Report from the road (9/25/2024)

Although I am home, I want to report a little more about my recent road trip. I was gone for 11 days. I had fun. I did not record the miles I drove, but I think it was over 3000 miles. Flying back was ok. Thank goodness there was a direct flight from Los Angeles to Norfolk and I was able to relax once the airplane tool off. In this blog I want to discuss some of the non-drive experiences, mostly as they relate to people.

My objective of Day 1 was to get away from Virginia as soon as possible. The major thing I experienced that roads were still under construction, very much like what I described here a year ago. I also had trouble with my phone keeping its charge, despite the fact that I plugged it in. Somehow the USB port was not doing its job. I decided to buy a plug-in charger in the town I stopped. Luckily, there was a car parts store near the motel I stayed in. The attendant was very helpful, we had a nice talk about all the complicated plug-in gadgets and different telephone charge ports there were. He was young, but even for him it was somewhat difficult to hunt for the correct gadget on the rack.

I somehow had a hankering for Mexican food and stopped at the restaurant nearby. It had good ratings on Google, and I dare say, the food was good. But don't order the rib-eye fajita. My chin dropped when it was served; it was an actual rib-eye stake with all the fajita makings. I ate all the vegies and half the meat and that was it. The stake was great but I was full and regretted all those chips I ate and washed down with a jumbo margarita. When I mentioned to my server that it was way too much, he just nodded.

As I mentioned in my previous post the next stop included St. Louis and the famous Gateway Arch. You go up in what they call a train; however, to me it feels more like a ferris-wheel. I shared my gondola with two couples. When making small talk they mentioned that they were both from Milwaukie, did not know each other, but lived a mile apart. As a result they started to discuss the latest murder a few blocks down from where they lived. The mother of one of the couples lived a few homes down whre the murder took place. One of the ladies told me that she wanted to take her (now) husband to all the water parks in the country and they had just spent a day at one in St. Louis.

I want to keep this post about some of the people I encountered on the road. I did not get a chance to interact with many, except some servers in restaurants, most of them were very nice and personable, including the server in Warrenton (MO), Pratt (KS), the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, and Mesquite (NV). The bar lady at the brewery in Alamosa was nice too. The most memorable were the teenage server in Pratt. She was too young to serve beer and the bartender had to bring it over. I should have asked if she was still in school and what she thought her future was in such a small rural Kansas town. Actually, the staff at the Pratt Holiday Inn Express were the friendliest. The wait staff at the North Rim appeared to be mostly Turkish engineering students who were there for the second season. I had fun talking with them. Their season was almost over, after which they played tourist for a few weeks before going back to Ankara. Their plans included a tour of the National Parks in the west. The owner of the Peruvian restaurant was from Nicaragua, but he assured me the cook was Peruvian. The food was outstanding.

The ranger or receptionist at the Prairie Preserve, she was mildly interesting, well trained and thus politically correct. Between the lines, she briefly mentioned something like “the mess” this country was in, but when I tried to draw her out, she refrained. We had a nice talk; she as a wildlife grad and me as a range management dude. However, she had no idea about the less common plants that I observed during my hike on the preserve.

The most interesting discussion I had was with a Navajo sales person at the Four Corners Landmark.  He was manning a booth and we spoke about my previous life and work on and near the Navajo Nation.  He told me that I missed the powwow in Windowrock which was held that weekend.  Again just small talk but very pleasant to be back in the culture I once lived in.

My last real encounter with someone I did not know was at the Hollywood Bowl. I wanted to buy a commemorative sweatshirt. “No, no that one is too small for you,” an African American lady all the sudden started to give me advice, “you need to go a size up.” We ended up in a nice 5-minute small talk, while my daughter and her spouse looked on. Having had a few women trying to take advantage of me on-line, I was a little weary or suspicious but then my family was nearby and we parted on very friendly terms. I may write about these more nefarious encounters some other time.

As you can see, I have nothing serious to report, and never had an in-depth discussion during any of my encounters. In a way I regret that, but is never was my objective during this trip. Hopefully, it provides a very small vignette of the people I saw and met during my trip.

This is a photograph of the small gondola of the train going up the Arch.  It's a four minute ride and as you can see, very intimate.

The Four Corners Landmark

Nomads, day 15 (9/19/2023)

We have arrived in Long Beach, our intended destination. We have come here to watch our daughter get ordained as a Unitarian Universalist minister. I have no idea how long we will stay here. But let’s continue with the correct sequence of events.

Day 15: Henderson (NV) – Las Vegas – Barstow (CA) – Long Beach

Days 16, 17 and 18: Long Beach and the Los Angeles area.

The trip from our latest stopping point to Long Beach was interesting and uneventful at the same time. We left the hotel as soon as possible! Here, I came up with one observation: while the setup of the van makes sense and is good, we need to devise a better way of moving things from the van into a motel room or now into our daughter’s home. Yes, I get a lot of steps on my Fitbit walking back and forth between our van and the intended place of domicile for the night, but it all seems somewhat inefficient if you decide not to sleep in the van that night. We have our clothes in bins and when staying overnight in a motel room, I only need our toothbrushes, one piece of underwear, a clean T-shirt, etc. You get the message I assume. We still sleep with the same clothes on as at the time we were born.

After what had inevitably become to be, our regular breakfast of a McMuffin meal with coffee, we decided to go for broke and visit the famous Las Vegas Strip. It took us a half hour drive in morning commuter traffic to get there. However, we were treated with the sights we were somewhat expecting. The van we are driving has the advantage that you sit higher, and you can look over all the vehicles. It was a great vantage point. There was a lot of construction and traffic on the strip, so we inched from one end of the strip to the other. The benefit was that the driver (me) had plenty of chances to look around as well. The electronic billboards, the famous casinos, the tourists, and even the occasional person sitting on the curb, acting as if he was completely out of it, broke after gambling, drunk or with a hangover at 9 in the morning was fun to see. After hearing so much about the famous strip, it did not disappoint.

Leaving Las Vegas put us on Interstate 15, all the way to LA. Starbucks on the way, and by the time we left Nevada for California my Google Maps told me there was an accident somewhere down the road. We were passed by a screaming police vehicle and soon thereafter we got the reminder why not purchase one of these super big campers (at least the size of a big bus) that fit behind a monster truck. We finally got to see what one of those campers looked like from underneath. The camper was on its side on the shoulder of the highway. The truck that was pulling it was upright, but it looked like it had been on its side as well. The airbags had been deployed and when we drove by, I could see the driver trying to deflate them.

The remainder of the drive was fascinating. We just descended and descended from a plateau that was above 4000 feet to approximately 700 feet in elevation. It got progressively hotter, and the vegetation became sparser; we encountered large areas covered in sand. Looking on the map we could see we were entering the beginnings of what was to become Death Valley further to the northwest. We never actually entered Death Valley; we skirted it; however, this low area already seemed very inhospitable and an eerie reminder of what we could have encountered had we gone there. In Barstow we stopped for dog food at the local Tractor Supply, which was much larger than our local one at home. Lunch at the outlets near Barstow and on the road again, now with Long Beach as destination on our GPS. Our lunch spot (at Chipotle) was interesting. We sat outside with the dogs, and we were surrounded by house sparrows that were begging for handouts. Radar was really interested in the little birds and tried to shoe them away.

Back up in the hills to finally descend into the L.A. basin. As we dove down a layer of smog or maybe thicker polluted air and the L.A. highway system welcomed us. The highways were all that they were made out to be, very crowdy and congested. Thank goodness we were able to utilize the carpool lane having 2 individuals in the van.

We arrived in one piece after a 16-day trip. In the next post I will describe some of our adventures while residing in the Long Beach and L.A. area. We are now slowly starting to plan our trip back home. I think we will be somewhat happy to drive up our street, to stick the key in our front door and start planning some new (van-based) adventures.

Not in order of our trip this time.  We have arrived!

Joshua trees in the Mojave Desert 

Las Vegas strip

Las Vegas strip

Nomads, days 13 and 14 (9/18/2023)

We woke up in Logan Utah, with the destination in sight. We slept decently, even after being relocated by the folks that stole our site. But let’s first resume my daily log.

Day 13: Logan UT – Cedar City

Day 14: Cedar City – Zion National Park (Kolob Canyons) – Moapa Valley (NV) – Hoover dam – Henderson (near Las Vegas)

Back to Logan. We were not particularly happy as you might have noticed above and in our previous post. The memories that flooded back from our time there were interesting. Together we received around $1000 in stipends, and we lived of that and savings that we had accumulated from my Uganda job. We cleaned our home and did laundry on Saturdays and hiked on Sundays. When we left town at the end of our studies, our landlord gave us our deposit in the form of a check. When we arrived on the east coast four days later, we learned that she had blocked payment on it without giving us any reason. Our discussions with the waitress, the evening before (shew was from Texas and obviously not from the prevailing religion), somehow had brought other negative feeling up about our stay 42 years ago. I am still amazed how events from so long ago can jaundice someone’s impressions and feelings. It harks back to some of the stuff I read in “The Art of Travel” (look at my first post for the reference <here>).

After breakfast at McD. (we wanted get the hell out of the campsite ASAP), we again drove by our old home and decided to go view the campus. We hardly recognized it, so much has changed in the 42 years although a few things looked familiar. I was looking for houses friends used to live and tried to remember parties we had while driving to campus. However, those homes were gone and now were the sites of commercial buildings. We remembered our friend Allen who was always in shorts and even biked to campus in shorts during snowstorms. We also again discussed our very good friends Jeff and Maria. Jeff had rheumatoid arthritis and one afternoon they came to our home, giving us all their booze, because they had decided to turn Mormon. A couple of weeks earlier we had been skinny dipping together in a creek in the hills.  Jeff committed suicide soon thereafter; he could not live with the pain and the outlook on his future.  In those days, they did not have the drugs we have now. We hit the road after that and took off for Cedar City.

The drive took off some of the pressure, I personally was delighted to be back in the basin and range ecosystem. I love the Great Basin Desert. We initially wanted to go to Bryce Canyon NP, but changed our minds, since it was getting hotter again. In other words, we found a dog friendly Holiday Inn Express; I booked a room online and set that as our goal. Our intention was to go for a hike after checking in and visit Zion the day after. Well, by the time we got near Cedar City we were hit by some major thunderstorms and the hike never materialized.

Zion stayed on our list, but a visit the next day revealed to us that this National Park wasn’t dog friendly. The Kolob Canyon scenic road was partially closed, and we walked the dogs on a section of the closed part.

Goodbye Utah, hello Nevada; one of the few states I had never set foot in. Lunch at a taco stand in Moapa Valley while watching a flock white faced ibises; they were what looked like grazing in a flooded pasture. This was followed by the drive through the Lake Mead scenic area. In Nevada we had entered the northern regions of what looked like the Mojave Desert, I was delighted to see creosote bush and the sparseness of the vegetation. The geology was amazing, as well. Here I am in my element, at home; being an arid land ecologist. We loved seeing the lake and the white ring showing how the water level had dropped. One of the rangers told us that the level had come up 26 feet these past few months.

A visit to Hoover dam, and a hotel. It was 98 outside and we were not thrilled with camping. This turned out to be something. It seemed that only the casino hotels in the area were dog friendly (guess why). Honestly, they sucked, or the one we ended up in did! You had to enter a smokey casino with dogs to get to the elevators, but we survived it. These are some of the perils of camping in a van with dogs.

What did I learn to date? We need a rooftop AC, if we want to do this more regularly in the warm part of the year. To be able to operate the AC on sites with no electricity, we will need to generate our own power. In other words, we need to install solar panels on the roof and a battery system. Something to investigate when we get back home.

Zion

The taco truck

In the sand dune area with petrified sand dunes

Same as above, with our van.  The temperatures are 98

The Hoover Dam

The carpet at our hotel.  Should I take my shoes off?

This is where you walk your dog, in the parking lot of the casino