Monday, August 29, 2011

Friends, Romans, Countrymen, Lend Me Your Rears

Because this climate is kicking mine.  Kicking my ace.  So hard.

It's just so dry here.  I feel like I'm being dessicated.  You know those little packets of silica gel that come in a box of new shoes?  They are stamped, "DESSICANT - DO NOT EAT."  I feel like I'm living inside of one of those packets.

Idaho was pretty dry compared to New Jersey (but everywhere other than the Amazon Rainforest is dry compared to New Jersey, really), but so far Utah has taken me to a whole new level of parched.  I feel like if I lay still for long enough, cacti will sprout from my pores.  A tumbleweed rolled past me just now as I am typing this.  I am in my living room.

Once upon a time, I had extremely oily skin.  We're not talking typical greasy-faced teenager.  No, we're talking Exxon Valdez.  Like, I would hug a baby animal and someone would rush in to wash it off with dish soap before it could be safely released.  Like, my face was its own emirate in the United Arab Emirates.  Like, Daniel Plainview tried to erect a derrick on my forehead.  Let me be the first to acknowledge that I was an aesthetically repugnant adolescent.  The only solace I found in looking like I was using Crisco for foundation was that I was probably going to be the very last person my age to develop wrinkles.

Over the past couple years, I have gradually grown closer and closer to being a normal person (which closely coincides with the recent dramatic rise in oil prices, for which I apologize).  Then the desert happened.

Overnight, I went from pleasantly hydrated to "dry-rotted suitcase on the floor of Death Valley at noon."  And it's not even just my face.  No matter how much lotion I apply, or how much water I drink, I feel like my outsides and my insides are quickly turning to dust.  I have never in my life been ashy prior to living here, but if I don't lotion up within 15 seconds of showering, I practically grow scales.  My sinuses are so dry that my boogers have boogers (you're welcome for that visual).

On top of all that, running any respectable distance in nearly impossible.  One mile in, you feel a little thirsty.  Two miles in, your lungs begin to shrivel and your esophagus burns a little with every breath.  Anything beyond that, and you can forget about ever feeling happy about anything ever again.  No matter how much water you drink during or after this run, you will feel like you're hungover.  Your poor tender brain will throb against your bare skull; the light will stab your eyes like a thousand flaming ice picks.  You may even throw up in your mouth a little.

You would think the one benefit of this aridity would be not sweating even in hot weather.  You would be wrong.  Somehow, humidity and I got along just fine.  It was like my body and the air reached a state of homeostasis.  I didn't need its moisture, it didn't need mine.  But here.  Here it's so different.  The air is all, "Hey, you using those water molecules?  Cause I kinda don't have any sooo, yea." 

Dry air is so awkward and passive aggressive like that.  The point is, though, the air seems to draw moisture out of my body in the form of sweat.  It's not even that I'm hot, it's just that the air is sucking every drop of water from my body and using the surface of my skin as an evaporation staging area.  It's gross.

So, thanks, Utah, for turning me into a sweaty catcher's mitt.

Thursday, August 25, 2011

SLC Crunk

Now that I've berated the liquor laws in Utah, let me describe the highly enjoyable imbibing experience we had in Salt Lake City on Sunday.

We started the great schlep down to SLC after lunch, with our sights set on Men's Warehouse so Andy could get measured for a tux for an upcoming wedding.  Unfortunately, Men's Warehouse decided to be closed (as they apparently are every Sunday, contrary to what their website indicated, but hey, we can't all be as perfect as me).  So we cut our losses and continued on to This Is The Place.

For those of you not intimately familiar with Mormon history, "This Is The Place" is, and I'm sort of paraphrasing here, the place where a rickety old wagon rattled over the mountains and encountered a wide desert valley.  That wagon was carrying Brigham Young on his deathbed, and that arid valley is now Salt Lake City.  He saw this scrubby, sulfurous wasteland and thought, "Damn, this place has potential."  Or maybe he thought, "Balls.  I'mma throw up if we have to bounce over one more GD mountain range.  Who cares, we're stopping here."  But really, he probably thought, "Well, this is about the least accessible or desirable place we're going to find anywhere.  We are sure to be left completely unmolested if we hang out in this hellscape."  Whatever, I don't know, I wasn't there so I'm speculating as to his inner monologue.  But history tells us that what he supposedly did say, which is, oddly enough, "This is the place." 

So the aptly named attraction boasts a bunch of elaborate statues, a gift shop, and a reconstructed pioneer town.  I will now shamefully admit that we visited the ol' 'Place a few weeks ago, on a Saturday.  We left without visiting the pioneer town, because it cost $10 a person.  Seriously?  If I wanted to look at old vacant buildings, I could have stayed in New Jersey and spent an afternoon in Camden.  Fortunately, I didn't have to do that, because admission drops to $5 on Sundays!  The reason should be obvious - all good Mormons are churching it up on this day of rest, and nobody is there to dress up in old timey costumes and give tours.  That suited us just fine, so we ponied up the cash and explored what amounted to a sort of creepy Mormon ghost town until the desert sun drove us to the brink of insanity. 

Judging from the position of the sun in the sky, we surmised it to be beer o'clock and ventured into downtown Salt Lake to Trolley Square.  There, we found a shady spot on the deck at the Desert Edge Brewery.  We ordered a round of beers (which were delicious!) and steeled ourselves for the inevitable demand that we order food right away.  It was then that we learned that not all liquor licenses are created equal, and Desert Edge clearly opted for the dungeon-master level of license.  We were free to drink as much beer as our little livers desired, without ever feeling pressured to ingest solids.  A veritable booze-o-rexic oasis in a desert of regulations.  Even so, we did order an early dinner, and my grilled portobello salad was bangin'.

A brew with a view
To put the cherry on top of a great afternoon, we drove around in search of a frozen dairy dessert.  But not just any regular old ice cream would do.  I was bent on experiencing my first fro yo encounter.  I cringe a little as I type that, because it sounds like something a sorority girl would say, obvi.  But I find that calling it 'frozen yogurt' doesn't quite capture the essence of what this is.  Which is magic.  It couldn't even get more magical if a leprechaun hand churned it from unicorn's milk.  It's that special.

The place we found, called Yoway, was this adorable little Korean fro yo shop tucked into a random shopping center.  We entered to the soothing sounds of mellow Asian pop music emanating from hidden speakers.  Bright pastel walls surrounded an open room with space-age, Jetsons-style plastic chairs scattered around little tiny metal tables.  At the back of room was a buffet table of candy and fruit toppings and a cash register.  Down a dimly lit hallway to the right, there awaited a gauntlet of frozen deliciousness.  We picked up our cups and drifted up and down the hall, reading the names of the various wonderful flavors on the frozen yogurt machines built into the wall. 

After much deliberation, I decided to pop my fro yo cherry with a mix of red velvet cake and vanilla flavors.  I emerged from the hallway to the glory of the toppings bar, and carefully curated an exhibition of deliciousness with the fresh berries and crushed peanuts I lovingly sprinkled on my ice cream.  When I was satisfied with my creation, I proceeded to the register, where I paid for my new best friend by the ounce.  How wonderful.  I always feel like a 'regular' or 'small' size is too big but a kid's size is just a tad too small.  But this was my Goldilocks moment.  I was in control and it was just right.  It was so right it was wrong.  I can honestly say it was the best thing ever. 

Until I used the bathroom before leaving.  Then it got just a little bit better.  And then my head exploded.

Well that's a bit harsh...but I guess people who don't wash their hands have a lot more in common with child molesters than we all think.


The gauntlet of fro yo is a prohibitively long and tiring journey for some people.


I realize that this whole self-serve pay by the ounce fro yo phenomenon is not new (isn't that what Pinkberry is?) but it's new to me, and my life is forever changed.  It takes me back to the annual Scholastic Book Fair/Ice Cream Social night in elementary school.  Those were the days.  Eight-year-old me had almost zero awareness of body image and no self-control whatsoever, so this was a free-for-all unadulterated by concerns about my health or my appearance. 

My teeth actually hurt thinking about the mountain of ice cream that I drowned in chocolate syrup, peaked with whipped cream, and peppered with avalanches of Reese's pieces and chocolate jimmies.  (I just can't call them sprinkles, even though I recently learned that in some parts of the country, 'jimmies' carries an offensive racial connotation of which I was never aware  That's unfortunate, so I'm taking it back.  Or just not giving it up, but it is what it is.) 

But the ice cream wasn't the sole attraction.  No, this yearly event combined my two great childhood loves - being a fatty, and being a nerdle.  The only thing that could possibly tear me away from the ice cream bar was the promise of scooping up a haul of the latest and greatest by Ann M. Martin, Francine Pascal, and R. L. Stine.  All of which I would read in an afternoon with about the same greed and gusto with which I devoured the ice cream that preceded their purchase.

Ah, those were the days.  But thanks to fro yo, I can revisit that little piece of my childhood any time.  Unless I don't want to be broke and weigh 500 pounds.  Which I don't.  So really, by 'any time' I actually mean very seldom, but with frequent pining and yearning and salivating in between.

Note to self:  brilliant business idea = bookmobile ice cream truck.  yes.



Tuesday, August 23, 2011

Utah’s Liquor Laws, or, SLC Punk hit it right on the mark

The liquor laws in Utah are a labyrinth that would make even David Bowie tinkle a little.

source

Every person I talk to sheds a little bit more light on the issue, but nobody has a concise explanation.  Probably because there isn't one.  Here's what I think I understand so far:

"Where'd you get the beer?"
"Wyoming, where else?"
"This actually needs some explanation.  Beer in supermarkets in Utah is weak.  Three points instead of the normal six points of alcohol.  It's the religious influence, and it's a pain in the ass.  To me, it makes no sense.  If you've got alcohol, you've got alcohol.  So why three instead of six?  You know a drunk's just gonna drink twice as many beers to get drunk.  So not only do you have a drunk on your hands... but you have a drunk who's fat and gross.  There's nothing worse."

(Copied and reformatted from this page)


3.2 Beer.  I really shouldn’t complain, though.  It’s perfect for me.  I basically catch a whiff of someone else’s drink and get a contact drunk, so if they wanna water down my happy juice, that’s probably better for everyone concerned.

Unlike Idaho, and I’m sure many other places, you can’t buy wine in grocery stores in Utah.  Just beer, and, depending on the store, usually a pretty limited and crappy selection.  Although, the grocery store closest to us, which I will no longer patronize because it is overpriced, doesn’t stock a lot of things I like, and the produce guy is overly-helpful in a way that totally creeped me out (close talking, shoving sliced mini-cucumbers on toothpicks in my face…) introduced us to a hilarious and quite palatable libation in the form of Polygamy Porter.

Is it just me or does the woman on the left really look like Joyce DeWitt?

But speaking of wine, it’s expensive here!  At least, compared to the wine we used to buy at Winco in Idaho, it feels like highway robbery.  We used to be all about Rex Goliath wine, which we lovingly call chicken wine, although cock wine would both more and less appropriate, given that the label bears an image of its giant rooster namesake.  At Winco, it was $4.99 for a standard size bottle, and $8 or $9 for the 1.5 liter bottle.  It’s not something you’d put in your wine cellar and age for a special occasion, but it’s decent enough that I wouldn’t be embarrassed to serve it to guests, and it doesn’t give me an instant hangover like Franzia.  So I thought I had graduated to the level of adulthood where you don’t have to buy jugs of Carlo Rossi, but I guess I’m not quite there yet.

Sidenote:  I know I used to hate on Winco for being the po’ people store in Idaho.  The one in Moscow was a little grungy and usually pretty crowded, as much as any place in Idaho can ever be crowded.  However, after moving back to New Jersey and having no access to such a place, I found I really resented having to buy prepackaged dry goods like flour and spices and pasta.  The best part about bulk bins is obviously the ridiculously low price, so I won’t even pretend that’s not my primary motivation in going to Winco, but sometimes it’s also really nice to be able to precisely control the amount of a substance that you choose to buy.  This one time, I needed a tiny amount of cardamom for a recipe I wanted to try, but I wasn’t about to pay more than an hour’s wage for a tiny jar of spice that I would probably use once and have to throw out the next time I moved.  Enter Winco.  $.43 later, I had just enough cardamom for whatever random concoction I was trying to whip up.  What’s not to love? 

Needless to say, when I discovered that there are two Winco stores within 30 minutes of ournew home, I was totally stoked.  Now I’m one of those people who make a pilgrimage once every so often in order to hoard these wonderfully inexpensive foodstuffs.  I bring a cooler and stock up on frozen berries, frozen corn…I shovel those dried apple rings into a plastic bag until it’s about to burst.  It’s just…so beautiful.

Winco, I just don’t know how to quit you.

But I digress.  Did you know that Happy Hours and other forms of drink specials are not allowed in Utah?  This is a recent development, as of June, I think.  Any alcoholic beverage sold, from beer to wine to mixed drinks, has to be the same price whenever it is sold.  That being said, a lot of joints are getting around this limitation with a clever loophole.  Changing the size of a drink and selling that different size only once a week for a low price gets a green flag.  So you can’t sell pints of a certain draft beer for $4 from Wednesday through Monday and then sell it for $1.50 on Tuesday.  But you can sell pints for $4 all the time and sell a 14 oz. glass of the same beer for $1.50 on Tuesday.  Or, you can sell pints for $3.50 and 24 oz. mugs for only $3.75, as long as that particular drink is always that price when it is sold at that size.  So, so weird.

Worse still, only true bars can sell you a drink without forcing you to also buy food.  Restaurants with less comprehensive liquor licenses cannot sell you a drink unless you buy food.  The worst.  We found this out the hard way after a morning of vigorous hiking through a mosquito-infested canyon that did not live up to its name (Dry Canyon).  We devoured sandwiches about 20 minutes before we got back to the trailhead, so we weren’t hungry, we just really needed beers.  Much to our dismay, we ordered beers and were immediately forced to choose something, anything edible, before we were allowed to have our beers. 

Okay, thanks, but I just ate.  Now all I want to do is sit here in your air conditioning and drink this beer that I already bought from you.  Fortunately, we found a nice hummus plate on the menu so it wasn’t the worst thing ever, but still.  Who are you to decide whether or not my stomach is properly primed to receive alcohol?  What if I just carbo-loaded on the way over here, and one more ounce of food will cause me to simply explode, ala Monty Python’s Meaning of Life?  What THEN, Utah Liquor Control Board and restaurant owner?  WHAT.



Monday, August 22, 2011

Parts Three and Four of the Drive

Well, the third installment of the story, which covers the remainder of Tuesday night straight on through the third and fourth days of the drive.  As you recall, we crawled to the nearest food establishment to inhale some dinner at 8:30 at night, after 14 hours on the road.  We hit the jackpot when we stumbled into a seedy Mexican joint purveying dirt cheap margaritas. 

The watered-down margaritas did little to dull the pain of returning to our room.  On the short walk back, we noted that the freegan (or more likely homeless person) digging in the dumpster and stuffing treasures into his backpack had moved on.  With defeat in our hearts and Mexican food-babies in our bellies, we trudged up the stairs to our room and shut the door that had no chain or deadbolt.  We brushed our teeth in the bathtub, because it had cold water.  We looked around…for the…cat?

Where was the cat?  He had vanished completely.  We tore apart the room for several minutes before Ajax came strutting into the middle of the floor looking all nonchalant like, “Oh, hai, guys, what’s going on?”  Neither of us saw him emerge, but a few minutes later Andy watched him disappear into the bed.  Yes.  INTO.  Not under or behind or just between the sheets.  INSIDE the actual structure of the bed.

As it turned out, the bed frame was nothing but four pieces of 4x6 lumber nailed together to form a rectangle which rested on the floor.  The two twin box springs supporting the king-size mattress were screwed onto the bed frame.  Because that’s necessary.  Someone might steal one of these box springs, guys.  The box springs were overhanging the end of the “bed frame” by about six inches, and the fabric covering the bottom of the box springs had torn.  Naturally, Ajax found his way into the crevice this tear allowed him to access, and he proceeded to crawl into the space between the box springs and the floor, where he was completely hidden. 

Ajax soon returned to the world of the (barely) living, and we set about blocking his access to this netherworld.  We stuffed some trashcans and luggage under the overhanging box springs and figured that would be enough.  Utterly depleted by this effort, we then attempted to go to sleep.  In the stillness, the room’s ultimate flaw revealed itself. 

I had just drifted into a half-sleep when a noise assaulted my very soul.  Was I on the launch pad at Cape Canaveral?  Why, God, WHY am I hearing a spaceship firing up three feet from my head?

Oh.  It’s the air conditioner. 

There seemed to be two settings.  Off, and NASA.  The high in Tulsa that day was something like 104, and we were on the 2nd floor.  Turning off the AC was not an option.  So we suffered.  We slept in 10 minute spurts.  The machine would roar into action and blast frigid air for a few minutes, and then abruptly shut off for about 10 minutes before repeating the process all over again.  It was the aural equivalent of waterboarding.

Finally, around 4:30 in the morning, we gave up.  We arose to shower, pack, eat and get as far from Oklahoma as we could, as quickly as humanly possible.  I got out of the shower to find Andy in a panic.  The cat was gone.  Again.  Ajax moved the barricades just enough to squeeze back under the bed, and promptly fell asleep.  There was no coaxing him out.  We had to lift the entire bed – frame, box springs, mattress and all.  We propped it up on the trashcans and I had the distinct pleasure of crawling under the bed and into the filth to extract the cat.  I may or may not have contracted AIDS from this experience.

By 6:30 we were hauling it out of there like our lives depended on it (because our sanity actually did).  When we crossed into Kansas, I wept.



I was even happier when we made it to Colorado, for three reasons.  First, this sign.  I love how a lot of the West seems to think it’s still 1989.



Second, we began to see signs of the Rockies in the far distance.   And, finally, we were going to stop for the night in Colorado, a mere two states away from our final destination.

Wednesday afternoon we made it to Fort Collins.  I know from its reputation that Fort Collins is a legitimately cool place.  However, it could have been freaking Compton, California and I would have been happy to stay there for a night, simply because it wasn’t Tulsa.  We stayed at a newly opened La Quinta, which was also objectively quite nice.  Comparatively, however, it was a palace of epic proportions.  Spending a night there made me feel like a real person again.

We slept in until 7 and hit the road shortly after 8.  We stopped for our typical roadside peanut butter and jelly somewhere in Wyoming, where we watched this rainstorm sweep across the open range.  Later, we passed by Sinclair, Wyoming, a town that exists solely within the boundaries of an oil refinery and looks like the movie sets for Brazil and Mad Max got together and had a post-apocalyptic baby. 



Finally, around 3 in the afternoon, we crossed the border into Utah.  After four solid days of driving, I was actually grateful to be there, if only because it meant I could soon stop driving hundreds of miles each day.  Much to my pleasure, northern Utah is actually a really pretty place.  We drove past Bear Lake before turning south into a canyon that would lead us to our new town.  Actually, we first turned south onto a side road that quickly turned into a gravel road and then a pock-marked dust road because the GPS seemed to think this was a reasonable detour.  Once we found the real road, the canyon was beautiful.  There was a lot of precipitation this past winter and spring, so the river was rushing alongside the road and everything in sight was a different shade of green.  I was actually happy to get stuck behind a truck hauling a camping trailer, because it gave me an excuse to slow down and take in the view.  

Bear Lake - Much more impressive when you're not trying to take a picture and drive a car at the same time.

Driving through Logan Canyon

 We stayed in a hotel the first night, and went out for dinner in town, where we got a crash course in the twisted labyrinth of Utah’s liquor laws  (which could be a rant in and of itself).  The next morning we signed the lease for our apartment and unloaded the bare essentials we had hauled out in our cars.  Thus began our 10-day stint of suburban camping while we waited and waited, and waited still, for the movers to deliver our stuff.

Saturday, August 20, 2011

Part Two of the Drive - A Tale of One (Very Awful) City

Let's pick up right where we left off.  Tuesday morning, we woke up in Knoxville, drove for an eternity, and ended up in a place I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy:


Marathon is not an inaccurate way to describe Tuesday’s drive from Knoxville to Tulsa.  By the end, we were exhausted, dehydrated, starving, sore, and at risk for having a heart attack.  If my bowels had released at some point during the drive, it would not have been surprising.  Marathon.

The drive was just too long.  Too many hours of monotonous countryside.  Too many unexpected tolls on Oklahoma roads.  (Why would I want to pay to drive here?  You should compensate me for pain and suffering for setting foot in this wasteland!)  Too many thunderheads that I was convinced were going to turn into giant whirling funnel clouds that would head straight for my tiny little car.

We left Knoxville at 7 in the morning.  We gained an hour as we entered Central time.  Even so, it was around 8 PM when we finally checked into the motel where I thought my life was going to end.   After stopping at three other hotels where we could not stay, we finally came upon a Budget Inn that was both affordable and hospitable to Ajax.  (Sorry, no pets.  Sorry, too expensive.  Sorry, no vacancies. – Wait, what, a hotel in Tulsa is full?  Who the hell else came here voluntarily?)  We hastily paid for our room and immediately suffered buyer’s remorse as our sense of desperation for shelter waned enough for us to take in our surroundings.

Signs adorned the lobby cautioning, “No Refunds,” and “We are not responsible for anything stolen from your room or vehicle.”  I suppose those aren’t unreasonable policies, but you could tell this was just the kind of place where people might really really want and deserve a refund, and where you would probably be one of the lucky ones if you left with all the same belongings you had upon arrival.  We emerged from the lobby to a simmering asphalt wasteland.  The strip of dirty, low buildings and scabby parking lots stretched on for miles in either direction. 

Where.  The hell.  Were we?

Exhaustion and hunger were overriding any questions I had about the safety of my person or possessions, so we proceeded to our room.  The door swung open to reveal a hell-hole.  My first thought was to check the vents to make sure there wasn’t a briefcase full of money and a transponder hidden anywhere because this was clearly the kind of place where Anton Chigurh would blast open your door with a cattle stunner and kill the shit out of you because you took his drug money.

Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men

I don’t even remember if we checked for bed bugs.  By some miracle, the place must not have been infested, but bedbugs would have just been icing on this cake full of razor blades and horrors.  Andy sat down on the bed and a beetle immediately crawled up his pant leg.  I tried to wash my hands and found that only scalding hot water was available from the sink.  I peeked in the cabinet under the sink and found a half-eaten pudding cup (in addition to a dark hole that led to some abyss of plumbing and probably child-raping clowns).  If you're wondering, the pudding was chocolate.  No, I do not recall if it was Jello or Snack Pack, but in retrospect it could have just as easily been Swiss Miss or Kozy Shack.  So many questions left unanswered.

But I digress.  After 14 hours on the road, I was ready to just lay face down on what I’m sure was an unspeakably filthy comforter atop the bed and cry until I passed out.  But I had come to Tulsa for a very specific and important reason!  Tulsa was not on the way to Utah, nor was it on my list of places I ever wanted to visit, save for the fact that Danielle was forced to call it home for three years.  So I tried to rally and make arrangements to meet up with Danielle.  But then the problem resurfaced -  Where.  The hell.  Were we?  

My camera didn't have a 'hellscape' setting, so this photo doesn't accurately capture the desolation.

 In my short-sightedness, I had failed to make sure I knew where Danielle lived in relation to the city proper (if you can even call it that).  As we approached Tulsa from the south, I realized this omission and called her to find out.  South.  She lived south of the city, the very place I was driving at that moment.  As fate would have it (fate, you bitch) Andy, driving ahead of me, hit a dead zone and had awful cell reception as I tried to inform him that we needed to get off the highway and find a hotel NOW.  He thought I was telling him NORTH, keep going.  Ugh.  So we ended up somewhere north of Tulsa as we began our hotel search.  I have no idea how we ended up where we did, on the west side, in a bleak, sprawling ghetto. 

Danielle wasn’t familiar with our blighted wasteland location, so she tried to look up directions.  As fate would have it again (that trollop), computer troubles prevented Danielle from swiftly obtaining directions.  Andy and I were too tired and disgusted to venture very far from the hotel.  It was almost 8:30 by this point, and we hadn’t eaten since lunch.  On the verge of crying, screaming, slipping into a coma, or all three, I regretfully told Danielle that hanging out just wasn’t in the cards. 

Andy and I set out to find the closest possible source of food.  We found a Mexican restaurant in the half-vacant strip mall next to our motel.  They had cheap and fast margaritas that provided the only bright spot in what was one of the worst days of travel I have ever experienced.



The watered-down margaritas did little to dull the pain of returning to our room.  On the short walk back, we noted that the freegan (or more likely homeless person) digging in the dumpster behind our motel, stuffing treasures into his backpack, had moved on.  With defeat in our hearts and Mexican food-babies in our bellies, we trudged up the stairs to our room and shut the door that had no chain or deadbolt.  We brushed our teeth in the bathtub, because it had cold water.  We looked around…for the…cat?


In the next installment, we'll learn where Ajax the Intrepid ventured, and how we pulled him back from the edge of the abyss.  

Friday, August 19, 2011

How I Spent My Summer Vacation

Or, Utah:  A brain dump in as many parts as I feel like writing

Do they give out prizes for the number of times a blogger promises to write about something and then forgets or just disappears from the internet entirely?  Because if they do, I want one.  I believe I could be a serious contender for such an honor.

I’ve been gone from this interweb hovel for exactly one month today.  I’m not even going to apologize, because I’ve just been having too much fun.  If I did apologize, it would totally be passive aggressive – it would be all “Oh sorry I’ve been too busy living life to actually write about it.  Isn’t it just a crime that I’ve been acting like a responsible, real person and not a curmudgeonly hermit.”  By the way, there is a season for everything, and that curmudgeonly hermit will come crawling back to regularly blogging someday.   Someday.  (Probably in the winter when the Inversion lingers over the valley and I am, as a colleague predicted, ready to slit my wrists.) 

Let’s backpedal a bit, shall we?

The drive.  Yes, the drive.  We began our drive to Utah on July 11th, marking the third summer in a row that we have driven across almost the entire continent.  When you realize one day that it’s been blindingly sunny and 120 degrees every day for 6 months, I’m the reason.  You’re welcome for that golden tan, by the way. 

This time, we decided just spending four straight days in the car wasn’t punishing enough.  We reached the conclusion that if we really wanted to take road-tripping up a notch, it was time for the mental self-flagellation of driving alone.  (Full disclosure:  Andy had already driven across the country alone.  Twice.  In January.  So I am kind of being a huge whiner here.)  So we took separate cars.  Really, we did this to save money, because shipping a car is expensive.  Even though we had a generous moving allowance from Andy’s new job, the moving company, Allied Van Lines, if you’re curious, was giving us the run-around and trying to rip us off in ways that I may or may not remember to bitch about in an upcoming segment of this story, so we had to cut corners somewhere.

Monday, July 11th dawned bright and steamy, like every morning in New Jersey between Memorial Day and Columbus Day.  We rolled out a few minutes after our projected departure time, because saying goodbye kind of sucks.  We waved to my mom and Andy’s parents and sister as we drove away from the flat, swampy farmlands of rural South Jersey and headed for the Delaware Memorial Bridge.  I just couldn’t wait to have one last day of paying tolls and driving on 6-lane highways in gridlock traffic. 

And boy did I ever get my fill.  Somewhere in Maryland, traffic came to a dead stop.  Shoulder construction forced several lanes of traffic to merge down to merely a few lanes, and obviously asking people to take turns while driving is just beyond so the next hour or so was spent alternately creeping at 3 mph or debating whether it would be more efficient to just cut the engine, put the car in neutral, and push.

Fortunately, this truck slipped in front of Andy’s car and kept my spirits high until almost Virginia.  ‘Twas magical.



The rest of Monday’s drive was unremarkable.  We arrived in Knoxville, checked into a Super 8 where we did a quick Bed Bug/Make Sure There Are No Crevices Into Which The Cat Will Disappaear Forever inspection, and set out for Keith’s house.  He showed us around his super sweet Brady Bunch-esque house (it still kind of makes me feel old that some of my friends are home owners and that comparing utility bills and appliance efficiency is a form of stimulating conversation). 

Then we went out for dinner, which was awesome and did not contain grits, hush puppies, or anything remotely Southern – a relief for both my waistline and my colon.  Afterwards, Keith showed us around a bit of downtown Knoxville.  He took us to the giant disco ball from the 1982 World’s Fair.  Good times were had by all, but we called it a night early so we could get some rest in preparation for a marathon drive from Knoxville to Tulsa the next morning.






Marathon is not an inaccurate way to describe Tuesday’s drive from Knoxville to Tulsa.  By the end, we were exhausted, dehydrated, starving, sore, and at risk for having a heart attack.  If my bowels had released at some point during the drive, it would not have been surprising.  Marathon.  

This tale of wandering and woe will continue...tomorrow.  Seriously, it really will, because I've already written it and scheduled the post.  You can take that to the bank.