Feb
22
Day Three: 463 miles to Wall, South Dakota
Filed Under astruc | 6 Comments
Today was an easy day, mileage-wise, but the road is catching up to me and I am too tired to write.
Maggy was kind enough to set up a feed for this journal. I’m not entirely sure how this all works, but I’ll follow up on it when I make it to Florida. I’m okay with the feed since it’s just titles and not content (thank you kju for enlightening me!). I will also straighten out the notify list when I arrive. I will not be sending out notifies in the meantime.
Meanwhile, I stuck some videos on my Facebook profile:
White Lines: Snow in Wyoming; or What it sounds like when a middle-aged white woman raps alone in her car.
Downtown Wall, South Dakota.
Feb
21
Day Two: 463 miles to Sheridan, Wyoming
Filed Under astruc | 9 Comments
Hello from Sheridan, Wyoming. Hi! HI!!!I’m a little punchy.
I am eating a club sandwich, and after 7 hours on the road, this is the greatest thing I have ever tasted in my life. I am covered with road dirt and am greatly looking forward to a boiling hot bath. The hotel is nice. The people are nice. A lovely man in the parking lot took pity on me struggling in the parking lot with my bags and the litter pan.
He fetched a cart, loaded it up, and asked my permission before he escorted me to my floor. I almost hugged him. Unlike the guys in Seattle who let the door slam behind them. Seattle men are very modern. They don’t do much of this sort of thing. I tried to encourage (read: begged) Skye to unlock the car door for me before he got in, but it was mostly a lost cause.
Thank you, feminism!
Even though today was one of the longer mileage days, it went fairly quickly. I had a new toy. My stepdaddy sent me a GPS thingie for my birthday. Everyone kept telling me to get one, my friend Dan offered me one of his, but I had been resisting. I am weirdly gadget-adverse sometimes.
I broke it out of the box in Seattle, but could never get a signal from my house. Today in Montana with its wide-open satellite-friendly skies I tried again, and the thing zeroed in on my location immediately. Cool! I programmed in the address of the next hotel, and thought, well, this is kind of dumb. I have my maps, and I printed out turn-by-turn directions. Why do I need this?
I rolled up to the stop sign. “TURN LEFT! TURN LEFT!” shrieked the crazy German woman who apparently lives in my GPS. Umlaut and I both jumped a mile. I had somehow missed that the thing talked. Not only did it talk, it had all sorts of fun functions, such as TIME UNTIL DESTINATION. And HIGHEST SPEED ACHIEVED. I smiled.
For the next, oh 400 miles or so I played “how fast do I have to go to shave off x number of minutes from my time?” The answer is: Five minutes at 90 miles per hour. And my current high speed is 110. The crazy German woman is going to get me arrested.
It is amazing how much of America is wired these days. Most of the way through Montana I hadn’t any cel signal, but there was wifi at all of the McDonald’s. Every tiny business I passed had a URL on their billboard, including the Testicle Festival. I am so sorry I missed that. I love America. We’re such a weirdly optimistic country.
I mentioned in the last entry that it seemed like I was stopping more often for gas in the new(er) Jaguar. Allan pointed out that it was just that my XJ-6 had a larger fuel tank. I had completely forgotten about that. Our old XJ-12 had IIItwo gas tanks, but it got something like a whopping 6 miles to the gallon.
At the dealer for an oil change, I checked out some of the new models. It was disappointing. They don’t look like Jaguars. I like Jaguars because they’re stodgy, slightly overweight, and sexy as hell under the hood. I do not want Jaguars to suddenly have mass appeal. I want the interior to look like this and the exterior to look like this. I want them to break down and have terrible reputations so no one stupid will want them. That is the whole point, dammit. Whoa, Freudian.
I saw the lunar eclipse but I did not understand what I was seeing until I was watching the newstonight.
Annoying: All of my fingernails are broken. Not sure how I managed that. I have more to say but I am tired and wanting to take a that hot bath with the bubble bar parting gift from cirocco.
Today’s movie: A rare sighting of the housepet in the wild.
Feb
20
Day One: 476 miles to Missoula, Montana
Filed Under astruc | 17 Comments
Is it possible that my old XJ-6 had better gas mileage than my current 3.0 X-Type? I feel like I’m stopping for fuel a lot more often. We made it all the way to Missoula without incident. I almost bailed out in Spokane. I didn’t get any sleep last night and Washington State is so boring to look at from the road I thought I was going to fall asleep. Snoqualmie was beautiful, but there wasn’t much east of that and I caught myself nodding off twice. Once I grabbed a bite and began The Terror That Is Real Mountains, I was back to wide awake.
I’m happy to be in Montana again. This is the only non-coastal state I think I could live in. I could have a horse here.
The air grows colder and colder as I move east.
I sent out a real live notify email last night. Does anyone do that anymore, or is it all RSS now? Am I the only person on the planet that does not use an RSS feed and actually visits the URL in question? I like to read writing in the original context.
The list was so old 160 addresses bounced. I’m not even sure how one signs up for it. Anyway, don’t worry about that now, I have no idea what I’m doing and will probably kill that old list if I have to manually delete the old names. And thank you so much for all the notes, it meant a lot to me that so many people remembered.
I made a little movie while I was driving by Lake Coeur d’Alene in Idaho. I didn’t look through the viewfinder, I just hit RECORD and hoped for the best. I had the camera in my right hand, the steering wheel in my left, and one pissed-off housepet in my lap. I recommend this as a life experience.
Feb
19
T minus 7
Filed Under astruc | 16 Comments
I’m as ready as I’ll ever be. The car is packed, though at the last minute I ditched a garment bag of dresses. I briefly considered leaving tonight to spend the night in Spokane. The Snoqualmie Pass is clear and the weather up there is almost balmy, a good sign.
If you’ve sent me email about getting together while I’m on the road, I will answer as soon as I have a minute. The last few days have been madness.
I had dinner tonight with Gael & Rob & Paul & Dan & Kim & Miss Belly. It’s tough leaving. I built a last fire tonight and read for a couple of hours and now I am going to get a good night sleep.
Tomorrow I drive from Seattle to Montana.
Feb
16
Procrastinating
Filed Under astruc | 6 Comments
I spent most of yesterday mapping out my route turn-by-turn and making a few hotel reservations. It’s tricky with the housepet, though I have to say it’s amazing how many hotels accept pets these days. I’m breaking mid-trip to spend the weekend in Kansas City. I have friends there and it’s my birthday. Still haven’t decided on a hotel for that weekend.
There’s all these niggling tasks I need to get up and just start doing. My big duffel and one carton are already loaded in the trunk. I need to bring down the sailbags holding an assortment of handbags and belts and shoes. Packing became much easier once I let go of the idea that I could pack the shoes in their boxes. I am excited at the prospect of wearing heels again. Wearing heels in Seattle is an invitation to slide down a moss-covered sidewalk on your ass in the pouring rain. Twice.
My family is happy I’m coming. Next month, Nan is to undergo surgery to rebuild her stomach wall. Did you know that your intestines can explode out of your stomach if you insist on carrying your own fucking Costco purchases in and out of the car? BE WARNED!!!! Meanwhile, she has to wear this weird garment thing to hold her intestines in. I’d be happy if she just carried her intestines around in her handbag but she’s thinking that’s not a workable solution for the next 30-plus years she intends to live.
This is all stemming from her peritoneal-ovarian cancer. I feel ambivalent, I fear infection and stroke, but she is determined. There is no guaranteed outcome, she is a guinea pig of sorts, I suspect. Her cancer has a near-100% mortality rate and she is still alive, so I have to give them a lot of credit. She was diagnosed three years ago and lives more or less cancer free.-Okay, I’m going to pack something and think about vacuuming.