In Our Own Way

When you've gotta go, you've gotta go.

Trip Preparation

Movement, Again — and Upcoming

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Photo 1 caption: the view west from a park called “The Trails of Summerlin Village,” in the northwest of Las Vegas proper. The Stepson’s house “in Las Vegas” technically is located in a Vegas suburb called Spring Valley. But the gigantic ZIP-Code-spanning development known as Summerlin lies all around. I visited a lot of the parks in Summerlin over the last five months — and now that the daily thermometer is flirting with three digits, I’ve done so, especially, early in the day. The building in the foreground is somehow associated with — I think — a Baptist church up at the street level. The street in question lies between this vantage point and the mountains.

As some — many? most? — of you know, we will finally be putting Las Vegas in the rearview mirror a week from today. We’ve got reservations at various places, doing various things, and mostly in California, for the next month. Here’s the general itinerary for now:

  • Grand Canyon
  • Joshua Tree National Park — and, knock on wood, and meeting up with The West Coast Nephew!
  • San Diego — the Zoo! and a behind-the-scenes “safari”! laundry!
  • Santa Monica
  • San Luis Obispo — and, after leaving, the Hearst Castle and elephant-seal viewing in San Simeon!
  • Carmel-by-the-Sea
  • Yosemite National Park — including a guided tour and, for me, a photography course “in the footsteps of Ansel Adams”!
  • Lake Tahoe — including a guided tour!

From there, we’ll be doubling back towards the Pacific for a brief stopover with The Missus’s cousin and a drive up the rest of the way to Redwood National Park. Then eventually we’ll point the car east and north, to drive eventually aaaallllllll the way back, via some route, to someplace yet unknown. Key destinations, if all goes well:

  • Yellowstone National Park
  • The Badlands of South Dakota
  • Mid-Wisconsin (a sort of genealogical side-quest for The Missus)
  • Possibly a little jog north in order to skate between Lakes Superior and Michigan, then down the coast of the latter
  • …and then, yes: ?????

I like to imagine that I’ll update you all here more often than I did during the (sometimes chaotic) first leg of the year(ish)-long road trip. But I’ve imagined — and promised! — that before. So for now let’s just say, y’know: stay tuned!

Wake Up! Wake Up! We’re Still Here! (Whatever “Here” Means Anymore)

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Image 1 caption: Progress report, of a sort: this is how our trip planning/reporting software displays our route so far, through Thursday December 2. Unfortunately, you can’t interact with this version of the map at all — it’s just a screen capture — but I’ll have more info about a slightly more detailed version, below.

Yes, I know, you don’t need to remind me how long it’s been since the last post. At the same time, it’s very hard for us to believe it was less than two months ago that we left the Schenectady/Scotia NY area, bound for Vermont. That’s a lot of time in the car (and a lot of time between stops, too).

We’ve been intermittently logging our mileage along the way, sometimes recording it when we get to a stop, sometimes when we leave, sometimes forgetting to do it at all. But for what it’s worth, since leaving Greenville, NC, we’ve put about 6,000 miles on the (new) car.

The map above is a bit simplistic. I created it just by pinpointing the cities and towns where we’ve spent at least one night, and leaving the software to depict “optimal” or recommended routes. But such routes bear little relationship to reality: we often have deviated, by choice or circumstances, from the “plan.” Bad weather — and loss of GPS! — has forced us to leave highways; we’ve driven around within those destinations, quite a lot. (Y’know: grocery and other shopping, sightseeing, going out for dinner — that sort of thing.)

For a more complete picture, I sometimes check out a feature of Google Maps called the Timeline. To use it, you must be a bit, um, casual about letting your cellphone identify your location. So it’s not an option you’d want to turn on all the time. But it can be interesting! For instance, here’s my Timeline for a single day of the trip — it was the first day after we got our “new” car in August:

Image 2 caption: Google Maps is watching you (if you let it)! Basically, every time you turn a corner with your phone in your hand or pocket, the software makes a note of it, and saves it to your profile. (This is also how Google Maps knows, for example, that there’s traffic congestion ahead: all the “Google Maps on my cellphone” users are at a standstill. In other words, it’s not all creepy!)

On the map at the top of this post (Image 1 above), this appears as a single dot — and it’s the same dot for every day we spent “in” Greenville, North Carolina. Actually, though, we spent a lot of time driving (or just walking) around on that day. Which is why our actual mileage is so much higher than the straight-line distances seem to show.

(For the record, we did not actually “go to” all the labeled places in the Timeline map. They’re just points of interest, per Google Maps. We actually went on that day to Enterprise Rent-a-Car, to return the rental which our insurance company had arranged for us while we arranged to buy the new car; we drove west to the little town of Farmville, North Carolina, just to get out of town a bit; and we spent that night at the Courtyard Marriott back in Greenville. If I could zoom the Timeline map in far enough, you could even see what streets I’d walked along in Farmville, and all the wrong turns and backtracking I did on the streets of Greenville itself.)

The route-planning software I’m using lets you save its data in a form which can then be displayed in Google Maps for others to see, to zoom in on, and so forth.

Here’s what this exported Google Map looks like at the moment. (As you can see, I can customize its look a bit more; overnight stays of four nights or more are marked with green icons rather than the default blue. And Greenville, North Carolina, is marked with a “fun” auto-collision icon.)

Image 3 caption: Google Maps view — again, just a screen capture — of our travels (partially in the future, as I write this) through December 2. The gold lines are round-trip airplane flights.

You can see and interact with it (at a limited level — zooming, identifying cities and so on) via this link. Just remember: this is a map whose data has been exported from other software; the data doesn’t always come through 100% accurately. This will be especially noticeable when you zoom waaaaay in — the Google Map shows some very strange, in fact entirely imaginary, routes!

More coming up soon as this blog transitions to less of a day-by-day travelogue (you can see how well that’s worked out), and more of a “Here’s something we’ve noticed during the trip” record. Thanks as always for stopping by!

Real-Life Septuagenarian-Roadtrip Dialogue: Two Ships Passing in the Night Edition

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[The setting: Wilmington, NC. The couple has already done grocery shopping for the day’s relocation to an Airbnb, from this hotel: they’ve picked up milk and creamer, and kept it in the refrigerator overnight; ditto bottles of water and soda, a small bottle of vinegar to be used for mysterious laundry purposes (Hers), and so on. He has already filled His insulated water bottle, the previous night, and as they prepare to move their luggage down to the lobby He takes a first generous swig from it.]

He: Gaaaaaah! What the living hell did I just drink a mouthful of?!?

[He opens the water bottle, takes a whiff, gags and sputters. He checks the refrigerated plastic bottle from which He filled His own metal one.]

He: Jeezus Chr—! Why the hell was the bottle of vinegar in the refrigerator?!?

[He rushes to the bathroom sink, metal water bottle in hand. He dumps its remaining contents into the sink, continues coughing and retching, washing His mouth out with tap water.]

She (from other room): What are you doing?!?

He (spitting and coughing): I’m dumping the rest of this sh!t into the sink!

She: You’re dumping out all that vinegar? I need that vinegar for washing my clothes!

[He stares at His reflection in the bathroom mirror. His eyes are tearing and bloodshot. His tongue feels corrugated. His throat burns like that time when He was a kid and clumsily tried siphoning gasoline from a canister for use in a go-cart, and the fuel ran down His esophagus.]

He: I just drank vinegar, and laundry is what you’re worried about?!?

She (calling out his name): You don’t understand! I needed that vinegar for my clothes! And that little bottle was the perfect size for a trip — I’ve never seen vinegar in such a small bottle! Now we have to go back to that store for more!

[He fumbles about for a breath strip, for a second and a third breath strip. He swallows, downs a fourth breath strip. His forehead is beaded with sweat. His eyebrows will probably return to their normal altitude by evening. His throat will burn for a couple days, and He will be awash for that long in inescapable olfactory memories of dyeing Easter eggs.]

He (weakly): Okay, okay… Let me go down to the lobby for a luggage cart. Then I’ll get the car, and then we can go the store for more vinegar and then we can do whatever until it’s time to check in at the Airbnb.

She: I just really can’t believe you drank my vinegar! Jeezus!

Not Quite the Catastrophe Which Seemed to Loom

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The “moving and storage” aisle at Home Depot. I’d been sent there in a rush because the mover said we’d need about ten “small boxes like that one [points to Home Depot small box on floor].” The aisle wasn’t closed that long — the forklift operator just had to take down a pallet of something-or-other, so it was actually a wise precaution to bar customers. But it did make me laugh — laugh hard — although I forced myself to pause long enough to get the photo.

That headline is a joke, of course. It seems to suggest it might’ve turned out to be a different catastrophe altogether — but no catastrophe at all, really… just really, really, really hard work for about four straight days.

We’re still not really done as of today, Wednesday. I have a few things to move to the storage units. (That assumes I can fit them, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a couple of the larger boxes and other loose items get, uh, “lost” should I pass a generic construction dumpster en route.) We still have a few things to get out of the refrigerator to be thrown out/recycled. We’re also storing a few things at our friend Leah’s house. And, finally, we’ve got several boxes of what-not to take down to The Stepdaughter’s house, for our first several nights “away” — that’s gotta be put in the car just for tonight.

…but all that stuff has to happen this morning, in anticipation of the arrival of the cleaning crew “sometime” this afternoon. (The woman who owns the cleaning service is Hispanic, and she and The Missus have been communicating via text messages in Spanish (at The Missus’s end, with the assistance of Google Translate). So there’s apparently a dense fog of gray clouding the arrival time.)

The agenda tomorrow suddenly much simpler: we get up, take showers, load our luggage into the car, check out of the hotel, head to have our routine labwork done prior to next week’s doctor’s appointments…

…and then we are g, o, n, e.

Packing for the Apocalypse (or Something Very Much Like It)

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Overload. Hence, why I have to think really, really hard about the difference between “reasonably needed” and “”nice to have, just in case.” Note, for instance, the absence of anything that looks like toiletries. Note, too, my failure to restrict the colors to just a single pallette — at the “cool” gray-blue-black-and-white end of the spectrum. Sigh.

While The Missus was out yesterday afternoon, I took advantage of the absence of distraction (ha) to do my final-cut packing of clothes. Objective: aim to take no more than one large hardsided suitcase (with the zippered expandable option) and one good sized backpack. (Camera gear is already stowed separately.)

I think I can still get there, although I think the backpack may be too ambitious. Instead, at the moment I’ve got it down to the big suitcase, the smaller version of the same thing, and a small tote.

The basic problem: failing to make really hard choices, even allowing for the six-month cross-country climate. I made much of my original intentions: I figured I’d be able to get by on a couple pairs of jeans and a decent pair of slacks; maybe three pairs of socks; four sets of underwear; a couple T-shirts; two-three long-sleeved T-shirts — like that. And two pairs of shoes. My thinking has been that it’s no problem to look — especially to strangers — as though you’re decently dressed, even for two or three days running; you just have to do some judicious juggling of wardrobe, wearing everything a couple-three times, in different mix-and-match combinations, between laundry cycles. (Pandemic lesson #1!)

Surprise, surprise: it seems I have grown much more fond of a variety of clothing than I ever thought possible.

So at the moment I’ve got four pairs of jeans (Jeans, for gods’ sake!) Also four pairs of shoes,. The socks-and-underwear situation: ridiculous. Shirts and T-shirts are the worst offenders, through no fault of their own: “How can I leave THIS one unworn for six months to a year? And, oh, wait, THIS T-shirt and THIS overshirt look just right together…!”

It really is like the title of this post says — I’ve got to make myself think in terms of the emergency cliche: “The air-raid sirens are warbling. What must you absolutely grab before running out the door?” At least I have the luxury of stopping to select items only by considering their versatility, and just letting the rest go to storage.

And now, of course, the situation grows desperate, because there’s so much stuff still to do other than Taking Care of My Wardrobe.

P.S. Remind me to tell you about the time I wasted yesterday simply getting a couple of duplicate keys made. And I did manage to (a) get boxes for a big-screen TV and a medium-sized one, and (b) drop off a couple bags of Goodwill donations, while failing to take care of the key situation. So, not a total loss.

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