Wagons Home

18 days
26 states
8,527 miles

There's been some rumbling around my house regarding my lack of posting once I returned home, the day after my last post, so here's a tidy wrap-up.

States visited/traversed: New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland.

Things I learned:

• Some of Amarillo, TX's stoplights go over to blinking yellows after 10 p.m.
• Okemah, OK is very proud of Woody Guthrie.
• Cotton picking is still a back-breaking job.
• Pennsylvanians are awfully nice.
• Traffic in and around Atlanta is the worst I have ever seen.
• Seattle has more of an attitude than Portland.
• In the deep dark of a United States night, you can see the most stars in Wyoming.
• Colorado isn't all Rocky Mountains; some of it is flat, boring plains and zillions of cows.
• Arizona snow squalls come up like driving straight into a wall.
• The California desert near Barstow is perfect in the winter: 60 degrees, mild winds, always sunny.
• You can see Mount Shasta from 60 miles away on I-5.
• Go to the Cadillac Cafe on Broadway in Portland and get the custard French toast.
• Best to avoid the Snoqualmie Pass in winter, unless you have snow chains or four wheel drive.
• You'll never go more than 10 minutes without hearing or seeing a train in Cheyenne, WY.
• If you drive from New York to Las Vegas, Las Vegas will be the least interesting part of your trip.
• Piggly Wiggly really exists and had brands of toothpaste I had never heard of.
• Arkansas is beautiful.
• When the levee breaks, mama you got to move.
• Waffle House might be inexpensive, but they make patty melts on Texas toast, which is awesome, and their coffee isn't half bad.
• Yakima. I just love saying it. Yakima.
• Tumbleweeds also exist.
• If you drive between Asheville, NC and Long Island, NY, you will drive through 8 states in one day. And it will be 759 miles. And you will have to take a nap at a rest stop south of Roanoke because you are so tired because you barely slept in Asheville because you were all like, "Should I head home tomorrow or should I try for one more night?"
• Asheville is adorable and if you're ever there, eat breakfast at Early Girl. You'll thank me.
• Also? 18 days = 1,040 photos. A lot of duds in the mix. I'm printing 306 photos and it's costing me an arm and a leg, but the first thing everybody wanted to know was when I was planning to print out pictures. So the answer is: tomorrow.
• Home is good. But home could be anywhere.
• Greenwood, MS, for example, could be home.

Random facts:

• I jumped on the bed in five states.
• I have about 10 pounds of hotel toiletries, if anybody need a shoeshine kit, shower cap or bar of soap shaped like a duck.
  
• The cold cuts at the Peabody are Boar's Head.
• I listed to all of William Basinski's Disintegration Loops for the first time over the course of day 18. That's about 5 hours of loops disintegrating.
• Troy Aikman's house is the first attraction listed on the See Henryetta! sign on I-40 in Oklahoma.
• Every Whole Foods sells my beloved Ito En teas, so I didn't have to stock up like I did, but hey.
• Just over the Nevada/California border is a patrol stop, like a toll both, and if you're not from California, they stop and ask you if you're carrying livestock or produce. I said no on both accounts, and later that night realized I was carrying three Pink Lady apples from the Whole Foods in Santa Fe.
• The guitar statue at the crossroads in Clarkdale depicts two blue guitars crossed over each other--they're copies of the iconic Gretsch guitar (think George Harrison's guitar in the early 60s--which was picked up by the bluesmen well after Robert Johnson's death, so they broke the anachronism and it only now annoys me). Weird sidenote: my Ibanez semi-hollow body electric guitar is a copy of that Gretsch. It's this one.
  
• If you're going on the road for a long time, pick up an 18-pack of Horizon Organic reduced fat milk. They come in little cartons with straws and when you're not quite hungry enough to stop, but hungry for something, it's the most delicious treat ever. Because of the special container, they don't need to be refrigerated until after opening, so they're perfect to keep in the car. I paired that with an apple and some shredded wheat and I never went without breakfast or a snack.
• You can't not get the catfish in Mississippi. Or the collard greens. Or the biscuits and gravy.
  
• Little Rock is named that because of a rock formation in the Arkansas River.
• Dust storms! Wyoming gets them so bad that they block out the moon sometimes.
  
• Cheapest gas: $2.10/gallon on the Continental Divide in Arizona.
• Most expensive gas: $3.49/gallon off of Route 99 in Stockton, CA.
• There's a shift on the oil platforms in the gulf that's called a "14 & 14" (which is not like two 7 & 7s, for you drinkers out there), which means 14 days on the rig, 14 days off. This was told to me in a bar at the MGM by a platform worker who had seen the Mayweather fight the night before and had lost $7,000 in the sports book. (Nerd note: when he first used the term "in the sports book," I had no idea what that meant)
  
• Memphis BBQ sauce makes the perfect gift.
• Elvis' middle name is misspelled on his gravestone.
• There is a Bob Dylan song to fit every occasion--but anyone reading this blog is probably painfully aware of this fact by now.
  
• And, finally, my lucky streak ended and I got two speeding tickets: the first in Washington, and the second just outside of Amarillo, Texas, on my way back to get my pillow.
  

I did a lot of--sorry for the awful cliche--soul-searching, but I didn't do a lot of worrying (until the end, honestly), and now that I'm home, I've decided to take my mom's advice and enjoy my life. That's probably what I realized more than anything else: 2007 was too much about just struggling to get through, struggling to get to the next mile marker, struggling to figure out the next step and I put myself in too many places where I shouldn't have been for my own wellbeing. No more. No stress in 2008--there's just no place for it in my life.

Thanks to all of you for sticking through with me--your comments and e-mails were always appreciated and read with love.

Hope the new year brings you peace.

Andrea

P.S. Next stop: Darjeeling! I only have one question and that is: Who's comin' with me?

*

"Tired of screwing up, tired of going down, tired of myself, tired of this town."
Tom Petty

"You don't have to yearn for love, you don't have to be alone,
Somewheres in this universe there's a place that you can call home."
Bob Dylan

"Good work, everyone. I suggest you get some sleep. Me, I'm going to stay up all night singing songs about penguins in a fine, piercing tenor."
- Futurama

Day 17 (Or: Not Much To Write Home About)

Kiss my Asheville, high in the Blue Ridge Mountains, just west of the Eastern Continental Divide, where Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald died in a fire at a mental institution in 1940.

I'm the kind of tired where everytime I look in the mirror even I wonder what I'm so angry about. But my eyebrows are just too tired to stay up and make me look open and kind.

The reason there's not much to write home about is that today was spent driving from Mississippi to Asheville, NC, from where I'm currently writing. A meager 600 or so miles, and yet, 11 hours of driving. Doesn't help that technically, I'm still on central time, even though I crossed over into eastern once I went over the border between Alabama and Georgia.

States traversed today:

1. Mississippi (I should have stayed. I have lovely stories of the nice people at the Alluvian helping me this morning to find my way to North Carolina, giving me water and extra pads of paper and pens for the trip, and the business card of the front desk manager in case I got lost or turned around on the way up here. What hotel in the north would ever do that for somebody??)
   
2. Alabama (arrrghh... I really wanted to see Birmingham, but it was shrouded in fog)
   
3. Georgia (been here before, not particularly sad I missed it this time)
   
4. South Carolina (I was only in South Carolina for like an hour)
   
5. North Carolina (and even less here, although this is where I'm sleeping tonight)
   

I also learned today that there are two kinds of rain. The first one is something like this:

I took this photo during a minor squall, under a little straw umbrella-type hut in Aruba about four weeks ago. This is my kind of rain: warm, drifting, temporary.

Here's the other kind of rain:
Cold. Persistent. Day-long. Alabama-style. It had rained overnight in Mississippi, but when I woke up, had breakfast and went about the other tasks of my day, it was clearing, blue skies and sunshine. Then, about five minutes after I crossed the border into Alabama, there was this. It lasted all day.

Also, once I got into Georgia, I immediately wanted to turn around and head back west. Traffic. So. Much. Traffic. It is the sole reason that I didn't get into Asheville until after 11. At first I was going to just scrap Asheville and try to stay somewhere else, but I really didn't have the desire to do the extra work--it just seemed more productive to keep driving.

I did pass through Atlanta, and it was all lit up and pretty.

And now it's raining again, although the sound of it is beautiful. Seem a little random that I'm in Asheville? Here's why: At this inn, the Grove Park Inn, F. Scott Fitzgerald stayed in room 441 in 1935-36. That's all I needed to hear. I'm in room 368 and things are gooood. It's a period-appropriate Arts-and-Crafts style lodge, by far my favorite American architectural period, and thus the room has a lot of texture, color and wood detail, as does the entirety of the other spaces, too.

But to pay for just 11 hours in this room seems like a waste, sadly enough. I thought I'd be here by 8 pm, but no such luck.

*

So the other thing I was thinking about on the road, when I wasn't willing the traffic to clear up, was how this trip has, in a bunch of different ways, represented the different stages of my life, in an eerily accurate timeline, with appropriate watershed dates along the way. Hard to describe here, but it has something to do with how the trip began with me kind of groping along for direction, followed by a period of frenetic learning of the road, the towns, the histories, the culture, culminating in spending time with Amelia, my college roommate, and then the rocky trip back from the west, and then passing through South Carolina, where my first boss out of college was from and now staying at this place which feels like the last great hurrah before I head home, back to my transformed life.

And even if my life doesn't outwardly seem reformed, it certainly is an upside-down version of the way I was living just a few weeks ago. Because every day that I woke up in a new place, was a new beginning for me, with a different perspective. This long road has left me half-fulfilled and half-longing, but I'm not as concerned as I was before I left with immediately finding whatever it is that I'm longing for, whatever it might be that I'm looking to do, looking to be.

I think I finally have gotten that I need to stop waiting for my life to begin, that it already has begun and I need to just accept it and live it. It's not perfect, and if it's not what I want, I have to change it.

My father's best piece of advice this year has been that you cannot hope to change, if you cannot accept that your circumstances are things that you ultimately have created for yourself. I was resistant to that idea, because it meant that I made bad choices, but what are bad choices? A sin? Every minute is a blank slate.

So that's that.

Look at all those logs! I hope they're being combined with post-consumer waste!
The Delta, after a storm.
I wish I was still there.
'Bama.
Raiiiiin.
Grove Park Inn, #368.





Day 17:
Greenwood, Mississippi - Asheville, North Carolina
Mileage: 621
Total: Approx. 7, 890

Also, also: I was getting very, very tired when I was about forty-five minutes away, so I dug deep into the iPod for the dance party songs and came up with Wilson Pickett's "Land of 1,000 Dances," and it totally helped me stay awake, doing the mashed potato, and whatnot. Picture that one.

Good night.

Day 16 (Or: Stories About Robert Johnson and Other Faustian Narratives)

Good evening from Greenwood, Mississippi, cotton capital of the world, seat of Leflore County, hometown of Mississippi John Hurt, Bobbie Gentry, Morgan Freeman and Donna Tartt!

So, here's a modern-day slacker version of the Faust story*, which I hope my friends will appreciate:

• Dude is standing around, probably at the mall waiting for his girlfriend to get off work at the food court.
• Dude gets to thinking about his life, living over his mom and stepdad's garage, working part time data entry for the telephone company. Dude concludes that life, which sucks, is both annoying and boring.
• Dude's girlfriend totally shows up with some other dude who has a mullet and a bicep tattoo of some stupid dragon, and is all like, "We're totally over."
• Dude is seriously bummed. On the way back to his mom's garage-top hideaway, his ride, a Delta '88, breaks down. A Scientologist approaches, maybe it's even whatever his name is, Xenu, or whoever. Xenu is all like, "I've got something that'll turn your life around." Dude is like, "Will it cure my learning disability?" Xenu's like, "Whatever, get in the back of my spaceship."
• Pact is sealed in blood, because Xenu's a freak like that.
  
• The next day the dude is discovered on the street and in six months time, his name is Tom Cruise.
• Tom Cruise marries Nicole Kidman, is at the top of his game for a couple of years, gets too full of himself, divorces Nicole, calls Matt Lauer and Brooke Shields a pair of dicks, jumps on a couch and shouts at Oprah, converts a nice little Catholic girl to Scientology and outs himself as being a bag of mixed nuts.
  
• The rest of us wait for the Scientologist (who in this version is actually Satan) to come and get his due from the big-headed, hurricane of hubris that is Tom Cruise. (That could totally go on the back of his robe, if he ever becomes a lightweight boxer: "Hurricane of Hubris")
  

That's kind of a Faustian tale and it always ends with the protagonist heading south. Well, I'm now back in the deep south and let me tell you: nobody tells a Faustian tale like someone from the Delta.

So down here, as I've touched upon a number of times, the ultimate tale of a failed pact with the devil is Robert Johnson, whose grave is either in Greenwood, Quito, Clarksdale or Morgan City. And everybody claims him as their own, so that makes the facts more than a little hard to come by--but legend reads better than facts, don't it?

Anyway, so I'm back in Greenwood, is more or less what that long interlude was trying to suggest.

*Kind of.

**

I only drove a couple of hundred miles today, between Little Rock and here, the Alluvian Hotel in the middle of Greenwood. Greenwood is more or less the opposite of Clarksdale, and most of it is due to the Viking Range Corporation, which is one of our advertisers in my other life at the magazine. Viking, which is headquartered here in Greenwood started a hospitality arm that includes a Spa, the Mockingbird Bakery (where I had truffled fries, marinated green salad and an out-of-this-world gourmet grilled cheese for lunch), a restaurant (more on that in a minute), the Viking Kitchen Store and this beautifully appointed hotel, which I feel lucky to stay at.

(Did you catch that? The hotel is owned by the Viking Corporation? Viking?)

A plug for the southern Delta: I know Greenwood's not really much of a destination if you're from the north, but I have to say, it's such a quaint, picturesque place I could imagine spending more time here in town. If you're not familiar with the south, this seems like a good place to start--a couple of hours between Memphis, Gulfport, Little Rock and Atlanta, just down Highway 49 from Clarksdale, and full full full of that famous Southern Hospitality.

So tonight I ate at Giardina's, the restaurant attached to the hotel, which was opened in 1936 (the year of Robert Johnson's first recording session in San Antonio, TX, which is completely unrelated, but come on, work with me here). Forget what you know about Italian pronunciation; down here they say it "Gardenias," which is kind of quaint to my Girolamo-influenced ear. I had a king's meal, and for significantly less than I did at Craftsteak in Vegas, but with far, far more atmosphere. For example, I could hear myself think. Terrific.

I had made a reservation because the extremely lovely people at the desk had told me in passing that the restaurant only had 14 booths, which is more or less the size of Salsa Salsa back home. Although it's Wednesday, I don't fool around when it comes to fine dining. I started with crispy oysters, served with a jalapeno tartar sauce. I had been asking about trying crawfish, but I chickened out at the last minute; when the waiter came back to bring my salad, he also brought a small plate with three crawfish tails on it, "on the house," which was awesome. They're like shrimp but with some other aftertaste, kind of like... I dunno, mussels? The little tang that steamed mussels have? Kind of like that.

Then I had a green salad with "Comeback" on it, which is like a spicy Thousand Islands dressing. Then came the 8 oz. ribeye, which was lean and flavorful and topped with sauteed mushrooms. I also got a baked potato on the side, and managed to finish like half of it, surprising even myself. Anyone can tell you that while my palate is wide and my tastes are adventurous, my stomach is small and I never finish a meal, unless it's a bowl of soup.

But tonight I splurged because they had my favorite dessert: bread pudding drizzled with an aromatic Bourbon sauce. They even had my favorite kind of tea, a second-flush muscatel Darjeeling. I left completely stuffed, a feeling that's been alien to me on this trip, but completely satisfied.

Oh! But the coolest part! The restaurant was moved into the hotel from its original location a few blocks south of here two years ago. The 14 booths are separated by seven-foot-high beadboard walls and curtains--I was in 9A. A few restaurants in the south still have this; it's a holdover from the moonshine days during Prohibition, and it was totally helpful as I plowed my way through Searching for Robert Johnson by Peter Guaralnick, which I picked up at the bookshop across the street when I got into town today. The privacy was nice. I eat alone at restaurants a lot and sometimes you just don't want people staring blankly at you while you try to read. That happened in a faceless town in Oklahoma, in a Pizza Hut that was apparently the place to be, when I was starving and exhausted and still 150 miles from Amarillo. I was finishing Michael Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road and it was like they'd never seen anybody read and eat at the same time.

Misc.:

• Crossing the Mississippi in the daytime was awesome.
• I saw a dog in the median of Highway 65 today, looking both ways, waiting for cars to pass. After they passed, he trotted safely to the other side. I saw the same thing in Oklahoma yesterday. Weird?
• Hurray! It's really Christmas now, because Adult Swim is playing "A Very Venture Christmas" right this very moment! Nothing says "birth of Christ" like the Venture Brothers. ("Why didn't he wish me a merry Christmas?... Nobody wants a Dean-in-the-Box!")
• It was 65 degrees when I got here today. Cloudy, but beautiful. I didn't even wear a jacket when I explored the main streets around town. Gonna make Long Island's 30 degrees quite a transition.
• Shin Chan on Adult Swim is possibly the most disturbing show in their lineup.
  
• This may be a day late and a dollar short in terms of insight but: While I was away, Roger Clemens was confirmed as a 'Roid Rager, as I always suspected, that jerk. As the offspring of a natural bodybuilder, I have this incredibly complicated negative view of steroids and the people who think they enhance anything meaningful. In fact, I have considered starting my own line of anti-steroids clothing. I'd call it "Natch" and it would have slogans on tee shirts that would embarrass my mother, highlighting the... um... notorious physical side effects of steroids. Since I never thought the Yankees should have acquired Clemens in the first place, I feel somewhat lamely vindicated. Clemens has got the crazy eyes like my arch nemesis, Jason Giambi.
  
• Get ready for a lot of photos of this room...
  

Little Rock, the capitol in the middle distance, and the moon!

Cotton on the side of the road. Arkansas, south of Dumas (which the locals pronounce Duh-miss).
Lake Chicot, which is leveed against the Mississippi.

The Mighty Mississippi!

"It's Like Coming Home."

Greenville, the first town over the bridge from Arkansas.

Crossing into Greenwood over the creek, which is actually a slough, which I learned in my travels are little tributaries that usually fill up only after heavy rains--that goes for the west. In the southern Delta, they're filled up most of the time, as are the ditches dug on the sides of the roads, so be careful to stay off the shoulders of the highways.

When I first got there I ran around the room and made little "Eeee! Eeee!" noises like I was watching the Beatles's helicopter land at the World's Fair grounds.

Leather headboard and pillowtopped mattress! And down pillows!

The prints on the wall are of bayous in the Delta.

Handsome, no?

My own little office.

Look at the floor!

The coffee is from Wolfgang Puck.

Looking toward Howard Street.

The Viking Cooking School.

The kind of research you do in the Delta. Pictured, top to bottom: A set of postcards of turn-of-the-century posters featuring magicians and conjurers; Bob Dylan's "Modern Times"; Robert Johnson's "The Price of Soul" compilation; William Faulkner's Collected Short Stories and Peter Guaralnick's Searching for Robert Johnson.
Day 16:
Little Rock, Arkansas - Greenwood, Mississippi
Mileage: 207
Total Mileage: approx. 7,000
(I have to check the tripometer--there are two, one which I use to record the daily trips, and a second which has the total tally, which is the correct number. But I've tried to break it down daily to give you all a breakdown of what my driving days are like--I just keep forgetting to reset the tripometer or I reset after I've gone a few miles, so the total is the only real way to know for sure how far I've gone. Full report tomorrow, once I've remembered to look.)

Click for every Dylan lyric ever (except, oddly, the lyrics to "I'm Not There"--odd because of the Todd Haynes movie about Dylan that's out right now, includes the song and takes its name from the title):

I'm gazing out the window
Of the St. James Hotel
And I know no one can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell
Bob Dylan - Blind Willie McTell

No solid plans for tomorrow; I'm hoping to make it to Asheville, North Carolina, which I hear is adorable, and an easy drive from here. See you on the flipside!

Greenwood trivia, from Wikipedia:

• Greenwood is one of the few places in the world where you can stand between two rivers flowing in the opposite direction: the Yazoo River and the Tallahatchie River.
• Legend has it that the Leflore County Courthouse in Greenwood stands on Choctaw land once used for rituals and sacraments.
• The City of Greenwood is named after Choctaw Indian Chief Greenwood Leflore, who negotiated the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek with the U.S. Government.
• Cottonlandia Museum in Greenwood houses furniture from Chief Greenwood Leflore’s mansion Malmaison, which was destroyed by fire in 1942.
• Greenwood known as the Cotton Capital of the World and boasts the second largest cotton exchange in the nation located on Cotton Row.
• The Tallahatchie River in Greenwood contains relics of the Union side-wheel steamship, Star of the West, sunk to prevent passage of the Union flotilla, led by General Ulysses S. Grant, to Vicksburg.
• Walter "Furry" Lewis was born in Greenwood in March 1899 and became the first bluesman to record the bottleneck method of playing guitar.
• Keesler Bridge in Greenwood is a swing bridge of the Howe Truss design and a dedicated Mississippi landmark.
• Helen Keller gave a speech about happiness in Greenwood on March 29, 1916 (Unfortunately she was unable to hear the applause.)
• John Phillip Sousa conducted a concert in Greenwood in 1930.
• Robert Johnson died and was buried just north of Greenwood in August 1938 and now has three memorial gravestones set across the county in his memory.
• B.B. King, King of the Blues, was born near Itta Bena at Berclair in Leflore County in 1925 and initiated his career in the mid-1940s on a broadcast over Greenwood’s WGRM [then located at 222 Howard Street - upstairs (now home of the Greenwood Blues Heritage Museum & Gallery)] as guitarist for the St. John’s Gospel Singers quartet from nearby Indianola.
• In 1944, Time covered the Greenwood Mule Race, attended by over 5,000 people.
• Academy Award-winning actor Morgan Freeman graduated from high school in Greenwood in 1955.
• Young Emmett Till's abduction from the home of relatives at Money, Mississippi (just north of Greenwood) and subsequent murder in August 1955 sparked the civil rights movement.
• Little Richard sang a song titled, Greenwood, Mississippi and William Eggleston captured his photograph Greenwood, Mississippi, 1973 there.
• The movies Home from the Hill (1960), The Streets of Greenwood (1962), Ode to Billie Joe, The Reivers, Mississippi Masala, and The Gun in Betty Lou's Handbag were filmed on location in Greenwood.
• Greenwood sites used in the filming of John Grisham's “The Chamber” include Webster’s Restaurant where you can sit and eat steak and seafood on the same barstool as Chris O’Donnell.
• The largest Bible-binding plant in the nation is Norris Bookbinding located in Greenwood.

Day 15 (Or: "This Machine Kills Fascists")

Ahoy, once again, from the Peabody in Little Rock, Arkansas. They totally gave away my room so guess what--upgrade city! 18th floor! Be quiet Barbara, I know, the fire ladders won't be able to reach me, but up here in the suite, I'll be waiting in the bathtub to be rescued, watching CNN on the flatscreen that's built into the mirror. Yeah, that's right.

So, OK, remember how I passed into Amarillo, stayed at that same hotel just to get my pillow? Which you saw me with in the photo two posts ago? To prove that I got it back? Well, I was so happy about it, that I totally went and drove off without it. Again. Luckily, this time, I wasn't a state and a half away when I remembered, just ten miles outside Amarillo, so I turned around and went back. The girl at the desk was like, "Didn't you do this two weeks ago?"

Oy. Then it was time to go back through Oklahoma. Yesterday was a terrible drive, just too long and winding, and too many miles. So today, I didn't make a room reservation, I just decided to wing it. Little Rock is about 600 miles from Amarillo, so I figured I wouldn't make it. I woke up late and ate a lazy breakfast so by the time I got on the road, it was about 11 am. I made amazing time and got into Little Rock around 8 pm local time.

Here's the thing about Oklahoma: a few people I know told me that it was full o' nothing and worth skipping altogether, if possible. So not the case! Granted, the panhandle smelled overwhelmingly of cow poop and fine dining in every town I passed through was Pizza Hut (I eventually surrended to hunger and got one of those teeny pizzas with veggies on it), but today, day 15, I got a wonderful look around. Last time I passed through, the whole state was shrouded with fog and then the sun went down and that was it. Today I got to see the farms and the rolling hills and the ACRES and ACRES of wind powered-turbines! Green! Energy! In the heartland!

So, I ask you: if Oklahoma is empty to you, what would you put in it? Big rocky mountains? Then it would be Colorado. Acres and acres of desert? That's Nevada. Buttes? Hello, New Mexico. Leave Oklahoma alone--it's beautiful. And you can get those awesome western print blankets absolutely everywhere. That's my kinda state. Plus, everybody I met was so nice.

**I have often had this dream where I'm wandering across a large green hill, more like a mountain, surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of these turbines--so getting to see so many of them across the country on this trip, has been surreal. From Oklahoma to Nevada and California to Colorado, it's so encouraging to see how many turbine fields there really are.

Last time, I totally didn't get to see OK City (that's how they call it for shorthand--isn't that cute?); I wasn't even sure how close I-40 was to the city center. Um, it goes right through it. That was some HEAVY fog, let me tell you. I had no idea, none.

As for the listenin' today, I created a monster of a playlist called "Place Names" which, predictably, includes about 500 songs which feature the name of a place in it. For example:

1. Bob Dylan - Goin' to Acapulco
2. Neutral Milk Hotel - Holland, 1945
3. Sufjan Stevens - Pittsfield
4. The Grateful Dead - Panama Red
5. Arlo Guthrie - Coming Into Los Angeles

You get the idea. I also have a subset list which has specific places like The White Stripes' "Hotel Yorba," Elliott Smith's "Memory Lane," and Leonard Cohen's "Chelsea Hotel No. 2." When you're not really into books on tape, music selection is ESSENTIAL. Although, I listened to some terrific blues on the radio, for a change, while going through the Texas panhandle today.

Oh, and I had a vivid dream last night. I dreamt I was talking with someone familiar, but whom I could not identify, when the door to my left opened and Alan Alda walked in and said hello while passing us. My friend turned to me and said, "That guy again."

They say you have dozens of dreams during the course of a normal night of sleep. I can't imagine what my unconscious is going through for it to make that the dream worth remembering from last night.

Also, I might get the truck washed, which is weird for me, since I don't even do that with my own car (thanks, Pop). But when I'm driving at night, I can't tell if I need to turn on the defroster or if it's just the salt-crusted outside of the window. So far, Defroster: 0, Salt-Crusted Window: 7.

Anyway, here's a sample of today:

This bills itself as the "Largest Cross in the Western Hemisphere," and the secularist in me doesn't think it probably has a lot of competition. Groom, Texas.
Wind power!
I don't think this properly gives an idea of how large these things actually are.
OK City!
That biker dude gave me a thumbs-up as he went by. He has a New Jersey license plate--can you imagine?! In the winter time!
Horses just hanging out in Shawnee, Oklahoma.
Shawnee, Oklahoma. I love the writing under the name--thanks for clearing up the mystery.
I made another pilgrimage of the musical sort today. For whatever reason, I've spent most of the time on this blog focusing on either Robert Johnson or Bob Dylan, but there's one guy who, arguably, made Dylan into what he is even more than Johnson did, and I visited his hometown today, forty years after his death. Woody Guthrie's Okemah, Oklahoma.
This is another one of those towns, much like Clarksdale, that is caught in time, no matter what the modernizations (and on the main drag through Okemah, there aren't really many to speak of, except for maybe the gym--the town still has a five-and-dime). There's a little garden in the center of town with a display that is sponsored by lovers of Guthrie's music.

He wrote one of my favorite songs, "California Stars," and is without question the backbone of the folk music which came after him.
I'd totally be a folksinger if I could. And my first song would totally be "Passing Through Amarillo, to Pick Up My Pillow."

Day 15:
Amarillo, Texas - Little Rock, Arkanasas
Mileage: 631
Total Mileage: 6, 538*

* So, a sidenote: As many of you know, if I could go to one place anywhere in the world, I would go to Mongolia. If I started out driving from my house in Holbrook, NY, and drove straight across the globe (more or less), the distance to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia would be 6,322. In other words, I would have gotten there yesterday, Pacific Ocean notwithstanding. And it probably would have been cheaper to go that way than a $6,000 round-trip plane ticket from JFK.

***

California Stars
Woody Guthrie

I’d like to rest my heavy head tonight
On a bed of California stars
I’d like to lay my weary bones tonight
On a bed of California stars
I’d love to feel your hand touching mine
And tell me why I must keep working on
Yes, I’d give my life to lay my head tonight
On a bed of California stars

I’d like to dream my troubles all away
On a bed of California stars
Jump up from my starbed and make another day
Underneath my California stars
They hang like grapes on vines that shine
And warm the lovers glass like friendly wine
So, I’d give this world just to dream a dream with you
On our bed of California stars

***

Tomorrow: Back to Mississippi! Staying in Greenwood! Mmmph! So excited!

The rest of Day 14 (Or: "T is for Texas")

Union Pacific train in Cheyenne, Wyoming. I wonder where it' s going.Southern Wyoming, or possibly northern Colorado.
Anheuser-Busch plant in Colorado.
Denver, Colorado!
Preeeetty. And nice to get away from snowy landscapes.
I love the name of this town. But dude, the elevation changes were killin' me on this leg of the trip.

Sunset in Colorado. I crossed into the Central Time Zone after the sun went down, once I passed into the Oklahoma panhandle.

Interlude: Day 14, but too tired for real post, so...

I haven't gotten around to writing my folk song, "Comin' Into Amarillo, Searchin' for My Pillow," which I imagine to be a massacree with four-part harmony, which would probably also be to the tune of "Big Rock Candy Mountain," but since I'm quite tuckered out from today (it was a trying, trying day, and I'm looking at you, Texas), I'll leave you with this, so that you know for sure that the song is being composed as you read!

This trip has taught me that really, you need very little to get along. But still. Getting this thing back is priceless. I even decided to stay here again. (The $44 room rate and indoor pool had nothing whatsoever to do with this decision--it was alllll for sentimentality's sake)

And now, to get my laundry out of the guest dryer and get myself to bed. More in the morning.

Day 14:
Cheyenne, Wyoming - Amarillo, TX
Mileage: 537
Total Mileage: 5,907

It was on the northern border of Texas where I crossed the line.
Bob Dylan - When the Night Comes Falling from the Sky

More from day thirteen

In a handy-dandy bullet list:

• I apparently, somehow, managed to cross over the Continental Divide twice yesterday, at two different altitudes, while heading in the same direction, if the signs on I-80 are to be believed.
• Cities in the northern plains appear like mirages on the horizon, miles and miles before you actually get to them.
• I wish I was heading for Omaha, but next time... next time...
• As I pulled into Cheyenne, whose stoplights turn into flashing yellows after 10 p.m. (I'm not kidding, all of them in the entire city turn into flashing yellows), I thought to myself, "If these hotels ever fill up, it is because the rodeo's in town." I'm not completely sure a rodeo comes to Cheyenne, but it seems likely.
• The bank clock said it was 15 degrees when I got into town at 10:30 p.m.
• If ever a city were stuck in time, Cheyenne is it. Don't get me wrong: I loved it. It was completely charming, updated in places, clean and interesting, but it definitely has a touch of 1850 and 1950.
• The Bible was open in my room to Psalms. Psalm 45: "My heart overflows with a goodly theme; I speak my poem before a king; my tongue is like the pen of a skilled writer."
• This was my list for day 14, and I only completed items 3 and 5
• Eat breakfast
• Get cowboy hat
• Smell nice air
• Photograph Union Pacific sign
• Get out of Dodge... I mean, Cheyenne.

That's it. Now for Day 14.

Day Thirteen (Or: Next Stop, Amarillo)

Greetings from Cheyenne, Wyoming, a city I never, ever thought I'd see.

This was the first day that didn't feel vacation-like, mainly because of the stressssssss of trying to get to Cheyenne at a decent hour. But hey, that's OK.

The drive was about 750 miles. And doesn't have a lot in it. I did stop in a town called Little America because I was DYING for some vegetables and the only thing I really wanted was some cucumber. I stopped at possibly the only restaurant in creation that doesn't have cucumbers. What else.

Oh, I passed through Laramie on the way here. Laramie is where Matthew Shepard was beat up, strung up a fence post and left to die by two men because he was gay in 1998. I actually didn't want to stop there, but I was absolutely low on gas and had no choice. It smells like Santa Fe, with the faint scent of burning wood in the air.

Then, I was driving through Medicine Bow national forest, elevation 8,060 feet above sea level, and I got a nosebleed! That never happens to me, but it wasn't surprising--I'd been having issues with the elevation all day.

The driving was a little scary--there were random ice slicks on the road, even though the weather was clear--but everybody's wearing cowboy boots and this hotel (the historic Plains Hotel in downtown Cheyenne) has a charming, if slightly un-p.c. obsession with Native American likenesses that kind of thrills me. The hotel was built in 1911 and restored in 2003 and is totally charming.

Cheyenne is the "Magic City of the Plains," because when the local people in the area heard that the Union Pacific railroad was coming through, they slapped the city together quickly, hoping the railroad would bring them prosperity. It's the largest city in Wyoming and has about 10,000 more people in it than live in Holbrook. Weird. Anyway, it means there are plenty of places to park downtown, which is cool.

It's a total Union Pacific town and in the distance as I went to sleep last night, I could hear freight trains rumbling through. Made me feel good about bringng the train conductor's hat with me.

I've got to get on the road to Amarillo, but I'll post some more thoughts about Idaho and Wyoming later on, including the revelation that Idaho drivers are Idahorrible and the fact that it was about 15 degrees here last night.

Day 13:
Boise, ID - Cheyenne, WY
Mileage: 750
Total Mileage (adjusted--I messed up somewhere): 5,370

Idaho Heritage Inn, Boise, ID. With the geothermal shower.
I didn't even know there were mountains around Boise until the morning.
You can't really see it, but this car's license plate says Alaska.
I love historical markers.
I drove over this.
The Snake River.
And this guy.
I call this one, "No Direction Home."
Ogden is where there is a monument to the golden spike, or "Promontory Point," where the Union Pacific railroad met the Central Pacific railroad, completing the first transcontinental railroad in 1869. Also, I am a dweeb for knowing and getting excited about this.

UTAH!
More Utah.
Seriously, I kept thinking every time I saw a sign like this, that Cheyenne was getting furhter away.
Wyyyyyyomin'.
My hotel. P.S. This town closes at 10 p.m.
From my hotel room--totally charming, no?


Well, seen her up in old Cheyenne
Turned my head and away she ran
From Denver Town to Wichita
Last I heard she's in Arkansas.

Bob Dylan - Gypsy Lou