Thanks to Jessamyn for showing me how to link with a picture!
For some reason, I got to go to California for two weeks with my best friend the summer I graduated from high school. Just the two of us. Our parents paid for everything. Can you believe it? Man. Thanks, Mom! Thanks, Mr. and Mrs. Amysparents! Sorry we were so spoiled! We’d be happy to mow the lawn!
We’d originally thought of going to Europe, but even we thought that would be slightly grandiose. I was going to go to school in California in three months. My Friend Amy had some family there. I had some romantic ideas about driving along the 101 freeway in a convertible with the wind in my hair. Maybe meeting some boys. I felt not-very-connected-to-anything at that point…I knew but didn’t know that California is really, really far away from Miami. I didn’t think about what would happen there or what I’d learn or who I’d meet or how, even, I would get there. I wasn’t sure if I’d ever come home again, or if I’d stay in touch with the people I’d grown up with. I didn’t think too much about all that stuff, but I did think that a road trip up and down the California Coast might be the perfect bridge between what I was and what I was going to be in college: mysterious, thoughtful, glamorous.
So somehow we got tickets and made plans to go. We flew into San Diego and stayed with Amy’s grandma for a day or so, and, after a rather surreal day trip to Tiajuana (never again!), were introduced to The Beast. It was Amy’s uncle’s. He said he had just taken it to Mexico and had it all fitted out. Later we learned that the inside door handles were held on with glue, and that we had to refill the radiator with water every day or apparently the car would blow up. It didn’t have air conditioning. It was a brown 1979 Cadillac with an orange racing stripe, and was like nine feet in length. I didn’t, and still don’t, know how to parallel park. We climbed in and headed north up the 5.
We developed little rhythms, traveling. We had notebooks in which we recorded all our expenditures to the cent…I have never been so good about my money since then. We watched TV in hotel rooms for hours. Amy has a great sense of direction and is a really good driver, so she did most of it. We took a lot of pictures and even had an old video camera that we took with us everywhere. Southern California was just coming off a drought and we saw signs in bathrooms everywhere, telling us to conserve water. We were shocked by the smog.
We went to several amusement parks…I know we went to Disneyland and I think Magic Mountain as well. We visited Pitzer, at which I was enrolled for fall semester but had never visited. At the time the school was under massive construction and everything was fenced off and ripped up and it looked quite dismal. The day we went to visit there was no one around, although I did check in at the admissions office and met the people I would work with for the next six years that day. I was sort of heartbroken, and secretly resolved only to spend a year there. We went to Chinatown and Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, went to the Monterey Bay Aquarium and Muir Woods. One day we were eating lunch at a Subway, and the woman behind the counter leaned over and said, “You girls just got your drinks paid for.” She pointed at some big older guy lumbering off to his car. We thought it was really funny that we’d had drinks bought for us, yet they’d been sodas in a Subway somewhere in the Central Valley.
I don’t think we talked much on the trip. It really was pretty busy, what with all the amusement parks and colleges and all, and we mostly just talked about immediate things. I sort of wanted to talk with Amy about big stuff…I felt we’d had a pretty legendary friendship, and wanted to memorialize it in some way. We did take a lot of pictures, which I still have to this day, in my only attempt to make a scrapbook. Looking at them now I am mostly just incredulous that our parents let us go. We were very good kids (okay, well, at least I was) and we honestly didn’t do any of the things you’d think we would do if we were three thousand miles from our parents in a brown 1979 Cadillac. Actually, looking at them now, it’s just hard to believe that’s really me, there on the skyride, or there in the Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! museum.
I occasionally drove up to the Bay Area for various things while I lived in Southern California, including one memorable trip that involved going through a Del Taco drive-thru in a mini-van, nude, but the only other big “road trip” I’ve taken since then was when I moved from Claremont to Seattle three years ago. I sent most of my stuff ahead and packed everything else into my Toyota and drove north on the 5. For those of you that haven’t had the pleasure, you can pretty much put the car on cruise control at 75 and just sit back. It’s hot and flat and it just goes and goes and goes. I had a really good book on tape and I would get all panicky whenever I had to change them, because I didn’t want to lose the thread of the story. I got sort of hypnotized by traveling by myself, even for only three days. I had obsessively planned the trip, with a little road map and Trip-Tik from Triple A…I now know that I pretty much just had to get on the 5 and get off at the exit for Carl’s parents’ house, but I didn’t then. I talked to myself out loud the first hour, crossing LA to get from the 10 to the 210 to the 5, saying, “Okay, now here’s the exit, good, good. Here we go. Left lane. Now just go north for an hour and then you can have breakfast.” I wasn’t oppressed or tired by all the driving…after the first four hours I even found it soothing. I was leaving one life and going to start another, and to me it made sense that you wouldn’t do that all in one day. No, you’d do it slowly, thinking over every mile where you’d been and what you’d done there, and what you might do in the next place. By the time you made it, you’d know you were there. It’s the closest I’ve ever come to wanting to be nomadic.
If I ever do another road trip again, I’d like it to be on a big scale. I’d like to get a Eurovan (the kind with the pop-up roof with a bed in it, that only gets nine miles a gallon!) and visit a lot of state parks and various personal landmarks. I’d probably do it mostly on the West Coast, although sometimes I think about doing a circular trip across the country, down through California and across through Texas and down to Florida from the Panhandle, and then, you know, after a shower at my mom’s house in Miami, back up through Florida and up through the South into New York and New England, and back across the Midwest and home to Seattle. New places and old friends and everything in between. Even little old home-loving me sometimes gets the urge to just go.