Episode Eight: The Night That Wouldn't Give Up Without A Fight, and The Fruit Incident On The Border Of California

Sometime maybe an hour later, we crossed the border into California. I spent less than 24 hours in Mountain Time, and now at least I could look at the truck's clock and say, "that's two hours too fast", so some of my time confusion was cleared up.

(Note: I'm seriously thinking of leaving that clock on Texas time, just for the Halibut... I'll put a sign over it on the dashboard: "Texas Memorial Clock" and just leave it that way... then I can share my vast sense of time confusion with everyone who rides in my truck!)

We had to go through one of those fruit checkpoints, and I realized with a shock that we ACTUALLY had fruit to declare! That was a first for me! The lady was really nice, and we laughed about it. I brought out the remnants of my Texas fruit (three apples with Washington labels, all apparently okay. Chalk up a score for the people from Washington! Your fruits are acceptable!), and Elise and I were on our way again.

I don't know the name of the place we stopped finally, but it was a rest stop almost exactly one hundred miles outside of Barstow. We pulled up and I rearranged the truck again, let back the driver seat, and Elise crawled into my lap. We slept for several hours this time.

It wasn't easy. I have no idea why this should be but there were a bunch of trucks there, none of whom seemed to want to turn off their engines. We finally slept around it, but if anyone can explain to me why a trucker would want to leave his truck running all night long, especially with the price of diesel being what it is, I'd be obliged.

At some point before dawn I woke, cold. I pulled my jacket over Elise and put on another shirt, and just as I was drifting off again, I turned my head and looked out the window. The trucks were beginning to pull out to the West, and it was weird to watch their lights disappear into the blue gloom. The sky was getting lighter towards the east, and the details of the truck stop were emerging. I fell asleep again, to my great surprise, and both Elise and I slept until after 8am.

We woke up and changed clothes - a word on that. Can you imagine what a pain it is to dress for hot weather in the morning, to be forced to change towards late afternoon because it's storming and cold, and then find yourself back in the hot high desert a few hours later? THEN to wake up freezing again in the middle of the night?? I was starting to take it personally.

Anyway, we changed, again. This time we kept our hot weather clothes, because it stayed hot. As a matter of fact, later that day when we were traveling through the central valley, it was the hottest and nastiest it had been since the whole trip started, which just reinforces my opinion of the California Central Valley as the armpit of our nation, but that's a rant for another day.

We made it through Barstow, which is the point where one gets off hwy 40 if one is desirous of reaching the bay area, and one begins the long trek up through the last of the desert towards the central valley. We said goodbye to the direction of west and started working on north instead.

It was sometime after Barstow that we happened to be passed by an SUV towing a UHaul trailer. Something caught my eye about it and I accelerated so I could take a picture of the words on the side. I'm not going to repeat them, but you can read for yourself by checking out the pictures.

I can't imagine how the heck that thing gets rented and the management doesn't notice... I don't think it's been sold because the company emblems were still all over it.

Find out what the California Department of Food and Agriculture has to say about bringing fruits and vegetables into the state!: http://www.cdfa.ca.gov/phpps/pe/transport_animals_plants.htm



Tomorrow, we enter the Central Valley, the armpit of California!

Episode Seven: The Meteor Crater, The Scary Lightning, and Really Nasty Coffee in Kingman, AZ

The desert is amazing for a few different reasons, but one of the most amazing things is that you can see forever. There are no hills in the way, no trees, no houses, at least out on the road there aren't, and you can just see everything.

Which meant that we could see the huge black clouds piling up - don't know what direction they were coming from, but they were building off of one edge of the crater when we got there, and the lightning was spectacular. The wind, I kid you not, was the strongest and scariest I'd ever experienced. We were locking up the truck when a huge gust like the hand of God came roaring past and all we could do was just huddle against the door and weather it. That happened a few more times when we were on the edge of the crater, and if you don't think it's scarier than piss standing 550 feet above nothingness with only a rail to hold on to while the wind tries to pull your child out of your hands, guess again. I held on to her so tight and was so paranoid about it that I finally had to tell her I needed HER help because I was a shaky old grandma and couldn't make it down by myself. After that she was a hoot: "Are you holding on tight, Mommy? I'll help you, Mommy, because I'm Wonderwoman and you're a shaky old grandma." I have no pride, I admit it. I milked it.

Elise wasn't afraid of the lightning or the thunder, at first. We looked up at it and thought it was cool, but as we climbed to the tallest observation deck for the crater, we could hear the ranger talking to his boss on the radio about closing the deck because the lightning was getting closer.

As soon as he said that, a chill went through my body and I took a good look around at the fact that where we were standing, we really were the tallest things around for miles and miles. Add to that the fact that, according to the ranger, we were also standing on top of a huge metal water tank buried just beneath us...

I took a few panorama pictures, but then I grabbed Elise and we got off that platform. We then hit the lower platform where there were a number of telescopes to look down into the crater. Elise really liked that and she tired out my arms by making me hold her up to look through them.

Here's some info straight from the pamphlet they gave us:

"This crater was formed by the impact of an iron-nickel meteorite impacting into the high arid plains of the Colorado Plateau about 50,000 years ago. The body, estimated to have been about 50 meters in diameter and weighing several hundred thousand metrics tons, was traveling on the order of about 15 kilometers per second and impacted with a kinetic energy of some 30-40 megatons of TNT equivalent. The result of the collision was to form, in just a second or so, a large bowl-shaped crater 1.2 kilometers across and over 150 meters deep. Nearly 100 million tons of rock was thrown out to form a continuous ejecta blanket around the crater."

We got back to the car as the first of the rain drops were hitting, and the thunder was getting to be truly awesome at that point, which is just about the moment that Elise began to realize that she was scared of thunder and lightning after all, but mostly thunder. It was really sad! She asked for my coat so she could hide under it while she was in her car seat, but of course I couldn't drive with her that way since she'd get car sick in an instant, so I got on the phone to Jeff again and here's the point where our headlong dash for home truly began. It's kind of sad, when I think back, that the meteor crater was really the end of our trip. After that, it was all pretty much a driving nightmare. For me, anyway. For Elise, it was a sleeping, feeling headachey and sick nightmare. I probably had the easier part, poor little baby.

After the rain let up a bit and Elise was able to take the coat off her head, we just started to drive.

From Gallup, NM to Flagstaff, where I stopped to try and find a cheap hotel... stupid me, hello, RESORT TOWN... cheapest hotel in town, $149... which may or may not have been bull but I decided not to try to comparison shop and we left. A little bit further down the road to Williams, AZ - 218 miles away from Gallup. Quick stop in Williams for fuel, and to change clothes because by then it was miserably cold and we were still in our shorts and t-shirts, then on for as long as I could stand it...

Sometime after Williams, we crossed over the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe line, but I only know that from looking at the map now. I had no idea then.

We made a stop of a few hours at a Truck Stop, but I can't remember where it was. I know we hadn't left Arizona next, and I think it was after Albuquerque, but other than that I couldn't say. I think we weren't more than an hour from the California border. We slept there for a bit, mostly because I had no choice. I made a pretty comfy bed out of the drivers seat, Elise put her head on my lap, and we managed to catch a few winks that way. I woke up sometime around 2am, I think... there's no way to know for sure because my time sense was so completely disarranged by that time... Texas, Central time, is two hours ahead of California and Arizona, Mountain time, is only one. My cell phone clock said one time, the clock in the truck, still set to Texas, said another, and my body was just going twelve ways from sunday trying to figure out what to do with itself... I moved the car seat to the front of the truck, which has no airbags, propped the suitcase under Elise's feet like a lounge chair, and we started driving again.

Oh, and that truckstop, wherever it was, holds one distinction that I will not soon forget: they had the worst coffee I have ever tasted in my life! I mean, the friggin' worst muddy water - as desperate as I was to stay awake, I could not bring myself to swallow it, even when it was still hot. The carafe had a sign on it: "truckers coffee". Somebody should go shake the hands of every trucker who ever kept the goods of our great country moving on such nasty stuff!!! Ay Caramba!

(In a quick note: I've just now remembered that the truck stop was just outside of Kingman, AZ - I think it was "Love's")

Click HERE to find out about the Meteor Crater


Love's Travel Plazas - Just don't drink the coffee!:



Tomorrow, California, AT LAST!!

Episode Six - The Subject of Elise's Health, and The Fact That The New Truck Has Three Gas Tanks

Elise told me when we started off that she was exhausted, and while I thought she was kidding at first, it became obvious on our way back to the car that she wasn't. She really was exhausted and was having a hard time walking. I buckled her into her seat and we went to get some lunch from the Subways at the truck stop before heading on our way.

She wouldn't eat anything, and she kept laying down on the seat next to me. I finally started to clue in, and I felt her forehead.

Which was hot as a stove.

Oh shit...

Poor, sweet kid, she never complains, she never cries or has temper tantrums, and maybe I would have clued in a whole lot sooner if she had. The stress of traveling must have been tremendous for her, and yet she just kept plugging along until she felt so bad she couldn't hide it anymore.

It was at this point that I called Jeff. We talked for a bit, and decided that it would be a good idea to just head out towards home, instead of spending a few days here and there as I had first planned. I bought some kid's tylenol (hereafter referred to as "the watermelon medicine") and got her back in the truck, where I gave her some. She was okay after that, a little slow and she still didn't want to eat, but she seemed to be feeling better.

We continued down the road, and crossed the border into Arizona. You'll see a few pictures I took through the windshield. Almost the second we crossed the border, we were inundated with signs that read something like "Chief Yellow Horse Trading Post, STOP NOW!" The first one was okay. The next twelve were monotonous.

And I had to think, that has got to be the only economic opportunitiy around. You've got great flat stretches of empty desert, and then you have a "trading post" with one hundred billboards advertising all the cool stuff you can buy there... Every 70 miles or so there's a truck stop/"travel plaza", and that's really it. If there are cities there, they're so far from the highway that you can't see them across the perfectly flat desert.

You know, somebody could make an absolute fortune putting a factory or something out there near the reservations, rather than shipping American jobs to India. There's a huge and probably very motivated workforce right there, and if an employer could work in concert with the tribal governments, who knows what they could accomplish? OR... conversely, start up a Native-owned industry (other than jewelry, blankets or knives) right there on the reservation... or am I just so monumentally simple and naive that I don't see why no one has done this before? Must be...

On with the story: when we had gotten up, the day had looked sunny and promised to be hot, but as time wore on and we got further and further along into Arizona, the weather started to worsen. Clouds gathered, the wind picked up, and I started to notice that the truck, precisely because it was so heavy, was not, therefore, particularly aerodynamic. The needle on the gas guage was dropping like a rock. We started to see flashes of lightning, and the wind was really howling.

We stopped at one of the travel plazas, and out back behind it we found these funny arrows - see the pictures - that looked like something out of the fifties. I took a few pictures - Elise loved them. I also took a picture of her in the back seat of Inny... She looks so small in that big huge truck, but you can really see what I mean about the crew cab having enough space for people. The back seat is as big as the front.

I'm going to take a moment here to describe one more thing about my truck that I'm really in love with, and that's its three gas tanks, which are arranged like this: there's a main tank and an auxiliary tank that came with the truck. There's a switch on the dashboard for switching between the two and you can do this while you're driving with the touch of a button, and the engine won't so much as stutter, which is a great feature.

Here's the REALLY cool thing - the third tank is HUGE, and it has a little pump and a switch under the dashboard. You hit the switch and fuel is pumped into the main tank. That means that, when I brew my own biodiesel, I can make up a huge batch, dump the whole thing into the three tanks, and not have to keep going back again and again.

In this instance, however, it was nice to know that I didn't have to worry about the big huge stretches of absolute nothing that filled this part of our trip. I've traveled by car enough that I have a rule, and that is, when you're in the mountains (or the desert for that matter) you don't let the tank get beneath half. The truck suits itself to this kind of traveling, and I really appreciated the sense of security I got from knowing that I could carry a thousand miles of fuel...

Anyway, on with the story. I was pretty sure at this point that we were going to have to miss the Grand Canyon, but we passed a sign that said "Meteor Crater", and the worm of rebellion flashed a fang in my soul. Elise seemed okay, and she said she was feeling pretty good, so I made the decision to stop and take a look.

Love’s Truck Stops: http://www.loves.com/

Tomorrow, The Meteor Crater and REALLY NASTY COFFEE In Kingman, AZ!!

Episode Five - Leaving Gallup

The Plight of the Modern Native American, and The Bank That Was Closed

We woke up a bit earlier this time because I didn't pull the blackout curtains shut. They had a decent breakfast downstairs, so I went down and got some coffee (really good coffee - it was the last I had all trip) and some cereal for Elise, some little muffins and little bagels... we ate and she watched "Krypto the Superdog" while I packed up.

I had a money order I wanted to cash, to have some extra money for sightseeing, so Jeff found me a Wells Fargo branch nearby and we climbed in the truck to find it.

This was an experience... The sections of town that are just off the freeway are very tourist-oriented, of course, but you don't really get the reality of things until you leave the beaten path for the areas that are NOT touristy.

Here's what we saw: Gallup has a considerable Native American population - Zuni, Hopi, Acoma, Laguna and Navajo, to name only a few - and the part of town where the Wells Fargo was located was the Native American part of town. It wasn't precisely run-down, but it didn't have the sparkly surfaces, so to speak, that the tourists saw. Everything was clean, everything was in decent repair, there was no garbage on the streets, there was one broken window that I saw, and there was a lot of scaffolding up, to paint a mural, to fix the facade of a building... and yet half the town was pawnshops/trading posts, and the buildings were all small, older 70's architecture. There were several buildings that were devoted to aid agencies, and cultural centers, and native government, but no thriving businesses, and no shoppers at all.

Here are some free associations I made that night.

It was a small downtown area, actually reminded me a lot of Niles, or some of the small towns I've visited. No dirt, no garbage, but nothing was new, nothing was busy... Lots of pawn shops (shades of a short story by Native American Writer/Genius Alexie Sherman - "What You Pawn I Will Redeem"), lots of "Indian Trading Posts"...

Disconcerting: groups of people just standing around. Not talking, not smiling, not doing anything at all, just standing around, staring... teenage boys, but also what looked like whole family groups. Young men, women, old men, kids, dads... just standing propping up the buildings, silent as ghosts. Elise and I would walk past, and they'd all find other places to look. It's not that they stopped talking when we got near - it's that they never WERE talking.

We weren't welcome, I could tell, but this wasn't a standard, "Get the hell out of our spot" look - no one even really looked at us at all. It was the looking away, the looking down, the not smiling, the "I can't/won't meet your eyes." It was a shock, and I couldn't tell if this was a cultural Navajo thing, or if it really was us. There were a few whites walking along - we weren't the only ones, and you all know me - I'm "jeans and t-shirt and Berkies", so it wasn't that we were over-dressed, or even dressed like tourists, except that there were some differences. When I wear t-shirts, I pick colorful ones with v-necks, something that at least looks a bit feminine. My impression here was that people were wearing jeans and the kinds of t-shirts with logos like "Harley-Davidson" or, oddly, "West Coast Chopper", but I can't recall a single girl who had dressed like a girl. Hair was always pulled back, men and women, there was no makeup I could recall, no jewelry... I would have to spend more time there to really understand any of what I was seeing, but I was sure that I was seeing a culture that I didn't, in any respect, understand, or even have any familiarity with. I hate to use the word "alien", but it's perhaps the best word there is. I was looking at people from another complete planet, and I didn't understand anything about them.

The last thing I noticed, as we were standing at a corner waiting for the light to turn, was a white Ford F250 regular cab. That's why I looked at it, at first, was to compare it to my new crew cab (the four-door version). I saw a young Indian man and his wife, neither one smiling or talking, just sitting staring straight ahead, with a baby carrier between them.

What was arresting about them was that, as they pulled up level with me, I looked in the window, and there, next to the mom, sitting on the floor between her feet, was a little girl of about 8 or so. All I could see was the top half of her head. She met my eyes for a second, same blank, non-smiling look. It bored clear through me to the brick wall...

At that moment, I gripped Elise's hand tighter and thought about the opportunities I'd had from my life, opportunities that the couple in the truck had never seen themselves, and had no hope of seeing for their children. I don't just mean education, though of course that's an issue in places like Gallup - God alone knows how far away the nearest community college is, or whether or not there's even a university that one can hope to attend if one is not an A+++ student with a lot of money. I mean simple things like I live in the Silicon Valley and I can choose any one of a million jobs. I may not be qualified for them, but if I want, I can go get qualified and apply, and I have the hope that I can advance, to use an odd example, from being a simple mechanic to being a Mercedes mechanic who makes six figures.

There in Gallup, the only jobs are the ones serving tourists at the trucks stops, food or gas or cleaning things... That was the thing about the truck stops all along hwy 40. When we stopped for gas or food, the people at the counters were all minorities, either Hispanic or Native American, and I DIDN'T NOTICE, not until I visited the 'native' part of town and recognized the faces.

Well. Perhaps the most sobering moment of our trip. I'm going to be thinking about Gallup, NM for a very long time.

The bank we wanted was closed - there had been some kind of parade or something going on, but at 11am, it was over and everything was cleaned up and gone, which was just so weird. I couldn't even tell that anything had happened except that there were a few people closing up stuff or taking down stuff, somebody driving off with their sno-cone maker, a horse trailer with a single pinto horse that was gone when we came back, a sign on the bank door that say, "participating in Relay - closed today". We started our walk back to the truck, which was several blocks since it had been hard to find parking.

Elise kept saying she was exhausted, and she was having a hard time walking. At first I just thought she was kidding...

Also, http://www.gallupnm.org/ for Gallup, NM

Zuni Pueblo: http://www.ashiwi.org/

Hopi Tribe: http://www.nau.edu/~hcpo-p/

All I could find on the Acoma: http://www.geocities.com/laceone2k2/acomahist.html

Good Laguna Tribe site: http://www.lagunapueblo.org/

Official Navajo Nation Website: http://www.navajo.org/

A good general site on the different pueblos: http://www.kstrom.net/isk/maps/nm/nmmap.html

Tomorrow, Elise gets sick!

Episode Four - From Amarillo, Texas, to Gallup, New Mexico

(Quarter Horse History, The Subject of Produce, and Heading Out Into the Storm)

Well well... we got up this morning, not too exhausted but definitely not fresh, either of us. We got checked out and said goodbye to the Airport Ritz, got in the truck and went to the Quarter Horse Museum. I don't think there's too much to say there - Quarter horses as a subject of history could not fill twenty pages, which translates into "there's not much with which to fill a museum". They had an outdoor arena, which implies that, on better weather days, there might be demonstrations, and that would have been fun to watch. As it was, we wandered around a sparse photo gallery - some nice artistic works but only the work of one artist, and a lot of bare space on the walls that could have been filled up a bit better. Elise got some tokens to use on the supermarket-style mechanical horses, which she really enjoyed, and there was a horse skeleton upstairs, unfortunately tucked away behind glass with a printing over it of a complete horse, so we couldn't get too much from that. There was a spot in the racing exhibit where you could climb on the back of a fake horse in a starting gate - three horses, two to sit on with a "jockey" on the horse in the middle so you could get the feel of things. Elise enjoyed that a lot, and pretended she was racing her pony Rusty...

We left with the wind blowing ferociously and I for one couldn't get George's warning out of my head: "I'm glad you're leaving when you are - we're supposed to have some interesting weather this weekend."

Brrrrr... it was not a comfortable feeling, looking up at the black clouds and fighting our way through the wind to the relative security of the new and untried Inny. The truck is huge and heavy and it was nice to shut the door on Elise, safely buckled into her seat, but I couldn't help but think about how incredibly screwed we would be if Inny died on the road. We had something like 1400 miles to travel, and I was really hoping just about then that George the salesman had been as honest as I had hoped he was. I had asked a lot of questions of diesel mechanics and relatives in the know (thanks, John, for letting me bend your ear for hours!), and from what I had learned, I was reasonably certain I had made a great buy, but still, looking up at the sky in Amarillo and watching the tops of the trees bend like toys in the wind, I had reason to fall back on my faith, and to frankly kick myself for giving in to the temptation to bring Elise...

Nothing for it. We went through a drive-thru and headed out of town. Which, oddly enough, brings me to produce.

A word here on produce. Produce, you ask? What the hell has produce got to do with anything?

I'm glad you asked. Most of you who read this will be from California, and you likely may never have experienced what it's like to live in a non-produce state. Texas is just such a place: there are cattle ranches so that you can't hardly spit but you knock into twelve of them, and everybody drives a truck with cowshit on it (well, okay, that's a stretch, but everybody DOES drive a truck - okay, ALMOST everybody). However, try to find a fresh orange. I speak from experience. While we were at Kmart, I decided to pick up some fresh fruit for snacks from the grocery store section.

What an education! Oranges the size of golf balls, blemishes all over them, and the sign said "JUMBO ORANGES, .73 CENTS EACH"! Oh my... Here in California, "jumbo oranges" are generally those oranges that are grapefruit sized or larger. Here they grow cows the size of Mack trucks, but their fruit...

Funny thought: In California, the fruits are larger than life. In Texas, it's the bull... (All deference to my gay friends.)

Anyway, heads of lettuce all brown and weird, nectarines hard and sour and nasty, no cucumbers, no jicama...

Calfornians live in a state where you can grow just about anything. Growing things is so much a part of life here that Jeff and I recently visited a plant nursery where one could buy a merlot grape plant! I was so tempted, but I'd have wanted it for table grapes and I'm not sure how tasty the merlot grape is as a table grape. My friend Ellen's kids recently discovered that they have a grape plant, red seedless, I believe, growing in their back yard! Those were some tasty grapes! Just about every house has an orange tree, and you can turn the tiniest scrap of back yard into a vegetable garden.

And in Texas, you can't even get a decent tomato on your hamburger, which is what made me think of all this. We went through a BurgerKing drive-thru, and my Whopper with cheese had a few tiny shreds of lettuce and one sad tomato slice. It was just about the grossest thing I ate all trip...

Okay, so we headed out of town. I had originally thought we'd stop in Santa Fe for the night, but then I really looked at the map and realized that Santa Fe was out of our way. Don't know why I didn't see it before. Elise was a good girl, and a great traveler, but she did get bored. At one point, she called me to look at her. I started to say that I couldn't look away from the road or I'd crash, but I glanced in the rear view mirror as I said this, to see she'd put a diaper on her head like a hat - not a real diaper, but her nightpants, so don't worry. I busted up, and took pictures by aiming the camera blindly over my shoulder. Just goes to show what happens when a smart kid gets bored.

We stopped once, at a truck stop called Cline's Corners, where we had a snack and I let Elise out to run around a bit. You'll see the pictures of her running around the truck, and at one point, she announced that she had to tell Inny a secret, so she went up to his hood and whispered to him. You'll also see a picture of some wildflower - I don't know what it was, but it was very pretty.

Note for those who haven't traveled through the Southwest: remember the song "Route 66"? Well, it's called hwy 40 now... but still, I was humming the song just about the whole trip, and you know what, it was actually helpful! I kept reminding myself what city was coming up next!

"You see Amarillo, Gallup, New Mexico... Flagstaff, Arizona, Don't forget Winona, Kingman, Barstow, San Bernadino..."

Well, we got off before San Bernadino, but the rest fit just fine.

Anyway, after talking to Jeff, I decided to keep going for Gallup. We got there kind of late, and plunked down in a decent hotel - as it turns out, mere minutes before the whole rest of the world descended on the place, so we were lucky that we got one of the last rooms.

Now, Elise had been such a great kid all day long, but here's where I should have paid better attention, because she tossed and turned all night long, which isn't normal for her.

From Amarillo, TX to Gallup, NM: 425 Miles

The Quarter Horse Museum: http://www.aqha.com/foundation/museum

Tomorrow, the Third World Life of the Modern Native American

Episode Three - The Big Texan Steak Ranch

We did, with a bit of last minute juggling, make it to dinner at the one place I really wanted to eat, and that was the Big Texas Steak Ranch.

Think of it as Disneyland for Big Eaters.

There's a giant steer outside the restaurant - I took a cute picture of Elise standing between its forelegs - and they also have a hotel where the rooms are done up like store fronts, saloons and mercantile and the lock-up, etc. They also have a free limo service, I kid you not, with older cadillac limos that will come and pick you up if you're staying at any of the local hotels. Elise LOVED the horns, a fact that I am coming to regret. She took one look at them, decked out with the ubiquitous steer horns on the hoods, and decided that Inny needs cow horns. (I'm in real trouble - several days later she's still saying it, which means she WON'T FORGET!) Everybody promise you'll still admit to knowing me if I show up at your house with cow horns on the front of my shitkicker truck!

Anyway, the Big Texas Steak Ranch is also home to the proudly proclaimed "free 72-oz steak". Here's the deal: you sit down on a stage (well, if you're insane enough to attempt this, anyway) at the front of the restaurant where everybody can see you. They give you the steak (my sister and I worked out that it has to be just shy of five pounds of beef), a shrimp cocktail, a salad and a dinner roll. You get to take a bite to be sure it's done the way you like, and then you're off, and you have one hour to finish the whole thing. I asked the waitress how many people actually accomplish this feat, and she said about one out of five, so it's a challenge even for the big boys of Texas.

So you finish this gut buster - the important qualification here is "without throwing up", and yes, they have plastic lined bins handy - and it's free, you're famous, you get cheered, blah blah blah. Some guy actually sat down to try while we were there, and Elise and I cheered him on, but we had to leave before he finished. I still wonder if he made it.

They also had a bluegrass trio, two older guys and an older gal, who wandered around the tables taking requests - it was really nice. I asked for and got a song about Amarillo, but I can't tell you what it was called since I didn't catch the title. Purty, though. Restful.

So the sky was turning black with clouds as we climbed back into the truck to head back to the hotel. We even saw a bit of lightning. Earlier that afternoon, George from the dealership said, ominously, that he was glad we would be going the next day, since there was "some pretty interesting weather forecast for the weekend." Keep in mind the Panhandle area is tornado country.

Come to think of it, I'M glad we're on our way tomorrow. I don't think I want to experience the kind of weather a Texan calls "interesting".

Addendum - 3am by my internal clock, 5am Amarillo time, June 10th, 2005

Don't know why I do this but I often wake up at this point in the night and find myself unable to sleep for three hours. Which is going to suck because that's just about the point when we should be getting up. Oh well.

Right now I'm thinking about my writing. I don't believe I'm scholar material, though I do enjoy history. I've just been going over my last final and thinking about the fact that, with that one professor, I just can't seem to rise above a "B".

A close friend studying at a certain prestigious university recently found themselves in the utterly unenviable position of rethinking their entire life after being told by a panel of examining professors that they had falied their midway exams so badly that the panel didn't even think they warranted a second chance. Which just goes so far out the other side of harsh that I am STILL filled with outrage on my friend's behalf, but my friend told me that they had already been having doubts as to whether or not this was what they wanted to do with the rest of their life anyway...

I think I have reached my own "panel of examining professors", and they have pointed out to me, through the medium of my last literature final, that I do not possess the kind of thinking (and consequently, the true desire) to distinguish myself in academia. That's really okay - I actually feel very freed by that, because what I'm doing right at this minute is so much more satisfying to me than writing research papers.

What am I doing right now? I'm writing to you, of course. I'm traveling and writing down my experiences and laughing at the astounding stuff I've encountered and mostly, I'm wanting to share Don the Bullrider and the guy who thought he could eat five pounds of steak in a sitting, and to show you the awesome blackness of a West Texas sky as Elise and I saw this last evening. I want you to see, as we did, enormous sheets of rain falling away to the north, and to know with us the entirely human desire to flee before that storm, towards the shelter of our hotel room.

'Nuff said...

The Big Texan Steak Ranch! http://www.bigtexan.com/index2.html

(NOTE: from this point on, I'm actually writing days later, from the comfort of my little office in our house. After that 3am/5am discourse, things got a bit weird, and there really was no time to write as we went.)

Tomorrow, the weather and other variables!

Episode Two - The morning as it looks from the window of an all-indoor hotel.

(Buying Inny, Kmart, Icky Fruit, and the Big Texan Steak Ranch)

Our first night was a bad night - Elise fell asleep crying for Daddy - just about broke my heart to have to tell her we were too far away to sleep with Daddy. I slept well, I suppose, for being in a strange bed, and I woke up to take a look outside. The whole time we were there, I kept looking out that window expecting to see the outside world, and I was shocked and amazed each time I didn't.

Here's the weird thing about our hotel (Airport Ritz). It had this huge, roofed-over space, so that our room did not look out onto the world, but onto the giant atrium, which had a canned, musty smell (and a feel, for that matter). It was nice, if a little weird because I'm from California where the weather NEVER gets bad enough to need to roof over stuff like that. Not too hot, not too cold, not too tornado-y... The pool was just about under our window, and when Elise woke up to go take a look outside the window, her first words were, "Mommy, the indoor pool, that pool water looks like jello..." Which made me a bit worried. A few moments further reflection produced this insight from her: "That looks kind of foggy. It's a foggy inside pool".

Okay. Anyway. I called Mr. George Jennings of Bobby Duby Motors, who had offered to come pick us up at the hotel that morning. He concluded other business and came to pick us up in the truck.

Excuse me. That requires capital letters. The Truck.

Because it took some seeing to believe, and I mean that in a good way. Everything I had wanted, or imagined I wanted, had just pulled up. It's in immaculate shape, inside and out, but for a few minor dents, which I didn't have trouble with in a '97. It's not raised, not like the monster trucks, but it's sure tall and Elise thought that was really cool. Well, so did I, but she's a little kid, she gets to go "ooh" and "aahh" and not sound silly.

I'm going to have a lot more to say about the truck later, so I'll save time now and continue on. George informed me that what I had thought were work boxes in the back behind the cab was actually a third tank with its own pump. That makes for a total of three tanks - again, a really cool thing that I'll explain later.

This seems like a good place here to talk for a moment about the people in Texas. Californians might not believe me when I say this, but Texans, for the large part, are really nice people. They aren't in a hurry - the highway has a posted speed limit of 60 miles an hour through town, but - GET THIS - there an actual sign that says "minimum speed 45"! Great ghost of Anne Richards!

At home in the Silicon Valley - and we all know that our place to live is better than anybody else's place to live, right? - back home, people just about climb over the top of your car to get around you. The whole reason Elise and I are out here in the wilds of the Texas Panhandle is that some complete and utter YOIK just had to pass everybody else. Out here I have not been passed ONCE, and I have not exactly been Ms. Dale-ette Freakin' Earnhardt in my new and unfamiliar truck. At home, people have this "how dare you interrupt my flight path" mentality, but in Texas, people (usually in other trucks, which might explain it) just sidle up behind you and moderate their speed to follow you off the freeway like decent, normal folks.

Quick aside here - I now know why I could only find my perfect F250 Crewcab Diesel 4X4 here in Texas - it's because everybody out here drives trucks, and quess what? Not a few of them have legitimate mud all over them from driving on actual dirt roads where they might conceivably have a need for their 4-wheel-drive, unlike the Silicon Valley, where, as we know, everybody has to have 4-wheel-drive, even the freakin' Lexi and the Beemers and the Mercedes SUV's, even though there are no dirt roads for a couple hundred miles in every directions. I always look at those people and think "there's an idiot who bought the commercial along with the car"...

I swear, I have actually needed my 4-wheel-drive a couple of times, and I HAVE used it!

The other astounding cultural difference? People here are actually as nice as you think they should be. The guys at the car dealership were every bit as honest as yoiu really wish your car dealer would be. (Note - several days later, at home now, and I can really say that's true - the truck performed above and beyond the call of duty). The waiters walk past your table, analyze your drink condition, and in a few seconds they're reaching past you to put a new glass on the table, causing you to jump out of your seat because you never saw it coming. Here's the sweet bit: THEY DON'TTAKE AWAY YOUR OLD DRINK JUST YET. They actualy leave it for you to finish, and then when you start on the new glass, the old glass just magically disappears.

Wowzers.

I struck up conversations with at least three people today, and they were all good, twoi-sided, satisfying types of conversations.

Well, okay, enough. You get the picture.

I had planned on taking Elise to the American Quarter Horse Museum later in the day, but we got done with the truck stuff and lunch too late. We'll stop in there on our way out of town tomorrow.

Tomorrow, the Big Texan Steak Ranch!!!

Episode One - My First Blog Post, heading to Texas to get my truck

(Just to add some perspective here - this was my first published blog entry. I'm trying to make the switch from Yahoo 360, of which I have had quite enough, to Blogger. Please bear with me while I experiment.)

So, away we go to Texas, my daughter and I, to find our perfect truck. I used to do the horse thing when I was younger, and I had a friend who was a dedicated cowgirl. She taught me the term: "shitkicker boots". Well, I bought a "shitkicker" truck.

I did a lot of panicking about this trip, primarily because I'm the granddaughter of a clinically diagonised Paranoid Schizophrenic, but also because it represented the first time I had taken my daughter traveling without my husband.

Did I mention she's four? I was doing a lot of panicking.

As it turns out, she's a great traveler - too great, because instead of throwing temper tantrums when she perhaps needed to, she just smiled and got on with enjoying everything. She didn't forewarn me that she was over-stressed, she didn't say, "Mommy, I don't feel good"... well, she DID, but not until it was way too late, but more about that later.

Anyway, on with things.

The first leg of the journey, from Oakland Airport to Las Vegas, was only eventful in that the pilot apparently thought it would be amusing to dust off his "Chuck Yeager" impression, you know, 180 degree turns, stand the plane on its wing to get to the runway, which put Mommy's stomach somewhere in the vicinity of her Medulla Oblongata... Eyewwww... I should have known enough to take my dramamine in the airport, but we had been running late and I was astounded we got there on time, so little niceties like not barfin' kind of went by the wayside.

Elise had a great time, however - this was her first plane trip and she chatted with everybody, including the guy in the seat next to her on the way to Las Vegas, who was going home to his wife and four-year old son. He noticed my hyperventilation and promptly distracted Elise, for which I am still grateful.

That was the first leg. The second, Las Vegas to Amarillo, was a LOT better - the pilot knew how to fly straight, for one thing. Still, it was sometime in the middle of that last flight when I realized I was NOT going to be doing too much more flying.

We got off the plane (my hands were shaking for hours afterward), got our stuff and waited for the hotel shuttle.

Texans sure are nice, y'all. No less than three people asked us if we needed a ride, sitting out there on a bench at midnight outside of Baggage Claim. The airport cop came out and stood with us while we waited. I made a call to the hotel, and they sent the shuttle.

Okay, so up pulls the hotel shuttle, which was driven by Don the Cowboy.

Don looked like he'd been rode hard and put away wet, fifty years ago. Here was a guy who had the long skinny body, the almost-but-not-quite-bowed legs, the lines burned into his face, the missing teeth, the white straw hair, the slouch, and best of all, the ACCENT! He was a real cowboy, and talked about doing the rodeo circuit with his brother years ago. I did NOT ask him how he got from rodeo to hotel-shuttling at 1am.

Here's his bull-riding story, reported faithfully, as I'm writing this only minutes after hearing it:

"I only ever done rode a bull once, that musta been eighteen years back, back before I become a Christian, and I was drunk at the time. That bull come outa the chute, I tell you, I sobered up right quick. Didn't never do that again."

I asked to shake his hand, which made his face light up. I guess he doesn't get enough respect now...

Which brings us to the hotel room and 1:32am local time. We're off to bed.

Amarillo Travel Guide!: Click here...

Tomorrow, the truck!

Travels with Inny - Intro

Hi there, everybody!

Elise and I recently took a trip, and being a writer, I had to... well... write about it. I thought I'd make y'all read the saga of our trip to Texas. It would help, however, if you knew some of the background.

Some of you know and some of you don't, that I was recently in a car accident. I was rear-ended while at a complete stop in traffic. My wonderful red Expedition was totalled, the car I had waited all my life to own, and Jeff and I decided not to replace it, but to use the insurance money to get something cheaper and more useful. In the picture above, you can only see that the bumper is squished. What you can't see is that the entire frame of the car is bent, and that, when standing at the back, I could reach up and touch the roof, something I had never been able to do before.

So, we decided to replace the Expedition with a pick-up truck, but I wanted a very specific type of pick-up - I wanted a '97 Ford F250 Crewcab Diesel 4X4.

I know I taxed the patience of those friends who had to listen to me wail about not finding what I was looking for, but I had good reasons, I promise! I wanted a '97 because it was the best combination of newer, and still in my price range. I wanted a Ford because every work truck I see on the road is a Ford - they're built better and they last longer - and because the only lemons I ever owned were NOT Fords. I wanted an F250 because I wanted a diesel engine (I'll explain later) and they don't make the smaller F150's with diesel engines. I wanted a crewcab because anything else is too small to be comfortable for people forced to ride in the backseat, and I prefer to be the driver when I get together with people because I get carsick so easily. I wanted a diesel because they last longer than a gas engine, get considerably better gas mileage,and because you can run them on home-brewed biodiesel, a vegetable oil derivative that's easy and cheap to make yourself, and actually better for your engine, as well as being nearly zero emission...

And I wanted a 4X4 because I have needed it in the past and I anticipate needing it in the future, and I want to own this truck for the next 15 years and love it just as much then as now.

So now you know.

I think I succeeded in finding the truck to fit the bill, but it wasn't easy. I had to go to Texas - yes I know, that sounds bizarre, but trust me, I spent months looking and I seriously couldn't find the right truck without completely compromising, which would have produced results I wouldn't have wanted to live with for the next 15 years...

BUT... In order for this to make sense, you have to understand two things:

#1) The Expedition was named after Indiana Jones by my nieces and nephews (and Stefan insisted on calling it "Dr. Jones", which earned him a special place in my heart) because we had adventures and always came home okay. Elise couldn't say the "D" in "Indy", so it came out "Inny", and so the Expedition was named "Inny".

#2) When Elise was three or so, we had to take the Expedition in to have the brakes done. This was so upsetting to her that she cried almost the whole time he was gone, because she didn't understand that we would be getting him back. When I had the accident and knew Inny was going to go away for good, I told her that Inny had to leave his old body because it didn't work anymore, just like Babs our old cat had left her body to go to heaven. I told her that car spirits, unlike cats, don't have to go to heaven unless they want to, and that we had to buy a new body for Inny the car spirit to live in. This is why the Expedition was Inny AND the truck became Inny. It's succession thing... The king is dead, long live the king.

So, after finding the right truck, I had to go to Amarillo, TX, to get it. This is a journal of that trip, which I took with Elise, and some of the things that happened along the way.

Tomorrow, Episode One - "A New Hope"!