July 19, 2008

from golden country

Apologies for the lack of updates; I had to laugh at all the discussion on the death of blogs by Twitter — I may be a suitable poster child for that phenomena. Seems like all I’ve had time and energy for on this trip is blurbs and Treo snaps.

But we’re in Nebraska, now, and yesterday I felt for the first time like we’d truly crossed the line between east and west and I might’ve had a religious moment. More essay-esque notes should surely follow now that I’m back in home country.

More soon.

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July 14, 2008

Tucked into the Catskills

Shorter days this trip — and by “shorter” I mean that we’re averaging 5-6 hours a day on the road vs. the 8-9 we’ve usually done. Easier on the animals, and with so many logistics, on us too. I’ve been disappointed that I can’t get more pictures, but I’m driving and the new camera is mammoth and getting it out and ready in the car is a production unto itself. I need a little pocket camera for some impromptu snapping.

Paid $4.50 for gas at the New York/Pennsylvania border today. But scored a hotel with free wireless, a pizza delivery deal and free breakfast for $60. They canceled each other out.

Otherwise, further updates on Twitter and Flickr.

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July 11, 2008

Last epic road trip for a couple of years underway

Dinner at Joe’s Boathouse, South Portland waterfront

We’ve been Down East since Tuesday evening, but it wasn’t until yesterday when we drove Sarah down to Portsmouth, NH to meet up with her dad that I really felt like the trip had begun. While she went to spend the weekend with he and Lisa, Shane and I wound back up the Maine coastline the long way to our hotel.

It was a beautiful, beautiful night. And we can now add “enjoyed fresh lobster under the stars on the Maine waterfront” to our list of have-dones. We leave Maine Sunday morning for the next leg.

If you’re not already doing so, keep an eye out over at Flickr for photos from the road, and over at Twitter for mini on-the-fly updates from my Treo.

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July 8, 2008

Surprisingly, we are here and on schedule.

I am sitting on the floor at the foot of the bed in the dark hotel room so the glow of the laptop won’t light up the whole room, everyone else but the cat asleep. But despite that it’s 11 pm and I have to get up at 6 am - I can’t - because no sooner did I close my eyes after the long day today: sneezing fit. Fifteen minutes later and it’s still going, so I’ll catch up while I ride it out.

I was surprised at how easy today was (relatively speaking), given that usually we’re caught many hours and sometimes a day or more behind schedule for a multitude of reasons. But today we rolled out of that driveway barely an hour later than we planned to. Which meant that I drove the whole way to tonight’s hotel with the sinking feeling that we must’ve forgotten to do something.

We’ve descended down out of the Maine highlands and are now “Down East” along the coast for a few days taking care of some family and other business. Then, after four months in New England, we officially head home.

Only we don’t exactly know yet where home is, but that’s a minor detail. I’ve got a 4-day date with a blue-green eyed sandy blonde later this month and everything else can take a number.

Posted by tee in wandering
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July 5, 2008

Ventura Highway in the sunshine

In the spring of 1990, when I was 19 and in northern California, I split up with my high school sweetheart, Vin, after waking up one day and realizing the whole mess between us was completely dysfunctional and the head games were getting old fast. I left our apartment and stayed elsewhere while I gathered myself and then, a few days later, I picked him up with all his things and drove him to a bus station in Fair Oaks and sent him back to Connecticut where we’d first met four years earlier - an introduction from Marty, a good friend.

All I remember clearly of that day is realizing as I pulled away after the bus did that he had left his pillow in my back seat.

Not long after Vin got back to Connecticut he ran into Marty who, deducing what happened, got on a plane and flew to California where we, with about $1,500 to our names between us, spent the next two or three weeks traveling around California, nearly top to bottom, in my dusty, white 1977 Corolla on a trip I called my Grief Junket.

There were Lake Tahoe cruises, San Francisco pier dinners, Santa Cruz boardwalks in the early morning, San Simeon beaches (I wish I could find the photograph of me on the rocks, waves crashing all around as the sun went down), Pismo Beach motels, Guadalupe gas stations, Santa Barbara rock wall picnic lunches, blistering Ventura highways, Hollywood Boulevard run-ins with famous comedians, Venice moonlight body boarding (where I lost my hotel key in the sand), San Diego Zoos and cobblestone strolls, Tijuana velvet roses from throngs of little boys, San Diego dashes to the hotel bathroom after Tijuana cocktails, and then back up the coast again, threading through the same towns and back home.

When we rolled back into the L.A. area we stayed in a not-so-bad motel with a flashing, neon sign on Hollywood Boulevard in a second floor room overlooking the pool where partiers in rooms all around us were drinking beer on the verandas and then perching themselves on railings and jumping into the pool below while Moonlight Drive wafted in and out of our open room door.

An aside: I remember that being a defining moment in my partier-or-non-partier development, and I, for the most part, chose a non-committal version of the latter.

On the way home, somewhere between Morro Bay and Big Sur, we ran out of money and slept in the car. Shortly after that, we ran out of gas.

All of this was a distant memory until the other night when two things flashed, back to back, to bring it back to the surface: a glimpse of that same Hollywood neon motel sign in a movie, and then this.

Posted by tee in favorites, sense of place
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July 4, 2008

“Underwater Love” - Smoke City

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July 3, 2008

Book reviews: The Namesake, Nine Hills to Nambonkaha and Walking with Zeke

Just a few words from my notes on these, you can read my full reviews for all three books over on GoodReads.com.

The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
While my first impressions of The Namesake weren’t flattering (the first 10 or 20 pages felt dry and I almost gave up on it), by the fifth or sixth chapter I understood what she had pulled off. Using deceptively spare, undecorated language, Lahiri manages to paint richly-detailed yet unapologetically imperfect portraits that firmly affix readers to the lives of her characters as they unfold.

Nine Hills to Nambonkaha by Sarah Erdman
I believe I just spent the last two weeks in a remote, traditional western African village among incredible people and circumstances. I love when a writer tells a story that becomes indistinguishable from my reality when I’m reading/listening. Kudos to Erdman for pulling that off.

Walking with Zeke by Chris Clarke
In short, Walking with Zeke is a compilation of journal entries over the years that come together to offer a raw, touching portrait of the relationship between a man and his aging dog, treading not only the hills and washes of their physical landscape together but also the very winding, up-and-down path toward the inevitable.

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