And I Almost Forgot Our New Best Friend

The Home Stretch

As they say, all excruciatingly tiring things must come to an end. At least I think that's what they say...I'm too tired to remember, frankly. Yesterday was an absolute beast (as expected), starting in Boise, taking a two-lane road through all of eastern Nevada, and ending up in Flagstaff. Oh yeah, and there were brief dips into Utah and California, one of which was rewarding and one of which elicited the name "Texarkana" more than once. Nevada was incredibly humbling, and not only because I got a speeding ticket there (yeah, on a two-lane road in the absolute middle of nowhere, but hey). Regardless, we were travelling yesterday for the better part of 21 hours, which is quite a lot considering we were already working on less than 4 hours of sleep each.  And so in honor of my tremendous mental and physical fatigue, I thought I'd eschew the usual wordy story and just give you some of the highlights in pictures. As the week has wound on I've become more and more attached to the pictures as a record of our trip and more comfortable with letting them tell part of the story. Anyway, I've got  to jet. Two miles to our New Mexico walk. 

A Modest Proposition

Imagine, if you will, the following scenario. For the last week you have been driving enormous distances, largely for the purpose of going on remarkably brisk walks that would seem to the outside observer only to punctuate the boring moments of driving. But you know that the walks are far more than half the battle (or, in the cases of Virginia and Tennessee, all of the battle). Although they average only a hair over half an hour, your walks have presented you with countless vistas, both of the beautiful and the bizarre. You have seen nature at its most pristine and civilization at its most basic levels. You have seen a cow drinking from an icy, white-watery river. You have been overwhelmed by the beauty of a sunrise over the gulf of Mexico and propositioned by a vagrant of questionable sobriety (and perhaps taste). You've been to the world's largest McDonalds and just another Taco John's. You have worried about the aligator warnings on the bayou just days before launching a ferocious bombardment of snowballs. You have attracted quite a lot of attention from domesticated animals of all shapes and sizes and nearly killed a similar distribution of wildlife. You have been forced to reconsider your position on the unholy union of gas stations and slot machines. You have lost a hubcap and upon returning your rental car will probably blame Texarkana. You have publicly urinated in some of the most beautiful spots on God's green earth. And yet you were not prepared for this.

You are walking in a state park just north of Spokane Washington. The sun has probably set, but you can't see through the dusk-grey blanket of snowfall to know for sure. The park is surely closed, either on account of the snow or the dark, but you are too busy fiddling with your camera's manual settings to think about that, in search of a decent photograph in spite of the conditions. You set out to walk your mile on a slippery ridge looming high above the Spokane River. Having reached the half-mile point you and your cohorts turn around. There is a person walking on the ridge-road in the opposite direction. Through the contrast-less evening you percieve that the person might be holding a large cardboard sign. Another whacko. Just look to the ground, you think. Out of the very extreme of your peripheral vision you just barely make out the largest word on the poster. Kyoto? Obama? War? No...Uvada.

If you have ever seen the original Ghostbusters you know all about crossing the streams. And at this moment, the streams have been crossed. Let me recap this for you in simple terms. Snowstorm. Wilderness. Dusk. Rural Washington State. Uvada? Uvada is a town on the Utah/Nevada border, one of countless towns across the country that have adoped a similar method of nomenclature. At this point we are all aware of Texarkana, but there is also Florala, a Marydel and, if you squint hard enough, a Calexico. The thing is that Uvada is a ghost town, at least according to the internet. You won't know for sure until later today when you walk there. While your brain is churning all this information at punch-card speeds the person drops the sign. It's Brian. The guy who started the trip with you, the one you had to drop off in Atlanta so he could go back to work. There he went, and here he was, back with the pack in a snowy state park on the Spokane River. Now that's a surprise.

You'll have to ask him, but it seems that Brian decided shortly after he returned to New York that he was missing too great an opportunity to abandon the effort and sit by the sidelines. Money and effort be damned, he would have to rejoin us as soon as he could, even if that would only win him back a few days of the trip. Actions like this should make the four of us, Philip, Dave, Dan, and myself, who have been on this adventure for the duration sit up and appreciate just what we're doing and just what kind of opportunity we've been presented. The evidence is all around us. Nishant asked to join us at the last second, if just for a couple of days. His penance would be having to fly the red-eye to New York for an important family gathering from the bustling Spokane airport. [FN 1] My Dutch friend Walter, was bound to join us until it became clear that if he did he would lose his job. And still he espouses regrets about not making it to be with us nearly every day. According to his math, Walter is the fifth Beatle, and I guess I can't argue that point with him. The six people I've mentioned were the only people "invited" on this trip, but literally dozens of otherse have remarked how they wish they could have taken a trip like this. Often these people are older and far more successful than us, but despite their successes they would gladly trade their places with us for this one week. I knew all that. I had even spent a reasonable part of the Idaho panhandle thinking about how badly I wish Walter had been able to come along. Here we four are, unanimously jaw dropped by our surroundings...and yet we're American and are at least familiar with much of what we're seeing. It would have been absolutely staggering for a foreigner.

And yet it wasn't until Brian showed up in the woods, in the snow, in the dark that our good fortune really hit home. Not just our good fortune in having the opportunity to partake in this adventure, but in the opportunity to do so with these kinds of friends. When reflecting back on our 48 State journey a long, long time from now, it's fairly obvious which we will remember the most.

[FN 1] And I should take this opportunity to note the tremendous thanks that I and the others want to extend to Nishant for making three days of our trip that much better.

"Where the Buffalo Roam," or "Four Feet From My Hurtling Minivan"

Every day of this trip has provided a different challenge. We've had walks in the pitch-black mountains of Georgia, the howling dogs of Oklahoma, and the questionably demilitarized zone that is the Texas-Arkansas border. Last night we faced a new challenge, one as difficult and more realistically threatening than any to date: not slamming into large cloven-hooved mammals at high speed. This sounds like a non-story, or at least an old one. We all face the challenge of avoiding an accident with deer, after all. I've even had the misfortune of taking out a fawn not three months after first obtaining my driver's license. But let me assure you that what we encountered last night was an order of magnitude more difficult. The problems started on a 200-mile long stretch of completely uninhabited backroads in the Dakotas that we had to take deep into the night. We had so many encounters with deer that I can't possibly remember the number. But the highlight of the evening is when we noticed large hulking masses of black fur gnawing on grass growing out of the shoulder of our narrow lane. Yes, our little minivan had careened through the stark, desolate night right past a small herd of buffalo. Our short glance of these American icons indicated no concern on their part for our Toyota. No, these were no "deer in the headlights," perhaps because they knew they would get the best out of any collision.

Various members of our party made a number of metaphors throughout our five-hour trip through the mammalian gauntlet: it was the battle road at Lexington and Concord where the Red Coat machine was slowly and meticulously dismantled by minute-men in the woods. The airport road in Bahgdad. But perhaps my favorite metaphor is the one that wasn't mentioned: the "Wind Done Gone" version of Frogger, that is, Frogger from the car's perspective.

Like a Beacon in the Great Plains

Somewhere in the twenty minutes between our missed Illinois exit and first opportunity to turn around we passed an rest-stop called "the Oasis." I'm pretty sure we ignored the significance of that name the first time we saw it, but on the back side of our u-turn its meaning became abundantly clear. Yet even that rest-stop was just an oasis for a 20-mile stretch of uninterrupted interstate. If you're in the heart of a 9000-mile journey you're going to need an oasis on a completely different order of magnitude. We found that sanctuary last night in Gresham, Nebraska. 

It is convenient that just past the midpoint of our trip we would find ourselves in Nebraska, a state whose conventional reputation is that of the classic flyover state. We know it better, however, as Philip's home. Having met Philip's family a number of times before, I was completely expecting our visit to be greeted with not just open arms but an abundance of com-

fort food and a peaceful, relaxing place to spend the evening. It helps that this was the first night where any of us got more than four hours of sleep, but I think it's fair to say that we're all both rejuvenated and extremely grateful to the Romohr family for taking us in.

 Now it is on to the northern great plains. 

P.S. Updates may be fewer and farther between, because out here the cell towers are definitely fewer and farther between. 

Thanksgiving Break

Only a three hour drive separates us from Thanksgiving Dinner. Till then...

International Efficiency Day

Today has been all about the time crunch. We have long planned to stop for thanksgiving dinner in Philip's hometown of Gresham, Nebraska and now that people other than ourselves are counting on our schedule, it was imperative that we follow through with efficiency and celerity. We got our usual late start, which didn't help, but our real problem today came as a result of a missed turn in Illinois, quite possibly our first of the the whole trip. A simple missed turn is usually not a problem, but in this case the next exit wasn't for another...18 miles. I honestly don't know if I've ever seen a longer gap between exits. And of course we didn't actually notice the missed turn until the brink of that exit, forcing us to turn around one stop further down the road. It would be another 9 miles. So, in order to get back to where we started we had to drive a total of 54 extra miles (remember, that's two exits), with an accompanying time penalty that was and is almost impossible to make up. After all, we can't really drive any faster, and it's not like we can sprint those miles. As such, we've adopted a temporal austerity plan, meticulously going through every step of our process and shaving our time down minute by minute. We had one particularly impressive gas stop this morning that would have looked to an outside observer like a NASCAR pit crew on vacation. It still looks questionable as to whether we will get to Nebraska at a traditional Thanksgiving dinner hour, but we're doing our best.