The Move to California
SOMEHOW we got it all together, got things sorted out, got the car packed, unpacked, repacked, unpacked again, and repacked again—better each time, though. And we were ready to hit the road. My Dad had updated the insurance so that it would cover us completely. He had also bought a whole bunch of gas gift cards which he stocked in the car, choosing different brands that we might be most likely to encounter along our intended route. He also purchased the latest printed atlas that he could find that covered the entire continental United States. If nothing else, my mom’s car had a built in GPS system, so we could always fall back on that if we needed to. We were guys, after all, so anything that smacked or even hinted of asking for help along the road was so un-guy-like.
My mom stocked the floor behind our two seats with enough snacks to allow an Army to successfully navigate its way across the country. On the back seat she also had set up a cooler that plugged into a cigarette lighter and cooled the contents with electricity that it drew from the car while it was running. She filled that with a case of bottled water and even more food. She tossed two more cases of bottled water into the back end of the car.
On the morning that we were due to depart, we stood in the driveway beside the car getting our last-minute instructions. Both Mom and Dad shoved cash money into each of our pockets for the trip. Bill objected, but it was of no use whatsoever even trying. We thanked them both for everything. There were tears. My mom complained that her babies were leaving home and that she was going to miss us every hour of every day, and would worry endlessly until we reached California safely.
My dad had made sure that we each had a car charger for our cell phones so we could talk to them each and every day—without fail! Finally, after more tears and lots and lots of hugs, I got behind the wheel, started the car, and with Bill as navigator, we started on the greatest adventure of our young lives. California, here we come!
AFTER the first day, the novelty of traveling the open road wore off pretty quick. There wasn’t a lot of traffic across New York State, but it increased as we crossed into Ohio and approached Cleveland. We had opted for the more southerly of the two basic routes across the country, taking I-40, so from Cleveland we steered south, bypassing Chicago.
Our route took us south into Columbus, Ohio. In Indiana we passed through Indianapolis and then Terre Haute. In Missouri, we went through St. Louis, Columbia, and Kansas City. After that it was Wichita, Kansas, through the northwestern corner of Oklahoma, through Albuquerque, New Mexico; Winslow, Arizona; Flagstaff, Arizona; Kingman, Arizona, where we detoured north a little ways to visit the Grand Canyon; Barstow, California; and then finally on into Los Angeles.
In the end, our trip took us a little over 2,700 miles. Driving time alone was something like forty-five hours. When you factor in meals, gas fill-ups, traffic slowdowns, and other such things, the number goes up quickly and substantially.
We traveled simply. The first day we drove eight hours. We were both wired enough to keep pushing on, but we very much looked forward to the opportunity to have some time together off the road as well. We spent a quiet evening in a cheap motel bed somewhere in nowhere, Ohio. While we didn’t break the springs on the bed, we did give them an enthusiastic workout. As usual, Bill was insatiable, and I was only too happy to accommodate his needs and desires. And it was wonderful.
We relished the opportunity to make out to our heart’s content. It was a wonderful experience—the start of many, many more to come, I hoped—not to have to worry about my mom and dad hearing something next door. I’m sure that the people next door to us that night heard a lot, but we weren’t related to them so we didn’t care. And besides, we were all done and lights out by ten o’clock. Driving was dull, but tiring at the same time.
The next morning we were up early, ate a cheap breakfast at a roadside place, and pushed on for nearly five hundred miles. That turned out to be just too much driving for us for one day, so the next day we backed off to only three hundred and fifty miles. We knew five hundred miles was too much when we started arguing about stupid stuff. When the temperature of the air conditioning caused a nearly full-out war between us, we knew that we were overtired. After that, at a more reasonable pace, the peace and tranquility we had known returned to the journey.
Each night we stopped in another cheap (but clean) roadside motel/hotel and did things that would scare the sheep. Actually, I don’t think they would have been scared so much as jealous. Each day we pushed on, covering more and more miles, getting farther and farther from our starting point and slowly closer and closer to our destination. When we started planning the trip, we had talked about making two stops along the way, at Mt. Rushmore and at the Grand Canyon. In the end, given the routing that we selected, we ended up making only one stop, at the Grand Canyon, and what a stop that was.
We didn’t hike down into the canyon or do any of the serious climbs that were available as options. I could see Bill practically salivating at the thought of going down into the canyon and hiking back out. But we agreed that the canyon had been there a lot of years and would be there a few more so that we would stop and spend a few days there on another trip. Still, it was a spectacular place to visit, and everyone should at least stand on the south rim and peek down into the ginormous chasm that had been slowly carved away over millions and millions of years. The canyon had the most amazing ability to change appearance as the light changed. We were there several hours, and it was truly amazing to see the scene take on different qualities, depending upon the angle at which the sunlight illuminated the scene.
We both took bunches of photos, and between the two of us we hoped that we got a couple of good ones to send home. To pass the time on the drive out, some of the time when I was riding I worked on setting up a blog. It wasn’t all that hard to do. In fact, the hard part was choosing between all of the options that were out there. Actually, setting it up was the easy part.
As you might expect, each night when we stopped in nowhere, whatever-state-we-were-in, our initial entries were fairly concise. We were, after all, more interested in each other’s bodies than we were in writing about the cornfields we had seen that day. I knew that once we got to California and got settled we would have more time and more things to write about. I did, however, keep a notebook of scribbled notes while we drove so that someday when I was bored I could go back and write out a more detailed commentary on the trip. Memories of Isabella, Bill’s ancestor, whose foresight at saving signed first edition books to provide for his education, kept prompting me to record what we saw, no matter how minute it seemed.
We had deliberately timed things so that we would arrive in Los Angeles in midmorning. Several days earlier we had alerted our soon-to-be-landlord by e-mail of our trip and our expected arrival in Los Angeles. She had told us that she wouldn’t be available until late that night due to a work obligation, but that she would leave a key for us. She gave us careful directions as to which rock in the garden to turn over to find our key
We had to use the GPS to navigate once we got into the city, and since the city was huge and started way out, it came into play as the traffic volume increased. We had sort of expected that there wouldn’t be a lot of traffic at that time since the morning rush hour should be over and everyone who was going to work would already be at work. Wrong! We had lots of company on the road. Even so, we had no difficulty navigating to our intended destination.
When we pulled up in front of our new home, we looked at each other with two of the biggest smiles two people have ever worn on their faces any time before in history. After so many days on the road, so many days in this car, neither of us moved for a moment. “Well,” I said, “I guess we’re here.”
“Yeah, I guess we are.”
“You excited?” I asked.
“Yeah. And scared, too. But mostly excited.”
“You?”
“Ditto.”
Bill had driven us into LA—he was much more unruffled about driving in heavy traffic than I was. I was good on the open road, but I hated driving in heavy traffic, never sure where someone was going to go. Once I learned the patterns of traffic and how people drove out here I didn’t think it would be an issue, but until then I was quite happy to have Bill do the driving.