The is nothing quite as exciting as a long driving trip. Hitting the highway, leaving behind the cares or the life of one place, and driving off into the landscape. This may also be a little stressful, with some fears of breakdowns, bad restaurants or motels, finding gas stations, bad weather, etc. I drove to British Columbia and back with my parents in 1959, and to Yellowstone and back with them a few years earlier. The British Columbia trip I remember rather well, the Yellowstone one dimly. The following maps are the longest trips I've been on as an adult, usually involving moves, principally back and forth to Texas from Los Angeles. By then I had travelled quite a bit by others means, living in New Mexico (back and forth by plane, train, and bus) and Lebanon, seeing a good part of Middle East, with a long trek back to London from Beirut. I've detailed this elsewhere.

The original long drive here was moving to Texas in 1975. This was actually all the way from Hawai'i with my first wife, Gaye. The first part of that, of course, was not by car. It did involve some subsidiary trips. Before leaving Hawai'i we flew to Maui and the Big Island of Hawai'i, and drove around them a bit. In California, we bought a car, a 1965 Volkswagen Squareback, and drove around California, staying with my cousin Jaci in Hanford, California, going to the Sequoia National Park, which I (let alone Gaye) had never seen, and then driving up to Berkeley to visit one of Gaye's aunts.

Then, loading up the Squareback, we set off on our heroic drive. Before leaving Honolulu, the boss where Gaye had been working for a while gave her a plexiglass clock, with a volcano and some other symbols of Hawai'i and Texas and "Hawaii to Texas" spelled out in gold plexiglass letters. It was very nice, but I think I only have one small image of it, on a shelf in our apartment in Austin.

The trip was planned to combine travel, tourism, and visiting. An easy leg from LA was to stay with my aunt and uncle, Lorraine and Dan, in Lancaster, then we hit the road in earnest for Las Vegas, to stay with my cousin Linda. We were only there one night, but did get out to a show, which I think was at the Frontier. Linda's husband also threw himself into some engine work on the car for us. The selenoid, which engaged the starter to the fly wheel, had been sticking. It had been possible to free it with a whack from a screw-driver handle, but he got wound up about buying a new selenoid and installing it. So he did. Very nice. The next day we drove to Flagstaff. The last time I had been in Flagstaff was on a train in 1967, when the whole city was buried by several feet of snow. I was curious what the train station looked like without drifts of snow taller than a man. Well, a lot different than it did in August 1975. My original idea about staying in Flagstaff was that we could make a sidetrip to the Grand Canyon. I did not realize, howver, how far the Canyon was, and that an extra day was really necessary for such a trip. So that was postponed -- all the way, as it happened, until 2003. While Flagstaff was nice, the cold at altitude that night affected our battery, and we had to roll the car down the street to get it started. But we got going and then stopped for breakfast in Winslow, which I wanted to see because of the Eagle's song "Take It Easy," which has the line "standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona." We got into Albuquerque that day, which I had left in 1968 and wanted to revisit. I didn't know at the time that a friend of mine I had been with in Beirut, Craig Nettleton, had moved from Minnesota to New Mexico and was living nearby. So Gaye and I were just on our own. From there we headed down to Alamogordo, where my aunt Jeannie and uncle Norman lived in a mobile home in the desert. This was actually near Tularosa, which is a few miles north of Alamogordo. We laid over there for three nights and saw some of the area, where I had been in 1962 visiting Lorraine and Dan (again), when Dan had been stationed at Holloman Airforce Base. This meant White Sands National Monument, of course, the town of Lincoln where Billy the Kid shot his way out of jail, and a solar telescope in the Sacramento Mountains south of Cloudcroft. We had still been having trouble with the car, and bought a new battery. But there was something else wrong. The heads, of where there are two on the sides of a Volkswagen engine, had come loose. This called for a major repair, but the car actually made it all the way to Austin.

Norman showed me his brand new hand held calculator with red LED display. This was the new thing, and very fascinating. But I didn't expect I could afford one at the time. After a while in Austin, I sank $40 to buy one. Now, of course, they are more or less a dime a dozen, with solar powered LCD displays. From Alamogordo we drove over the mountains to Carlsbad to visit the Caverns, the only time I've seen them. The Sacramento Mountains would become very familiar to me as the eastern flank of the Rockies. From there east, the land is flat all the way to the Ozarks or the Appalachians -- which do not compare as mountains even to the Sacramentos. When we rose at dawn in Carlsbad and hit the road for Texas, it was a day of heavy portent -- not unlike the humid air that closed around us as mile after mile of Interstate 10 passed by. Hawai'i is humid, but not as hot and still as Austin in August. It was pretty bad, and we treasured the air conditioning at the Austin Motel (still there, by the way) on South Congress Ave.

Four years later, with Gaye and I long separated, I was packing up to move back to LA. I had lived the same place all those years and had quite a few boxes of books and a trunk to send back. Even then many things, like furniture, had to be dispersed. The Squareback filled up again.

A couple of days before leaving, while I was in a drunken croquet game at a party with my neighbors, I had a muscle spasm in my lower back. This literally put me down. One of my neighbors knew a chiropractor, who was willing to see me in a Sunday, the next day. His advice was (1) lie down, (2) don't sit, and (3) especially, don't drive. So I immediately drove to San Angelo, to lie down at Helga Hill's place. She was an old neighbor in Deep Eddy and was having her birthday party. I was in some pain but enjoyed it. Then I drove to Alamogordo, partially along the route (through Ft. Stockton, Pecos, and Carlsbad) that Gaye and I had taken almost four years earlier.

Back at Jeannie and Norman's, I could lie on my back for three days. That fixed my back (for the time being). Then I moved on to Albquerque, where I had meanwhile learned that Craig was living. I had flown in and visited him and his first wife a number of times in the meantime. Unfortunately, Craig and his wife had just separated. He was a bit despondent and was drinking a good deal in the evening. This ended up adding something to my life. Craig mixed Manhattans, before moving on to straight Bourbon, and I rather liked them. I still drink them. We also did some other activities. The most memorable was hiking up to Sandia Crest, at 10,678 ft. A demanding hike, though Craig's companions kept ribbing him that we were using the "easy" La Luz Trail. Well, 10,000 ft. is 10,000 ft., especially when I had been living nearly a Sea Level for years.

I drove on in to LA in one day. I had intended to spend the night in Flagstaff, but I got there by lunchtime. I ate at the Bob's Big Boy, which is no longer there. So I figured I might as well go on to Kingman. It was only mid-afternoon when I got there, so I figured I might as way go on into LA. The only real problem was getting gas in Barstow. California had gas rationing, and I had to wait in a line (thanks to Governor Jerry Brown). Very annoying. But it was still light when I rolled into the San Fernando Valley. Turned out to be the very day that John Wayne died.

After the summer in LA, I headed back to Texas, with somewhat of a lighter load. This involved an unusual stop in Arizona, a State where I didn't have any friends or relatives and so only stayed overnight at motels. A friend of Craig's I had met in Albuquerque in June lived in Prescott with his girlfriend. I arranged to stop off at their place. A quite nice interlude.

This resulted in a drive through parts of Arizona I had not seen before, up to Prescott itself and then through Jerome and Sedona to Flagstaff the next day. After another visit in Albuquerque, I headed down to Alamogordo again. The route I picked was over US 380 to Carrizozo, a road I later learned passed quite near Trinity Site, which itself I would visit in 1997. The dirt road from near Tularosa to my aunt and uncle's place crossed an arroyo just a few hundred feet from their driveway. When I arrived at the crossing on August 13th, there had been a heavy rain. Not only was the bottom of the arroyo deep in mud, but a County worker with a tractor, whose job was to clean up the road, had gotten stuck there. He asked me if I could call the County to get someone to come get him out. There was another route into my aunt and uncle's place, so I went around that way. We could call the County from there. But my aunt warned me that much more rain, and the alternative route in could get washed out also. I could get stuck there. So I decided to go on to San Angelo that day. A rather longer drive than I had anticipated that morning, but it wasn't much after dark when I got in. From there it was a pleasant Hill Country drive into Austin.

Near the end of the Fall Semester in Austin, my father back in Los Angeles had a mild heart attack. I was also thinking that I wasn't getting much work done on my dissertation in Austin. I had spent much of the Fall writing a paper about Mahâtmâ Gandhi. So I got ready to drive back and spent some time in LA.

This drive only took four days, but I still liked staying with friends. My aunt was juggling relatives at the time, so I drove straight from San Angelo to Albuquerque, by way of Lubbock and Clovis, places I have never seen otherwise. From Albququerque, I drove down I-25 and I-10 to Lordsburg, whence I turned off onto the scenic route of US 60 through Safford, Miami, and Apache Junction, Arizona. December, however, is not the best month for scenic driving, and it was quite dark by the time I got to Phoenix. I went through Mesa on the way in, and was astonished how much the place had grown since I was there in 1970. I gather it has continued growing since. I spent the night at a motel, left early, and got into LA by noon.

I was in Los Angeles all of 1980. Sadly, my father died that May. By the Fall, my mother was able to get away on her first trip to Europe. Afterwards, my cousin Cheryl was driving in from Denver for the holidays and suggested that we get together and drive up to Mt. St. Helens, which had erupted May 18th. That sounded good. I flew up to Sacramento, and she picked me up at the airport, having left Winnemucca, Nevada, that morning. We spent the night with her aunt and uncle, unrelated to me, in Colusa, north of Sacramento. From there we drove up through the Sierra, to Mt. Lassen, down around Mt. Shasta, and then up for the night to Klamath, Oregon. The next morning we drove back into California to the Lava Beds National Monument, where Captain Jack of the Modoc Indians held off the U.S. Army. We even explored some lava tubes, which I have not otherwise seen outside of Hawai'i. From there we drove all the way to Crater Lake, which was closed to tourists and buried under snow. That was remarkable in its own right. Well after dark, we got into Bend, Oregon, for the night. The next day we drove into Portland to stay with my cousin Jo. From there we made our excursion to Mt. St. Helens. The whole area, of course, was still closed off. Our only hope was to get close enough at some point that we could even see the mountain. This we were able to do by driving up on the south side, which had not been devastated by the eruption, which was directed north.

On the way back we first drove down to Eureka. This involved some exciting driving on US 101 in the dark and the rain. With trucks going by trailing walls of mist, the road was often only visible because of the new reflective buttons that had been installed on the center stripe. Now, I was originally unable to precisely date this trip because I apparently didn't note anything about it on my calendars. However, I did know an event for the night we were in Eureka. The television season that year had been delayed because of a strike, and that night was one of the first shows of the new season of the television series Dallas:  the memorable show where we found out Who Shot J.R. (Mary Crosby). That show was aired on November 21, 1980 (a Dallas website has the dates of all the shows), so that serves to determine all the dates of the trip. We needed to be back in LA before Thanksgiving.

From Eureka we spent a very long day coming down US 101 and then California 1 through Ft. Bragg to Bodega Bay (of The Birds fame). The coast road was long, narrow, and winding. We were very tired by the time we got to Bodega Bay, and Cheryl's dog, Scotch, a miniature collie, who had travelled very well all the way, got sick in the car. But we pressed on inland, all the way back to Colusa. We laid over there and took a day to go into San Francisco -- the last time I remember visiting there when it was easy to ride the cable cars -- now you can no longer just jump on in between stops. But we weren't done yet. From Colusa we drove all the way down to Big Sur, which neither of us had seen, and then over the mountains into the Salinas Valley, over the next mountains to Hanford, where Cheryl's sister Jaci (with husband and children) lived. After a nice night there, we came the rest of the way into LA.

That year, on Labor Day, my 1965 Volkswagen Squareback had gotten rearended and totalled. I flew back to Austin after Christmas and then bought a new car that January, the 1972 Volkswagen Beetle, Yoda, that I still own. This was the year, 1981, of the Memorial Day Flood in Austin. Shortly afterwards, I hit the road for my most ambitious driving trip to date. My friend Helga no longer lived in San Angelo, so I headed for Dallas, where an old officemate from Honolulu, Bob Queyrouze, had relocated -- stopping off at the Texas Rangers Hall of Fame in Waco on the way.

After a nice visit in Dallas, I drove across north Texas, through Childress and Amarillo, to Albquerque. The High Plains thereabouts looked different from other parts of Texas I knew. And the Red River actually was red. I got off to a rocky start, however, getting a flat tire on the freeway in Dallas, in the dark and the rain early in the morning. Although it seemed dangerous and annoying (especially with the spare buried in the trunk under my stuff), I had had good practice in changing tires on Volkswagens, and later in the morning I stopped off to get the flat fixed. That day took 13 hours, which seemed at the time about the longest straight drive through I had done by myself.

Once in Abulquerque with Craig and his new girlfriend, I got to go along on a trip out to Cuba, New Mexico, to visit our old friend from Beirut days, Alan Campbell, who was working as a paramedic there. With Alan and his girlfriend, we visited Chaco Canyon, the only time I've been there. There had been plague in the area, and Alan was actually taken a strong antibiotic because he had been exposed to pneumonic plague from a guy who later died in Gallup.

After all this excitment, I drove up to Cheryl's own place in Denver. After touring around Denver, which I had not seen before, together we drove up to our aunt and uncle's in the Black Hills of South Dakota. This was quite a trip in its own right, seeing Mt. Rushmore, etc. After returning to Denver, I headed back to Albuquerque, this time along the scenic route up the Arkansas River, to the Great Sand Dunes National Monument, and through Taos, which I hadn't seen before (or since). A brief layover with Craig, and I drove down through Socorro and the valley of the VLA (the Very Large Array radio telescope), Show Low and Payson, Arizona, and then down to Phoenix. I was going to spend the night there, and it was sure hot, 110^o. Unfortunately, the motels in the central city were all full with several conventions. After hunting around a bit, I decided to drive on in to LA. Without air conditioning, I poured water from gallon jugs onto paper towels to wipe off my face and arms. I was in Blythe by dark and LA by midnight.

After the summer and the fall in Los Angeles, I was ready to head back to Austin for the Spring. This was going to be a no frills drive, more or less straight through, though with a stop in Alamogordo. I was going to try and get there in one day, but Yoda had diferent ideas. I noticed an unusual oil leak before leaving. By the time I got to Blythe, the leak was clearly into the clutch from the engine, and the clutch was slipping. Fortunately, there was a guy at the gas station in Blythe, Nacho, who was eager to fix it -- with the help of the VW service manuels. He actually did, though it look from 10 in the morning until 6 in the evening. While he was working, I checked into a Motel 6, where the heat didn't work (it was December) and the people at the desk didn't seem too concerned about it. So when the car was ready, I drove on in to Phoenix and stayed at a nice Roadway Inn near the airport. The next day was an easy drive to Alamogordo.

For the leg on into Austin, I took a slightly different route, over the mountains to Roswell, then down through Abilene and Brownwood, to come down into Austin on US 183.

That semester I had a teaching job twice a week in San Antonio and spent considerable time on I-35, sometimes in ice storms -- it was a very cold winter, down to 12^o in Austin that January. This would be the last stay in Austin, since I wasn't getting enough done working at other things. Poverty in LA to finish the dissertation would be worth it.

Another no frills drive, through Alamogordo again, and off to another rocky start. Straight through by way of San Angelo and Hobbs, New Mexico, but this time the generator bearing burned out in Artesian, New Mexico. Fortunately, the engine didn't actually freeze up until I pulled into a gas station. Although the closest AAA towing was in Clovis, the guys in the gas station said there was a local guy who worked on Volkswagens. He towed Yoda and dropped me off at a motel, which turned out to be owned by people from India, the first time I had heard of that phenomenon. I got a discount by paying him in cash, off the books I suspect, and he installed another generator. Not a new one, but it did last a year or so.

At my aunt and uncle's, I noticed that a glass of iced tea, sitting on the wooden arm of a chair, left no water whatsoever on the surface. So different from Texas.

I woke up at 4:30 on the morning of May 20 and drove all the way to LA, by way of I-8 and San Diego. I ate sandwiches that my aunt had made, and only stopped for gas. It took about 16 hours, but it was still light when I got in. That was the last time Yoda would be out of California for a good while.

Over the next few years, I went along on a couple of one way drives. In 1983 I flew to my cousin Cheryl's in Denver. Landed in the middle of a blizzard. It took Cheryl three tries to get up her driveway through the snow into her garage, and we were snowed in for a day. Pretty nice, actually. She was going to do her annual drive to LA again, and along the way we could see scenic parts of Utah, where I had never been before. This included nights at Moab, near Arches National Park, and Mt. Carmel, just east of Zion National Park. The most awesome part was actually driving across the Colorado River through the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area. The next day was the first time I had been through Las Vegas since '75, but we didn't stop. There had still been a lot of snow on the highway in Colorado, and the last ice didn't fall out of the wheel wells until we stopped for lunch west of Barstow.

I had been flying back to Austin every year to consult with my dissertation advisor, Doug Browning, and visit. I finally finished and graduated in '85, but then went back for another visit by hitching a ride one way with my aunt Lorraine and my uncle Dan, who was going to one of his World War II fighter squadron reunions in Houston.

This was another no frills trip, but in an airconditioned Cadillac. The first day we actually had an easy drive to Phoenix, staying at the very same Roadway Inn I had used in 1981. The second leg stuck to I-10, and we stayed in Van Horn, Texas, in an area I had actually missed all the years of driving back and forth. The way into Austin, on I-10 and US 290, was a route I hadn't been over completely since the original trip to Austin in 1975. The humidity increased steadily along the way, of course, but it was not noticeable until we got out of the car in Austin. My aunt could hardly believe how oppressive it was, but she hadn't been in Texas in quite a while.

My life changed quite a bit when I finally got a job, after some time on the beach, in 1987. With my new girlfriend and then wife, Jackie, we travelled quite a bit, partly by driving, but mainly by flying places, including Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, and Japan. That could involve local driving, even all around New Mexico from Albuquerque to Alamogordo and Santa Fe, but none of the really long drives I had engaged in earlier.

When Jackie finished her dissertation and got her job at Princeton, we began travelling on the East Coast. This included a couple of fairly long drives, one from Niagara Falls to Princeton and Princeton to Burlington, Vermont, that both took about ten hours. Otherwise, the distances were more moderate. On the West Coast, we drove to Big Sur and San Francisco for our honeymoon and then, for various anniversaries, to Las Vegas, Lake Tahoe, the Grand Canyon, and other locations. We also took trips to Death Valley and San Diego.

By 2003 it had been a very long time, more than 20 years, since I had done one of the really long drives, let alone done one by myself. Since I am beginning to plan for my retirement, when I can move back to Princeton, and I had a storage space full of stuff that I couldn't even get to, I began to think it might be fun, and useful, to vacate the space and move most or all of that stuff back right away. Books on shelves in New Jersey would actually be more accessible than books buried in boxes in storage.

So I rented a U-Haul truck. Providentially, my cousin Guy and his girlfriend offered to help load the truck. Without them, I think the job would have taken a whole day and perhaps destroyed me. As it was, it only took part of a morning, exhausting me and tearing some skin off a thumb, but limiting the trauma. That afternoon, I loaded some stuff from the house and garage, including things my friend Marc had left in the hope I could drive them to Atlanta for him. Driving around on these errands familiarized me with the truck. I had had no experience with such driving. The truck handled and accelerated very nicely. The main problem was getting used to the huge blind spot and learning to use the mirrors. It would take a while to be at all confident about that. And there was also the problem of just developing a sense of how large the truck was, for maneuvering and parking. This was a challenge, and I am still more or less surprising that I never hit anything along the way.

The trip was not going to be purely utilitarian. I not only wanted to visit friends but to revisit the past. My aunt and uncle in Alamogordo, high and dry, had meanwhile moved to Puget Sound, low and wet. They wanted a change, and that will do it. But I was still going to swing down to Austin, largely by the route that Gaye and I had taken in 1975.

The first day I was going to shake down just by driving to Kingman, Arizona. Leaving early in the afternoon, I did get slowed by heavy traffic on I-210 and I-15 in the Cajon Pass. I got gas and ate in Needles, and then found a Motel 6 in Kingman. This one seemed rather nicer than the Motel 6 I had experienced in Blythe in 1981. Awaking around 5 AM, I hit the road straightaway. Breakfast was in Winslow, as it had been in 1975. The place Gaye and I ate, however, was no more, and I had to go downtown. But I did find a nice restaurant there and even bought a "Standing on a Corner in Winslow, Arizona" T-shirt. I was driving through Albquerque by midday, through because now my friend Craig and his wife were living up above La Tijeras, where I-40 passes between the two ridges of the Sandia Mountains just east of Albuquerque. My layover there was deliberately on the weekend, but it was too clever by half to be on a Sunday, since almost all the restaurants in Santa Fe are closed on Sunday. We went anyway, and ate at the Cowgirl Cafe, which was great.

I was expecting a very long drive from Albququerque to Austin, but it actually only took 12 hours, and I got in well before dark. I had stayed a number of times at the Hyatt on Town Lake, and I went there again. It wasn't long before I was eating dinner (chicken fried steak, mashed potatoes, and black-eyed peas) with my friend Robert at Threadgill's on North Lamar. Unfortunately, since I was only laying over for one day, I couldn't do nearly as much visiting and eating as I would have liked. But it would have to do.

I did realize that one advantage of staying at a hotel or motel, rather than with friends, is that it is easier to get up and get away. I woke up about 5 AM again in Austin, expecting a long day. I had originally thought about spending the night at Vicksburg, but since it was only about midday by the time I got there, I decided to push through all the way to Atlanta. This ended up taking 15 hours. I didn't even stop to eat, snacking on bananas I had bought in Albuquerque and cinnamon rolls from the Little Czech Stop along I-35 in Texas. To drink I had Gatorade all the way from Los Angeles. Driving across the Deep South for the first time, outside the cities, I seemed to be seeing nothing but forest. Forest all the way from East Texas to Atlanta. Not exactly what I expected, but then I hadn't known what to expect. It was nice I did have airconditioning. It was dark and raining by the time I got to Atlanta and had a wild ride around the Beltway in heavy traffic. My friends Marc and Cathy were in Alpharata, a bit north of the city. I had not visited them there since 1984, when I flew in after my dissertation defense.

Unloading Marc's stuff and laying over a day again, the sightseeing was limited and the visiting the main thing. Fortunately, Marc was heading for the airport the next day, so it was less of a problem getting away early than it might have been otherwise. At that point, I was expecting to go the distance to New Jersey. This ended up taking 15.5 hours, with an unknown amount of that absorbed by Rush Hour traffic in Washington, D.C., which I happened to hit at the worst time of day. Up till then the drive had been largely relaxing. I stopped for breakfast in Spartanburg, South Carolina, and lunch right inside Virginia. After dark, the drive was a little more stressful. I-95 goes up through Delaware and Philadelphia. Getting near Wilmington, Delaware, however, there was some freeway notice that I-95 was closed and there was a detour. I was thinking that this meant in Philadelphia, which apparently was not the case, but in any case, in the dark, I was not going to be able to read the roadmap to see what this was all about. Fortunately, there is a bridge south of Wilmington that crosses over to New Jersey at the beginning of I-295. I knew exactly where I-295 went, all the way to US 1 in Trenton, so I went that way. It was a good little way, with roadwork messing things up a bit, but I knew the US 1 offramp well when I got to it. It was an easy and familiar drive from there home, to the gravel on our driveway that I had had delivered myself.

Twenty years since my last long drive, this was altogether something different -- a drive right across the country, the LA River to the Delaware River. It was not bad at all. I had never had a problem with drowsiness on long drives. The only time I had ever experienced it was early in the morning. Later I would be wide awake no matter how long I went. Unwinding enough to fall asleep later tended to be the problem. My experience was similar this time. The cab of the truck was comfortable. It also helped that the 55 MPH speed limit was gone. Instead of pushing 60 on I-10, the speed limit there now was 75. Everyone was moving around 80. That sure added up. Even I-20 had a 70 MPH limit. Things only slowed down when I hit D.C. The next time, when I finally move back East, I think I'll avoid that city.

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Copyright (c) 2004 Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D., Postumus Friesianorum, All Rights Reserved