similarly, the grandeur of the canyons and mountains, the cultures encountered along the way -- everything from back country southern hospitality with restaurants like the Bean Pot in Crossville, Tennessee (or the other end of the spectrum, rednecked auto mechanics in Union) -- to native American Sky Cities; the arts scene in Santa Fe; from the gaudy leather in Graceland to the striking beauty of Sedona's red rocks. Only from the road can you see America at her most authentic best -- even if that authenticity is completely contrived. And only by taking the granddaddy of all road trips -- across this land from sea to shining sea -- can you discover the country far too many of us take for granted. 

A friend of ours from Britain made the trek with my mother and younger sister two decades ago, having visited them in Annapolis, Maryland and a week later now stood at our doorstep in Long Beach. As we walked the last quarter mile down to the Pacific Ocean, I asked what her impression was. 

She thought for a moment, leaned up against the railing overlooking Queensway Bay, and announced: "Big Country."

The Open Road