The last week has been quite the adventure starting last Sunday with loading the truck. What started as a plan to drive a small U-Haul (thinking a baby 10-foot truck) grew and grew. While I did purge about 75% of my life and belongings before Peace Corps, I still managed to fill and 8X10 storage, with mostly boxes and a few pieces of sentimental furniture including granddaddy’s haunted deacon’s chair, the impossibly heavy 1800’s table around which I heard my first tales of family clairvoyance and hands-on-healing, the first piece of furniture I bought post-divorce, a childhood table and tons of artwork and odds-and-ends of memorabilia from around the world – plus – you know – regular paraphernalia required for conducting life. That amounts to about 650 cubic feet of STUFF, translating to a 14 foot truck expertly loaded. That turned into a 17-foot truck to accommodate the possibility of not-so-expert loading and THAT morphed into a 20-foot truck by pick-up date because they didn’t have a 17-foot one. With each additional foot in length, my anxiety level ratcheted up by an order of magnitude. What is life for if not to worry…. but my friend Lizzy kept telling me I was making too big of a deal out of it and so I took a deep breath and hoped for a Xanax.And – just for the record a 20-foot U-Haul is NOT 20-feet long … It’s 30 feet – or so.
Forget the big-girl-panties….. I went for the jock-strap and channeled my “inner-trucker.” It seems to have worked. My good friend Karla from Peace Corps has achieved sainthood status because she flew over to make the trip with me. Not sure what I did to deserve this generosity, but I picked her up on Saturday and now, here we are in Oregon. How will I ever thank her!
Driving the truck back on Sunday after loading was a little like it must feel taking your first step on a tight-rope while holding an elephant by the tail. I was scared to even attempt the steep hill going to Lizzie’s house, but the only other option was to drive half way around Austin to avoid it. I was relieved to discover it did not in fact stall half way up as I had imagined….
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| Karla and I with our weapon of choice |
And I’m sure you all will be glad to know we heeded suggestions that we take a weapon for self-defense. Refusing recommendations of a gun, pepper spray or wasp/bear spray we opted for a fierce hand-rake that presented itself during loading. Soon every car will be equipped with one.
From that inauspiciously fearful beginning, we have now accomplished a 45 hour drive of roughly 2400 miles, transiting Texas, New Mexico, a corner of Colorado, Utah, Idaho and Oregon in a truck with a gasoline addiction resulting in the consumption of 350 gallons of gas (8 mpg). We accomplished the entire trip in what seemed to be a state of grace. Karla’s navigating saved the day and made it possible without total madness and the purchase of a female-voiced Garmin navigator we named Garmina has made me fall in love with technology. Interesting sights along the way kept us totally engaged and entertained.
Driving through the desolate no-man’s-land of West Texas we crested a hill and had to immediately dodge the debris of a blown-out tire. While still wondering what vehicle had survived that blow-out, the other side of the hill offered up a scene right out of a fifties’ movie: two ancient white school buses snugged up to each other facing opposite directions and surrounded by six grim looking armed guards policing the transfer of prisoners. We didn’t think it wise to stop for pictures.
We continued on for a total of thirteen hours that day and settled into a routine. On every trip concessions must be made to accommodate space and time limitations. On this trip, there was no CD player for books on tape or music. But with Karla – for whom every site triggers a song, there was always music. For me, it’s stories, so between songs and tall-tales, we managed to keep each other entertained, if not a little crazed. One of those concessions was not about to be good coffee, so at each unloading of more bags than a traveling circus, the one with coffee, french press and fixin’s plus an ice box with the half-and-half had highest priority. Waking up at 5:30 each morning – usually with a headache brought on by driving 10 hours the day before – yours truly (that would be me) greeted the day with a primal scream for coffee and started the ritual of figuring out how to make said coffee using the various contraptions available on site. Some mornings required a heating element purchased in Mexico, some resulted in messes that could only be described as volcanic, and others employed various contraptions mimicking a stone-age Starbucks. All required the focus of a chemist. But in the end – there was C-O-F-F-E-E to jump start the process of cognition sufficient to transit another 500 miles.
There were bizarre moments of mental lapses so aberrant that – had I been elsewhere – might have resulted in a scene out of One Flew Over the Cookoo’s Nest. Consumed in an examination of a lever I’d already used for a day, but which boasted a sign for a device about which I know nothing – I asked in the most earnest of voices “what do you think this lever is for… it looks like it has a purpose” Karla, looking incredulous and more than a little spooked at the prospect of continuing another 2000 miles with this mad woman, suggested it might be for shifting gears, at which point a deafening silence ensued. The incapacitating laughter that erupted when I came out of the time warp returns unbidden every time we think about it. Some things are simply inexplicable. Maybe we were just preparing for Roswell of alien fame. We hadn’t originally planned that stop, but as the route unfolded, Jeannie’s directions brought us right through Roswell and its ubiquitous supply of “little green men.” This one was the greeter at the Motel 6.
After a night in a dank and smoke infested Roswell Motel 6 (the alien was of no help) we managed to arrive in Albuquerque to meet up with another Peace Corp friend, Jeannie and had a great visit. Wish we had a friend like Jeannie at every stop along the way as she really made us feel so welcome and well cared for. Professional truckers that we are and each of us taking care of different things, not always checking in with the other – we drove out of Albuquerque on Day 2 to the sound of a small horn beeping behind us only to discover that Jeannie was not just giving us a a grand send- off, but warning us that we’d left the back of the truck open! How the mighty truckers had fallen and been reduced once again to the realm of mere mortals. So grateful were we that our stupidity was discovered before we got on the highway, that we almost forgot to be embarrassed. Thanks to Jeannie we were spared the abject humiliation of it happening it 8 o’clock Albuquerque traffic.
Shortly after that fiasco – laughing all the way – Jeannie’s improved routing took us past a resort where eight hot-air balloons were readying for lift off against the morning sky. Spectacular. The scenery that took us up to Colorado gave truth to New Mexico’s title as the Land of Enchantment.
Colorado was surprising in that we went across the southwest corner that looks like a moonscape with desolate buff-gray rounded land forms that gave way to Utah and its jaw-dropping surreal landscapes of red rock sculptures, arches and canyons. Just as we thought it couldn’t get any more spectacular, dramatic dark cloud formations dumping swaths of rain danced across the horizon occasionally gracing us with a shower to clean off the dust collected along the way.
Getting through Provo and Boise, Idaho kept us on our toes as we kept the U-Haul, newly christened Guadalupe after Our of Guadalupe (you can’t drive something 2400 miles without giving it a name) moving forward as Garmina would periodically remind us to “stay on road.” Who would have guessed she had a sense of humor? I wish her expertise extended to motels, because the next night we landed at a new and improved version of Motel 6 where the AC abandoned us. That made us determined to find another option, so we reserved a room at the lovely looking Dunes Motel in Hillsboro (the coast having NO VACANCIES because of the holiday) and arrived to discover it surrounded by yellow hazard tape and absent siding. Photo-shop is a grand invention.
Road signs and place markers did their part to keep us entertained and wondering about the fate they suggested:
Dismal Nitch, Dead Horse Canyon, Starvation Road, Poverty Lane, Hells Bend and Humbug Cove.
And Guadalupe never met a gas pump she didn’t love. We spent a lot of time nurturing her addiction. Gas prices got worse as we went west and we spent about $1200 feeding our trusty transport. But otherwise, she treated us well and was surprisingly comfortable, if you don’t count needing back support for the driver. At the last minute, Liz donated a bath mat that served that purpose. Improvisation turned out to be a valuable skill on this trip.
Coming into Oregon from the south east was shocking as we saw a part of the state that echoed the moon-scape feel of parts of Colorado, Texas and Utah, punctuated by hundreds of towering white wind turbines turning against the back drop of a bluebird sky.
Driving under the Welcome to Oregon arch gave me chill-bumps as I realized how long I have planned for and thought about this move. When the Columbia River and Mount Hood came into view it was nothing short of a spiritual experience.
We abandoned Garmina’s logical best-route commands when I decided to turn off and take the back way into Portland via Mt. Hood and Timberline to visit Brett. I couldn’t possibly be that close and opt for logic over heart and miss the opportunity to hug Brett in celebration of arrival. Approaching 11,000 feet, Guadalupe gasped a little, but pulled her weight and made it up the winding roads without a glitch. Getting to the top caused some angst when I realized I would have to get her down 6% slopes without riding the brakes. We managed to piss-off a few drivers behind us, but put her in low gear and snaked our way down.
No U-Haul trip would be complete without navigating and taking a wrong turn in a city during rush-hour the Friday before a holiday. We obliged and thought we might implode from hysterical stress-induced laughing as we squeezed across a two land winding bridge tailgated by a schoolbus full of football players. The driver had the good sense not to pass us, knowing no doubt that the drivers didn’t know what they were doing – a generalized assumption about U-Haul drivers that is probably well deserved.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that the trip thus far has felt truly blessed. At every juncture, it has been easier than expected. When there was threatening weather all around us, the road through it seemed to open up. Guadalupe has been comfortable and accommodating, despite her guzzling addition to gasoline. The loading was so well organized that nothing appears to have shifted and there have only been two glitches in routing over the entire route. We’ve laughed more than I thought possible, eaten some truly awful combinations of food (fried chicken, corn dogs, Cheetos, road food) ….. OK – so the food has not been so blessed. But otherwise it has been a remarkable journey and the rest of it is just beginning.
We have checked out Astoria, a major seaport at the mouth of the Columbia River, Seaside and Cannon Beach for rental possibilities, but of course everything is closed for Labor Day weekend and no one has returned calls since property management companies are closed. Flexibility being the byword here, we spent the day at the Japanese Garden and Rose Garden in Portland. Tomorrow we’ll explore Lincoln City and on Tuesday hopefully there will be some movement!
