The dangers of flying
I’m not afraid to fly. Of course I get a little nervous and claustrophobic and irritable. Doesn’t everyone? But sometimes you just get stuck in a seat next to someone who pushes your buttons. In my case it was the smell button.
I spent close to seven hours next to a young woman who had simply used too much cologne. I asked her about it and she shoved her wrist in my face, telling me it was the best thing she had found. I almost gagged.
Nevermind that she said she always got sick when she flew, or that she ate some pre-mixed mexican dish as if she was a starved animal, then grabbed her barf bag and pretented to regurgitate it all. Nevermind that she shuffled and shifted around so much that I was convinced she was on meth. And nevermind that she tried to climb over the seats to push in front of the other 200 passengers after we landed.
It was that musky-patchouli-stetson cologne that gave me a good reason to hate flying.
Next time I’m saving up for first class and bringing an oxygen mask.
on the other side
West Virginia was as I remember it–hilly, with bumpy roads and little communities crammed into the endless valleys. it seemed like people lived on the edge, or in the cracks to be more precise. we saw coal mines and oil refineries from the highway, and we could actually see a layer of black dirt, or coal, between the rocks along the road. The landscape was beautiful, the small communities were quaint and the roads were in very bad shape. West Virginia was the only state where we had to pay tolls—$13.00 total–and it had the worst roads. Hmmm. On to Virginia.
Northern Virginia is gorgeous–soft hills, well-placed farms, and tree lined highways. the trees kept my attention. There was such a variety–yellow, green, yellow-green, green, dark green–a veritable crayola box of tree colors. On this day the sky was perfectly blue with just the right number of clouds. I lost track of time and before I knew it we were in rush hour traffic on the north side of the Hampton tunnel. The only other time we had to deal with traffic was when we drove through Lincoln, Nebraska and that only took 15 minutes. We sat in the middle lane in our U-Haul for about an hour watching as little buzz cars sped past us on the right and squeezed in at the last minute. I’m guessing they got to their destinations a minute or two before we did. Good thing we are patient.
We stayed at my mom’s house for a few days while we unpacked the truck and visited with relatives here and there. then we drove up the peninsula to a small area called the Northern Neck of Virginia. What we found there was wide open spaces, cute old houses, lots of rivers and inlets and enough places to store a boat to make us feel satisfied. We just wanted to get a feel for the place and it ended up placing itself under our skin.
As I write this I am sitting in the airport in Charlotte, NC, getting ready to fly back to the west coast. I didn’t get to the ocean on this trip but I did manage to gather a lot of information and inspiration. I hope to be back here sometime this summer, settled somewhere on one of the many fingers of land that a spread out into the Chesapeake Bay.
This part of our moving adventure was challenging, exciting, mind-expanding, and sometimes just plain bumpy riding. I am looking forward to completing part one of phase one–cleaning up our house to get it ready for renters, condensing two storage sheds into one, selling as much unnecessary stuff as possible, and planning phase two–the RV trip. Stay tuned for the next chapter.
change in scenery
Blue skies, green grass, rolling hills, more horses than cows…we must be in Kentucky. Gorgeous day, no clouds, perfect temperature, great hotel. No worries!
What’s happened to the farmland?
We re-routed our trip a bit so we could stay an extra day in KC. Last night we stayed in Nashville, Illinois in a small hotel, with a comfortable beds, surrounded by nice, country people. I’m getting a sense of how hard life is here in the middle of this country. It seemed hard in Nevada and Utah and Wyoming with all their rocks and dust and mountains, but here in farm country people seem to be barely holding on–holding on to the dream of farming.
It is obvious that some LARGE corporation controls what is planted, grown and harvested. The fields seem to have been fallow for a while. They still have the broken corn stalks from last Fall. I wondered why there were no tell tale signs of cold weather crops like spinach and kale and beets. Then I remembered: Monsanto. Kind of a sad thing since this part of the country was built on old fashioned farming.
Another thing that has struck me is that “home cooking” is not what it used to be. There are lots of these kinds of restaurants but the food seems like it just came out of a can. I haven’t found a salad that wasn’t filled with mostly white iceberg lettuce and hard little “cherry” tomatoes. I feel like I need to hunt for a natural foods store to get something organic. What have we done to our source of sustenance? Will we ever find our way back to the natural ways of producing food?
It’s a lot to think about as we carry on down the road through fields of nothing, waiting for their GMO seeds to be planted.
Hanging out in Kansas City
We decided to stay in KC for an extra night since we’ve been through a rough few days. The weather has been ferocious: snow, hail, tornadoes whirling all around us, and finally, yesterday, high winds. It’s been quite a challenge pushing through so we thought we needed a rest. Plus, the hotel we are staying in is very nice and very new. It’s a sort of sophisticated man cave with brown and gold decore, modern lighting and flat screen tv’s all over the place. It is situated in the shadow of a huge race track which is ramping up for a race next weekend.
All day long we have watched mega RV’s roll into the parking lot, get a good cleaning and shining and roll out to wait expectantly for their inhabitants to live in them during the race. Apparantly Dale Earnhardt is coming, not such a big deal unless you are a race fan. We were told by one of the staff that there is a team of guys who travel with the Nascar drivers, actually ahead of them, just so they can keep their RV’s clean and sparkly. What a life! And who would’ve guessed, in Kansas City?
Favorite photos so far
Brookings to Klamath Falls
Klamath Falls to Winnemucca
Winnemucca to Salt Lake City
SLC to Laramie, WY
Laramie to Lexington, NE
Lexington to Kansas City, KS
Storm in Nebraska.
Didn’t know whether to drive or stay put. Hail sounded like rocks hitting the truck. Glad we decided to drive. Safe now in Lexington, NE. No worries. No worries. No worries.
Leaving the storm area. Good thing because it hovered there all night long!
On the edge.
Ending with a rainbow.
Some people weren’t this lucky. I am relieved and sad at the same time.
Wonder what today will bring?
Catching up with ourselves.
Note: Blogging while traveling takes discipline and might interfere with the whole experience. You can’t possibly write everything down…but you can take a lot of pictures from inside the car or truck if you have a good camera!
Last year when we were at a KOA campground we met a young couple who had given up their small apartment, their corporate jobs and their developing identities to travel and look for something better. They had saved enough money to survive in limbo for a year or so. They had been all over the country and were headed somewhere north. I admired that. No real destination, no fixed plan, just a sense of something better waiting somewhere on the road. Along the way the young woman was blogging about her adventures. Being a writer at heart I was interested in her process. She told me that it had been very hard to keep up with the blog because so much happens in a day when you’re on the road. You see so many things, so much beauty and hardship side by side, and so many words and phrases come into your head. And if you are driving or even riding in the passenger seat, it is hard to get it all down. That’s where I am now, filled with images and thoughts.
We have been on the road for only two days. We wentthrough the redwoods, along the mighty Smith River, had lunch on the Rogue River, drove through pine forests with snow on the ground,
actually saw some snow falling at about 5,000 feet,
and eventually dropped down into this “high desert.”
Yesterday we drove through the most unexpected parts of Oregon—desert. Lots of it. After leaving Klamath Falls, the landscape turned into a mix of pine trees, scrub brush and farmland. We wondered if the free range cows were happy like the ones down the street from our house in Crescent City. Every cow was black, and they were big. They seemed to be eating the yellow hay type grass happily. I wondered about the people here. The place seemed so desolate and unfriendly, yet there were farmsteads here and there, with the accompanying pick-up trucks and tractors. People did live here. I felt grateful for the ocean, either one.
This morning we are in Winnemucca, Nevada, which is a Reno-type gambling town in the northern part of the state. There are lots of truckers and construction workers in our hotel, and the casinos brighten up the sky, day and night. We came through here a few years ago, and remembered it as the only place to stop on this highway. In a little while we will drive back out into the wilderness, loaded down with our worldly possessions and enough water to get us through the Sahara Desert. I’ve learned from experience that you can never have enough extra water.
This day was filled with road after road of…nothing. As far as we could see into the distance was a long two lane road, heading toward a mountain range, then, another road doing the same, then another, then another. Having an iPod helped. Taking pictures out the window of the U-Haul also helped. The sky was ever changing, thunderstorms in the distance, snow on the tops of the mountains merging with the clouds, puffy white clouds allowing enough blue sky to peek through to keep us interested. Yes, the sky was the entertainment.
On day three, after more sky and road, we pulled into Salt Lake City at 9:30, but it was really 8:30 in our heads. That endless band of lights along the bottom of the mountain range is an amazing sight to see after the perfectly straight 80 mile road along the salt flats. Salt Lake City, or SLC, as the locals call it, lights up the sky with its billions of street lights and cars zooming here and there. Once you get into the town you are confronted with numbered streets with names like this: West 500 St. South, or East 400 St. North. It was confusing at first but made sense to a map maker, I’m sure. In any case, the streets were very well labeled. We found our hotel, came in and attempted to sleep in a hard bed with lumpy pillows and stuffy air.
Hopefully tomorrow’s lodging will be more inviting.
Welcome sight.
So we spent a little over an hour getting the truck unstuck, drove a few miles out of SLC and found this cafe at the foot of a ski resort. I guess this has to be our new theme. No worries.
on the road to simplicity 