Adventioneering

My much anticipated move to the PST is 97% complete.

Day 1: Picked up Alex from his redeye at Logan on Friday morning, shuffled cars and headed west.  Having been on a cross-country trip in September of last year (albeit with little sightseeing), my goals were distinctly different.  I had much less interest in stopping to see roadside attractions and much more of an interest in just getting there.

I set out with no particular mileage or city goals, although I had eyeballed 4 days with an extra day cushion in case of unforeseeable troubles.  I don’t like to jinx trips like this by using a Plan For Sun, Need Sun mentality. In retrospect, I think this worked well since we had no existing hotel reservations that would force us to drive when tired, or else stop prematurely.  I also didn’t lament passing through places like Coeur d’Alene at night since I had already seen them.

One of my biggest worries was the impact of my recent wheel balancing troubles and what other problems it might hide, or aggravate over long distances.  I kept having these images of the shimmy finding its groove, causing my car to drop an axle, or something ridiculous like that, and we’d be standing on the side of the road with Alex giving me a dirty look.

My initial worries about unbalanced tires  paled in comparison to the issues caused my the fact that my summer tires are wider than the stock ones and are prone to rubbing against the wheel wells.  With the Subi packed with all my heavy stuff, it was riding extra low and every dip and bump in the road pared off precious rubber.

We got to Wilkes-Barre, PA where I gave up and decided to ship some of the weight.  It’s amazing how I ceased to be concerned about the breakability of everything in those boxes the instant we pulled into the parking lot of the UPS Store.

Offloading 200lbs of stuff didn’t erase the problem, but gave us a little more wiggle room and gained us some forgiveness from my coils.  Even so, I threw up a prayer to the tire deities at Tire Rack when we passed by in hopes of securing a safe trip.  Later on, in the mountain passes and long sweeping turns, everything felt smooth and steady and I remembered why I like my car.

The rest of that day was pretty uneventful other than the fact that I was shamed into eating healthier when I ordered some butter-soaked, cheese and bacon-filled grilled creation with fries on the side while he ordered the smallest sandwich known to man and a fruit cup.  My cheesy bacon was delicious, for the record.

I observed that a healthy food roadtrip is nearly impossible unless you bring food with you, or only eat in large towns.  McDonald’s, Perkins, Denny’s and Arby’s have I-90 pretty well-covered.  This is great for me, since I love the fast food, but it’s not great for my chub.

Day 1 endpoint: Chesterton, IN

Day 2: Western Ohio and Indiana are really the first places you hit on I-90 that *really* don’t look like Boston, or anywhere in New England.  I don’t remember much of the trip in September other than brief snapshots and it’s difficult for me to remember which things were in which states since it mostly looks like coastal, rolling hills, plains or mountains.  I will say this though, South Dakota has a  bigger sky to me than Montana.  The part that we drove through is flat, nearly curvature of the earth flat.

I’m not sure how it worked out like this, but Alex got most of the technical driving:  sideways monsoons at night with crazy lightning storms, mountain passes in the rain at night after being blinded by work lights, and thick fog a few hours outside of Seattle.  It was almost like clockwork, we’d have a balmy sunny day, I hand him the keys and what do you know?  Ominous clouds in the distance.  Given my poor eyesight I, for one, was glad that he was driving.

I didn’t get a chance to stop at Wall Drug that last time, since all we could do was a slow drive-by to take a photo, and had every intention of stopping this time.  But it was closed .  To be honest, I was a little surprised that they would close the only oasis for hundreds of miles.  There are signs advertising its existence as soon as you hit the border of South Dakota.  All of that anticipation for naught.

Our goal of Sturgis was interrupted by the fact that the hotels were booked, so we detoured to Deadwood through a great stretch of curvy road (mental note to return here with a motorcycle) and woke the night manager.  Deadwood, used to be a gold rush town but has turned itself into a reasonably well-curated western town that features casinos in nearly every building and your choice of wolf moon apparel.  Deadwood was dead and so were we but it seemed wrong somehow to go to bed without at least going to the bar first in this town.  We grabbed two Jacks on the rocks while admiring the antler decorations and then hit the sack.

Day 3: Started out late due to Failberry but walked outside to a cute, photo-friendly town.  It was so clean I couldn’t decide if it was artificial.  My luck dictated that my battery run out before I was finished taking photos, but it was pleasant to walk around (i.e. !drive).  We didn’t hit the road until nearly 11am.

Crossing bits of Wyoming and Idaho inevitably got us thinking about owning ranch land and what life might be like.  For my part, it boiled down to that fact that I’d like to go camping in the very near future.  After bouts of rain, we saw a spectacular sunset where the sky and mountains looked like they were on fire.  We also stopped on the side of the road, as far away from the lights as we could get and stared up at the Milky Way for as long as we could stand, given that it was cold, windy and pissing rain.  Still, I haven’t seen that many stars that clearly in a *very* long time.  Too long.

Invigorated for the final push to Seattle, we made pretty good time.  I tried my best to stay awake while Alex drove, out of empathy.  We stopped at Snoqualmie Falls on our way into town and the falls were roaring.  We pulled into Redmond around 3:30am or so.  Epic.