Road Trip

Verlyn Klinkenborg, a writer who sits on the editorial board of The New York Times, recently wrote an essay, “The Road West,” which inspired me to dig through the notes in my "idea" file -- six pages from my reporter's notebook, detailing our road trip in 2002, when Steve and I drove across the country during our move from Georgia to California.

Here are the highlights:

• Just outside Birmingham, gas was $1.03 a gallon; in Little Rock, $1.06. Nothing beat Oklahoma City, though, at 99 cents, which warranted an exclamation point in my notes.

• Someone wrote “Colby is my bitch” in white spray paint on a highway overpass near Jasper, Alabama. A few miles down the road, someone else wrote “I love Lucy Baxter.” There were a lot of signs, too. In Jasper, it was widely advertised that you could get “Same-day dentures” before enjoying an exotic dance at the Booby Trap, and then lunch at BK’s Barbecue in Holly Springs, Mississippi. (The man next to me ordered six bowls of soup and ate them all. Steve ordered a hamburger.)

• On Thursday, February 28, as we were driving from Little Rock to Amarillo, Steve and I began discussing the Grand Canyon. I wanted to go, Steve didn’t (he’s been there twice already), and so he said it was closed. He thought this was hilarious, and repeated it several times, saying, “You should write that down.”

• From Amarillo to New Mexico, there wasn't t much to see, beyond a few broken down corrals and windmills, with some rim rocks in the distance. It reminded me of southeast Oregon.

• The speed limit outside Albuquerque was 75 m.p.h., but no one drove that fast.

• In Grants, NM, there were no trash receptacles at the gas station where we stopped, and we had to haul our empty Coke cans, potato chip bags, and banana peels to Flagstaff – where it was eight degrees at 7 a.m., when we awoke on March 2. We spent a few hours at the Grand Canyon (shocker, it was open after all), and on the way to Needles, we passed an old lakebed with rock outcroppings that ribboned over the surface like half-submerged serpents; accompanying this description in my notebook is a sketch of the Loch Ness monster. I wish I’d taken a photo.

• I tallied the dead animals we saw along the way, which included six coyotes; three dogs; one cow (which I mistook for a washing machine); six skunks (one of them at milepost 43, said Steve, trying to be helpful); one pheasant; one red-tailed hawk; one sage thrasher; one cat; two owls; one raccoon; and one “unidentifiable.”

• On March 3, at 1:30 p.m., we arrived in Sacramento. It was the best road trip ever, and I was sorry it was over. I'm ready to go again.