Okay, I've put it off long enough, time for a post about my trip.

I had pretty much a fantastic time. I kind of fell in love with the desert while we were out there, and I've added AZ and NM to places I would potentially move to if I had to leave Texas.

There were parts of California that were strangely like a life-size diorama. Hill country that looked like it had been sculpted into an idea of what hills should look like, not shaped by natural forces. Gorgeous.

The Redwoods and the Sequoias were amazing. Photos never do them justice, and the forests out there are pretty magical I have to say. While there, we saw three bears, one of which had cubs with her. That's more bears in one day than we've seen in 10 years of vacations. The first time we saw a bear, we got pretty excited about it and we told a lady next to us on the trail, to share our bear with her. She said, "Oh, another bear? We've already seen a lot of those today." That's the kind of bear surplus out there. There's so many bears that it's no longer interesting. California.

One evening we were driving in a somewhat remote area of California, up in the hills, towards our next campsite, about an hour away. As we pull up to a lonely stoplight, our truck suddenly dies. Completely dead. Running fine one minute, and then nothing. 2 or 3 cars filled with helpful people came and looked at it as we waited for the towtruck and no one could make heads or tails of it. (That's one thing about folks in California, everyone we came across was super friendly, maybe even to a slightly creepy degree) The towtruck came and towed us and our trailer literally around the corner, maybe 300 yards. $200. :/

It was dark by this time so we just popped our trailer in the parking lot of a little garage in San Andreas, California. (If you read through the Wikipedia entry, there's an article about how the San Andreas Merchant Association were concerned that people would mistakenly think of the San Andreas Grand Theft Auto game and associate the name with 'urban mayhem' instead of a peaceful California town.)

And that's where we stayed, for a week, while the well-intentioned but out-of-their-league mechanics stood around scratching their heads, trying to figure out exactly what voodoo curse had killed our truck. Camped out in a town so small it doesn't have a bookstore. It was a bit of a downer, sitting around watching the last days of our vacation dwindle away, bored out of our minds. They were super-nice, and the mechanic even let us borrow his son's car to drive to get groceries. We bought a bunch of movies and I spent most of the week watching them on our laptop. (They were also nice enough to run us an extension cord from the shop so we could have electricity.)

By the time they actually figured out what was wrong, we should have been halfway home to Texas. And not only that, but it would have to be towed to another town 40 minutes away since it was beyond their scope to fix. And it would be at least 3 to 5 days to fix it after that.

We did the math, and figured out that if I was going to make it to work on time, I had to leave yesterday, so to speak. So we called around for a rental car, which in itself was pretty hard. All those little towns have rental places, but apparently only have one car at a time, and we had a hell of a time finding one. One of the garage employees gave me a ride to the closest available car (an hour away), and after dealing with the eye-rolling, sarcasm-riddled Hertz employee on staff, I was off. _{Side note: In case you read this, Hertz employee Chris, from Sonora, CA: I didn't appreciate your tone.}

I left Thursday at around 9pm, from San Andreas, California and arrived in Denton, TX at 3pm on Saturday. Just me, my Kia Rondo, and the desert. Thankfully, the Rowdy Rondo was equipped with satellite radio, so I had some sweet musical accompaniment for my long and lonely drive. I stopped to buy a notepad exclusively to write down songs I heard while I was driving.

So long as I have some pretty country to look at and music to listen to, I can drive long periods of time and it doesn't bother me. I got maybe 8 hours of sleep in two nights, sleeping in the car both times. It was kind of an adventure, and almost made up for the week we had our wings clipped in California.

There are very few times that I think it is truly appropriate to blast Motley Crue at a high volume, and that is when you're tearing across the desert at midnight.

One night I pulled into Tucumcari to sleep for a few hours. I drove through the town around 1am, and it was an incredibly eerie experience. I saw almost no signs of human occupation in the entire town. No people walking around, no gas stations open. I didn't even see another car driving around. On a Friday night. A seemingly empty town in the high desert, with the wind as the only sound outside the car. I pulled up to a hospital, that didn't look like it had a soul inside, and slept. That close to Halloween, it was pretty spooky, and I seriously considered that I had driven into some kind of zombie apocalypse.

Overall, the drive was a great opportunity to think, clear my head, and just appreciate how beautiful the world is. Probably one of the most magical things I can remember is pulling off the side of the road in the wee hours to stretch my legs. There were no other cars on the highway so it was deathly still, just the sound of the Rondo's engine and my own footsteps. And up in the sky, I could see more stars than I believed were possible.

Overall, I drove 1,700 miles in around 36 hours. You can see my route here.
Not everything went as planned, but it was still a great trip and it was what I needed.

Oh, and my parents did eventually make it out of California. About a week after I left.


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