2005

Unlike most of my past cross–country road trips, I wouldn’t be making this one alone. Also, this one had a goal at one end: our relocation from San Francisco to Charlotte. We’d already shipped a pod and about 35 boxes to our destination, and we still had a rather sizeable load in the car as well. We’d had a lot of work done on said car, and I was relatively confident about its ability to get us across, despite its age and its nearly nonexistent shocks…

The weeks prior to the move had been brutal; it’s even more of a pain in the ass to leave San Francisco than it is to live there. And the day of our departure was no different. We had one final run-in with our psychotic downstairs neighbor which ended in me telling him (in so many words) to go fuck himself. And the last thing we did in San Francisco involved sitting on the sidewalk in front of FedEx on Harrison Street, packing up one last emergency load of stuff to ship, since the car was overflowing. I’ll probably always chuckle thinking about us squatting down on the sidewalk South of Market sorting our undies into neat little piles for shipping, although it seemed slightly less amusing at the time…

After a torturous drive out of San Francisco, we made our way to Cupertino to have lunch with Dan in the Apple employee cafeteria, which made both of us wish we worked for a big high-tech company. After our goodbyes and yet another torturous drive across Highway 152 from Gilroy to Los Banos, we were finally on Highway 99 headed south and it felt like we had escaped the City of Doom for good…

The car was a little overloaded with a few things we’d been planning to drop off with Mark’s sister in Fresno, but it had been holding up just fine. Until we pulled into the Red Roof Inn. There was a loud thunk and a rattle, and then the car got really LOUD. I had very little doubt that we’d just lost our muffler…

All the same, we managed to keep our spirits up through dinner with Mark’s parents. It was only the second time I’d met them, and I thought things went really well. They were friendly and nice and we all got along very well and ate and talked well into the evening. And they offered us the use of the house for Saturday night since it seemed we’d still be in Fresno another day getting the car fixed…

Sunday morning brought a quick breakfast and goodbyes in Fresno before moving south on Highway 99. The car was definitely running much cooler and smoother, I must say. Much of my paranoia was gone and I was ready to start enjoying the trip and to stop worrying about the car, San Francisco, etc…

Our drive was a bit convoluted; we went from Fresno to near Riverside to check in to our motel and then back across to the other end of the LA basin for dinner. Long story. Suffice to say, the Motel 6 is Rubidoux is just about the creepiest place we stayed on the trip. Upon check-in, we were required to sign a non-aggression pact promising we wouldn’t harass any other guests. There were parking permits, liability waivers, and all these signs reminding us that Riverside County ordinance prohibited us from moving into the motel in a residential capacity. All this, mind you, was for a very suburban, almost rural location. I was a touch nervous, but the place seemed OK otherwise…

Dinner at the Saddle Peak Lodge in Calabassas was wonderful. Mark had elk. I had buffalo. There were large dead animals everywhere. There was also, for no apparent reason, mandatory valet parking despite the fact that the lot was both spacious and immediately adjacent. Standard LA, I guess. I once went to a Sizzler there which had valet parking…

After dinner, we drove around LA and the Valley for a while and I realized once again how much I was going to miss this strangely wonderful and exciting place. We planned a long visit soon…

Breakfast at Waffle House; the trip was already getting better. Then, we covered Phoenix and assorted suburbs from all angles. It’s amazingly easy to drive in Phoenix; the freeways may be crowded, but even at rush hour, there’s more than enough capacity on the surface streets alone. And it’s all a big grid, so it’s a really easy place to get around…

For a variety of reasons, some of which would become apparent later, this was the most photo-intensive day of the trip. As expected, I saw lots of interesting 1960s and 1970s architecture, and surprisingly little which was much older…

I’m intrigued by the Uptown area of Phoenix. It’s very close-in, and yet it all seems to have been developed in the past 30 or 40 years. This is an area that — in most cities, even smaller and newer ones — would contain most of the old bungalow neighborhoods and streetcar suburbs from the 1910s and 1920s. Not so in Phoenix; there didn’t even seem to be any evidence that these neighborhoods had once existed and later been bulldozed. Usually, there’s at least a TRACE of something old, but not here. All the same, it also seemed much too large an area to have been a standard urban renewal tract. I don’t quite understand, and we looked without success for a good book on Phoenix history which might have explained it…

It being Tuesday, we had our traditional pizza night at a New York-style joint on Camelback and then drove around some more. I finally read the Phoenix paper, which used to be well-known as a quality paper but its now a miserable, Gannett-owned piece of shit. I didn’t know it at this point, but almost every other paper along I-10 is also a miserable, Gannett-owned piece of shit…

Another exciting day of desert driving took us through Tucson (where everyone apparently lives in his own double-wide), Las Cruces, and not much else. We saw the award-winning rest area near Las Cruces, and it was very nice…

We were running really late, so we were unable to visit a friend in El Paso, since we (alas) didn’t even know he was living there until we were still about two hours out of town. And I DID like the town; it looked like a rather compressed, hilly, and landlocked version of what would otherwise be a flat, sprawling Texas city. And the lights of Juarez across the border were very tempting…

Dinner at a nondescript Subway on Lee Trevino Boulevard…

On a hot Friday morning in Fredericksburg, we called my parents and asked them to FedEx the newly-issued North Carolina tags and title for my car, lest we need to rid ourselves of it. Then, we walked over to the garage, which also doubled as the local impound lot. The idiot mechanic at Behrend’s (if you’re ever in Fredericksburg, avoid this garage) looked under the hood, told me all the coolant had leaked out of the radiator, filled it up again, and told me he couldn’t find any additional leak nor any good reason for one. The car started just fine. He took a small payment under the table…

Back at the motel, Mark and I were unconvinced by his diagnosis. Why, for example, had the car been running so smoothly and even so much cooler than usual over the past few days. Why did this happen all of a sudden and with no warning; it wasn’t as if we’d had a slow radiator leak which would have been gradual and noticeable. Our suspicions were confirmed when we realized we were still leaking. We drove to a Goodyear dealer on the outskirts of town, where the mechanic said, “I can’t work on this foreign car.” Mind you, he was talking about my 1991 Toyota Corolla, constructed in Fremont CA, which is one of the most common cars on the road today…

We then went to Chassis by Zach on his recommendation. We love Zach. He has a certain wry humor and a talent for finding what’s wrong with cars and fixing it (and Mark thought he was cute). He surmised that our problem was a busted radiator drain cap and a pinched O-ring. After one incorrect part delivery and one brief moment when he feared he might need to pull out the radiator, he sent us on our way with a fully-functional (in relative terms) car. Yay, Zach…

We stopped at the H-E-B and bought me a souvenir 100th anniversary bear to celebrate. And we went for a drive in the evening to test things out. So far, so good, although a significant damper had still been put on the trip. At least we slept reasonably well…