To San Francisco, Part 2

It was pouring rain by the time I made the short trek down to the American falls. It felt good to do a little bit of walking around, after the sedentary past few days. I took a few pictures, then reluctantly hopped back into the car again. I stopped and chatted with a gas station clerk on my way out of town. She was in her mid-thirties, and had that tough-as-leather outdoorsy look, but was pretty enough for all that. She assured me that it was not usually this cold or this rainy up here.

"My first time up here," I confided in her, as if my nearly incandescent aura of 'tourist' was not already blinding her. I asked her if she liked living here.

She smiled. "Well, I feel like I've got the best of both worlds," she told me. She spoke with a touch of the northern Minnesooouta accent, but it was very subtle. "I live in the city and camp in the country."

I told her I had just come up from the Falls, and she told me all about the really cool things you can do at the Falls that I'd had no idea about: they shine lights on them at night, which is supposedly pretty incredible, and you can take a little ship down to the base of the falls, and it seems like you're brushing right up against the edge of the water.

"Well, I'm headed out today, so I guess I won't have the chance to do that," I said.

She smiled again. "Maybe next time you come by."

Well, who knows? Maybe someday.

The drive across the border into Canada was hassle-free (I celebrated July 4th by leaving the country...I'm so patriotic!), and I made good time along the QEW (which, I'm told, stands for Queen Elizabeth Way...the Canadian equivalent of the Interstate) across lower Ontario. It was grey and rainy outside, and I hadn't planned to do anything in Canada except cut across it, so the only time I stopped was for a brief snack at a very lonely convenience store about halfway across. I bought a sandwich, a small bottle of maple syrup for my brother, and possibly the best yogurt I've ever had. It was fresh, and had nuts and fruit in it. It tasted like heaven.



I got stopped by customs at the border. The border guard looked at my car, packed full of all my belongings, with a suspicious eye. He stared at my passport for a while. He was a thick-set, thick-witted man with close-set, squinty eyes.

He peered at me, frowning. "You Greek?" he demanded.

"Um..." I wasn't sure what to make of his question. "I'm a quarter Greek. My grandpa was Greek."

He scowled. "Oh."

After another couple of minutes of hostile squinting directed alternately at my car and my passport, during which I wondered why U.S. customs was so much slower and more irritating than their Canadian counterparts, he told me they'd need to inspect my car. "Just a random check," he assured me, unhelpfully, and I stopped my car and went inside the inspection post. The customs official who ended up looking through my car was a good-natured older guy from Mobile, Alabama, and he seemed delighted when he discovered I was from Georgia. He left to rummage through my belongings.

When he came back, he handed me my keys with a smirk. "Nice machete," he remarked, grinning.

I left, and made it the rest of the way to Detroit without further incident. I noticed that there are 'INJURE OR KILL A HIGHWAY WORKER - $7500 FINE AND 15 YEARS' signs posted all over the Michigan freeways, which seems a little draconian. I wonder if that even applies if it's just an accident. After a bit of confusion with the strange road numbering system there (am I on 12 mile road? or 13 mile road?), I pulled up to James's tall, skinny townhouse in Novi, a boring, upper-middle-class-ish suburb of Detroit.

Brats, burgers, and miscellaneous grilling sundries in hand, me, James, and James's roommate Jason drove over to the park to grill out for July 4th. We were hauling out all the stuff when James announced that we'd forgotten no less than 10 different things. When we got back, we all stood awkwardly around the grill and it dawned on us that none of us knew what in the hell we were doing.

"I've been having some trouble keeping the coals lit," Jason was saying, poking at the weakly smouldering coals.

Neither of us knew what to do about that, so Jason continued, "But I did use to be sort of a pyro, so..." He smiled and sprayed lighter fluid all over the coals, grinning a manic grin as they burst into flames.

James looked skeptical. "Are you supposed to use that much lighter fluid?"

"I'm pretty sure you're not supposed to," I volunteered, watching with concern as Jason continued to drench the coals in lighter fluid with a big, vaguely disturbing smile on his face.

In the end, James and I swallowed our pride and went over to ask nearby July 4th revelers how to keep the fire going. A highly competent old Russian man who spoke almost no English deftly got our coals going and showed us how to do it. Afterward, we went over to the lake to watch the fireworks. I don't think I've ever a body of water that size that calm before, or fireworks that lame before. We decided we'd either missed the big show (which didn't make sense), or that Novi just had really low standards for fireworks.



James had the whole week of July 4th off, so the three of us spent the next five (I think it was five) days pretty much just lazing around. I got very familiar with James's (wonderful) couch, and took many a nap. We ate. We chilled. We went over to Ann Arbor and saw Transformers with James's friend Paris. We watched 10,000 episodes of Man vs Wild (Bear Grylls is my new hero, incidentally). I actually went running, twice! After so much time sitting around in the car, this was a real godsend. One night, we went Irish pubbing at a local place. I had a blast watching a woman who was at least 55 years old ruthlessly hit on Jason. James, of course, had 1 drink and turned bright red right away.



I stayed in Novi at least a couple days longer than I'd intended to. I kept figuring I'd leave the next day, and, after all, when was I going to get to hang out with my little brother again, anyway? San Francisco's a long way from Atlanta.

On Sunday, I pushed off for Aunt Ellen's place in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. I had mixed feelings about the day I was planning to spend there. I was looking forward to seeing my cousins again, but, on the other hand, this was my last 'stop-and-see-somebody' excursion before heading out to the outdoors portion of my trip. I got caught in a massive traffic jam on I-80, near Chicago, and didn't end up getting to Eau Claire until about 3 in the morning.

En route, about 10 different times, I was just a hair's breadth away from stopping and getting a motel for the night. But I kept figuring, it's not THAT much farther, I really don't want to stay at a motel, etc. etc., so I'd stock up on caffeine and sugar and set off into the pitch black again. One great way to keep yourself awake, I discovered, is to open your window, play your music really really loud, and just sort of scream along with it at the top of your lungs. I did this for a good two hours or so before I finally got to Ellen's place.



In Eau Claire, I got to see my cousins Brian and David for the first time in 12 years. They were both completely different (of course) than I remembered them, and I discovered, happily, that I had quite a bit in common with them both. Brian, a pale-skinned, long-haired guy who was so thin he looked skeletal, was getting ready to begin work on his Chemistry PhD, so we had a good time chatting about (extremely) nerdy subjects. (I met his girlfriend, Leah, the next day. She was a pale-skinned, long-haired girl who was so thin she...you get the picture. Also about to start her Chem PhD.) I met David the next morning. He's thin, like his older brother, but otherwise the two are as different as night and day. I'd heard David ran competitively for his high school, so when he mentioned that he was about to go running, I jumped on the opportunity to join him. We both pigged out on bacon right before we left. Bacon + running = win.

I am proud to report that I am able to keep pace with an 18-year old cross country/track runner! Yes, that's right, I'm awesome.

I went out for Coldstone with Brian and Leah after we got back. I had broken out the camera by that point, and annoyed everyone by taking pictures constantly. The fact that almost none of these pictures turned out well only compounded the stupidity. That evening, my uncle Ron took me for a guided tour around Eau Claire. There wasn't a whole lot to see, but we did get to go for a couple of short walks through the woods, which was nice.



I left the next morning, finally off to really see the countryside. I made good time, and zoned out at the wheel, watching the world fly past. The low hills flattened, and the forest turned to grasslands, the rich prairie of Minnesota and east South Dakota, and the landscape was farm after farm after farm. I set up camp on the east bank of the Missouri River, near a small South Dakota town called Chamberlain. If this wasn't the perfect spot to camp, it came pretty damn close:



After setting up camp, I climbed down the rocks to the shore. I found a nice flat-topped boulder by the water's edge, took a few pictures, then sat there for maybe an hour, watching the sun set over the low hills on the river's west bank. The bugs started to bite at dusk, so I climbed back over the rocks to my campsite, and lay down on a picnic table by my tent. A couple hours later, the sun had fallen completely below the horizon, and I watched the faint silver-white traces of the Milky Way slowly reveal themselves.

The morning dawned bright and clear. I took my time breaking camp, and it was almost 11 by the time I had loaded up the car and pulled out. I made the short drive over to the Acta Lakota Sioux cultural center and museum on the edge of town, and spent an hour or so checking out the different exhibits. One thing about reading about the American Indians...their entire heartbreaking history post-1492 really just makes you feel shitty about being an American. It's one of those problems where you think, well, at this point, what can really be done? Obviously returning all the land to the Indians isn't going to work. So what do you do, give them some cash? Hey, here's 500 bucks. Sorry about, y'know, murdering almost all your people and stealing all your land from you!

I had what purported to be the 'perfect cheeseburger' (not so much) from a place called Friendly Casey's, then hit the road, en route to the Badlands.

To San Francisco, Part 1

It is raining in Buffalo.

The whole world is grey as I drive through the final few miles of upstate New York to the Canadian border. I stayed in a motel the previous night - my first of the trip - and awoke to a flat grey sky and a surprisingly cold rain. It's July, but it feels like October would back down south. The rain has slowed to a drizzle when I pull into Niagara Falls State Park and walk down to Horseshoe Falls.

The water is kind of a light turquoise. And there's, like, a lot of it.



I stare off the edge of the falls, thinking, That's a lot of fucking water. I'm a little disappointed in my mind for its total lack of profundity. I take a few pictures, gawk the required amount of times, then wander back up to the restaurant at the top of the falls (called, imaginatively, the Top of the Falls restaurant), where I sit down with an adult beverage and crack open my laptop. "I BELIEVE I CAN FLY," blares the extremely unfortunate selection of music, and after a couple of minutes of this, I go outside.

"STAYIN ALIIIIIIIIIIVE," the Bee Gees shout down at me from the loudspeakers. "STAYIN ALIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII-IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIVE!!!!"

Somebody help me, cuz I'm goin nowhere.



The first leg of the trip could mostly be characterized by a single word, Hot. The end of June in the south is murderously, unpleasantly hot, and even driving 70-something with the windows down doesn't help much. But I made good time to Asheville, and waited for my aunt Diane outside a grand, asian-looking building called, appropriately, the Asiana Grand Buffet. I've always liked talking to Diane. Of all my relatives of my parents' generation, I think she's got the sense of humor most similar to mine. Also, not coincidentally, she's probably the most sarcastic. Sarcasm is pretty much the only way I know how to communicate, so this works out well.

After we gorged ourselves, we drove up to the North Carolina Arboretum and sat down in rocking chairs as we waited for the rain. Diane and her partner Bren told me how nice this place was, and how they'd taken my grandparents up here to relax one time. I, in turn, told them a horrible story about some demented parents that had basted their toddler's face in honey and tried to get a bear to lick the honey off. (It did not end well.)

We parted near the entrance to the Blue Ridge Parkway, and I spent most of the rest of the afternoon puttering happily up the winding road. It was pleasant, although it was also quite slow. Before I'd left, my dad kept mentioning Mount Mitchell (and I dutifully paid him no heed at all), but when I saw a sign that said, Highest point east of the Mississippi!, I figured, what the hell.



The Black Mountains are cool, even in the summer. There's a brochure there that claims that the climate is more like that of Canada than North Carolina, and you can see it in the spruces and firs that inhabit the area. The vegetation was of a completely different quality than the dense southern forest below. The trail to the summit, however, was like any other trail through the southern summer forest: dense, humid, and, to be blunt, unpleasant. I was decked out in all wicking fabrics, though, so I actually felt pretty good as I hiked. After several miles, I saw this:



So after all that, I didn't actually get to the highest point east of the Mississippi. Ah well. I did, however, get to eat at the highest restaurant east of the Mississippi, and what a god awful mess that was. The place was run by the state, so I figured it was going to be bad, but it went beyond bad, into the realm of both expensive and bad.

I was planning on camping at Mt. Mitchell, but it was really too early to stop for the night, so I pressed on (and when I say 'pressed on,' in Blue Ridge Parkway terms, that means I went maybe another 20 miles). It was already dusk by the time I pulled into the Linville Falls campground, and thunder rolled as I hastily assembled my tent and attached the rainfly. I hammered down the last stake as the rain began to fall, then ducked inside, happy for my good timing (and pissed that it was raining...rainflies are wonderful, but take all the fun out of camping). I stayed happy about this for all of ten minutes, when a bunch of loud hillbillies pulled up in the campground next to mine, broke out the beer, and proceeded to be obnoxious drunken assholes for the rest of the night.

The next morning, I realized that I'd made terrible progress towards Philadelphia, and that I'd need to abandon the Parkway if I was going to make my cousin Joel's place at a reasonable hour. So I drove for an hour or two through rural North Carolina and Tennessee until I found I-81, then stayed on that road all the way to Pennsylvania.

Joel is 27, and I'm 24. We've never met. Our family is peculiar like that. I'd always been curious about him, and his place was right on the way to NYC, so I figured I'd stop by and meet him. It was about 10 at night when I walked into the lobby of his (actually pretty swank) apartment complex. He came down to greet me, beers in hand. He was a big dude with big muttonchops. He introduced me to his girlfriend, Candy, a cheerful hairdresser with a frank demeanor, and after a few minutes of shooting the breeze, we proceeded to start taking Jaeger shots washed down with Heineken...which we continued to do for the remainder of the night.

We went down to a place called Manayunk in Philly, and went club-hopping, and drank more Jaeger...and more Jaeger...and more Jaeger. Joel told me about himself, his family, and his intense hatred for his ex-wife. He'd gotten married very young, after his high school girlfriend had gotten pregnant, and had been working full time since he'd finished high school. He was a real outgoing guy, and was doing pretty well for himself, but his exuberance seemed tinted by frustration at the opportunities he'd given up because of his failed marriage.

I woke up the next morning on Joel's couch, my spirits high. They remained high for about 30 seconds before I noticed the small garbage can placed suspiciously near my head, containing something that smelled suspiciously acidic.

Candy strode into the room, and glanced at me, amused.

"Hey, Candy," I mumbled, sheepishly. "I, uh...I think I might have thrown up in Joel's car last night..."

She laughed. "Yeah, I think you might have."

Joel was surprisingly cool with this most ultimate of party fouls, and, after we spent a good chunk of the day lying, inert, by the pool, nursing our hangovers, we drove over to the car wash, Mr. Clean and paper towels in hand.

Joel grinned at me as we scrubbed away. "Bet you didn't think you'd be doing any auto detailing this weekend, huh?"

Once his Trooper was sufficiently denastified, we drove to a local place called Steve's for my first authentic Philly cheesesteak.



I should have been impressed, and I really wanted to be, and I didn't exactly lie because all I told them was that I thought the cheesesteak was tasty, but when it comes right down to it, it was just kinda...meh. The cheese fries were great, though. Hard to mess up cheese fries. Soon, we were saying our goodbyes, and we agreed that it'd be cool if saw each other again before we died.

The drive to New York City was hell. On the map, the shortest route from Philadelphia to Brooklyn, where my friend Doug lives, is to take I-95 to the New Jersey Turnpike to Verrazano Bridge, but DO NOT BELIEVE THE MAP'S LIES, this route is pure hell and the traffic on these roads will devour your soul and leave you a lifeless, drained husk of a man.

So I, lifeless and drained, pulled into an alley behind a row of apartments in Brooklyn, jumped out of my car, and bear hugged my old friend. Doug and I grew up together, and it's always nice to see him again. Talking to him makes me feel like I'm a 12 year old again, sitting by the River Forest pool, with nothing to worry myself about except drawing, Japanese animation, and how to get the upper leg in our endless sparring matches.

"So I met this chick at this gallery with a couple friends a few nights ago," Doug was telling me, as he related a hilarious, vaguely disturbing story that reminded me in very jarring terms that we were not, in fact, 12 years old anymore.

Doug's old roommate from Florida, who was possibly the world's skinniest man, stopped by with his fiance the first night. He was a metrosexual sort of guy with fashionable clothes and neatly coiffed hair, and he talked in an endless stream. "One thing I wish I'd picked up from you from when we lived together," he mentioned, in between comments about art and, well, fashionable clothes and neatly coiffed hair, "is your cleanliness!"

His place really was clean. It was clean, but, since Doug's an artist, there were neatly placed pieces of artwork all over the apartment that gave it a pleasantly lived-in feel. I liked it.

I spent two nights in Brooklyn, doing nothing in particular. Nursing a hangover (and a nasty sunburn), this was fine by me, and I'd already seen most of the NYC sights last time I was here, so I was free to ignore my touristy impulses and just chill for a while. We drove out to Coney Island and wandered out onto the pier, watching the kids and the crab fishers and the obese shirtless people making out in public. There was a really cool mural there that we stopped to admire, but I forgot to take my camera with me! I dearly wanted to photograph all the chub, too, but some dreams must go unfulfilled, it seems. We bought the world's worst pina coladas at an oddly out-of-place tiki bar on the boardwalk, mostly because the girl selling them was a knockout.

We drove over to another part of Brooklyn to meet up with Doug's friend from work, Sebastian.

"He lives over in the projects," Doug told me as we drove, offhandedly.

I tried to act unconcerned. "Oh, yeah?" The Brooklyn projects. Oh, god.

We drove, and chatted about the different parts of Brooklyn. According to Doug, the part of Brooklyn where he lives, Bensonhurst, is controlled primarily by the Italian mob, and the neighborhood is actually pretty peaceful and safe because these guys ruthlessly enforce their own brand of justice that includes chopping up the bodies of offenders and dumping them near the fence by the shore, and lying down their families in the middle of the street and crushing their legs with a car. And this is the good part of town.

There were several men hanging around outside of Sebastian's apartment building on the sidewalk. They smoked and played checkers, watching us as we passed. They seemed more bemused than hostile.



Sebastian, it turned out, was a big, genial guy with long black hair and a scruffy beard, a comics and anime fan, and all-around Japanophile. We agreed that the way he seemed to be cool with the rough area he lived in was just by being large and completely unflappable. The three of us trekked around the nearby park, which seemed like a completely different universe than the surrounding slums, then went back to Sebastian's place, where I spent some time jamming on his guitar. It was a steel string electric, and I'm used to a nylon string classical acoustic, so I felt like I played pretty poorly, but at the end of it, Doug mentioned that I ought to come with him and Sebastian to Japan as their guitarist! As we went out for a delicious dinner of all-you-can-eat sushi, I kept wondering if he was being serious.

Sebastian ended up crashing at Doug's place, and we were lying down to sleep when Doug, looking highly agitated, exited his bathroom and began pacing around his basement apartment.

"Um, hey, G," he said, after a few awkward moments. "Got a question for you..."

Shortly after he posed his fateful question, we were dragging ourselves to a laundromat at two in the morning. By the time we got done, dawn was breaking.

Doug and Sebastian left for work at about eleven that morning, and I roused from sleep to say my farewells, and then didn't really manage to get back to bed after that, although Doug said I was welcome to stay as long as I liked. I ate pop tarts, drank iced tea, and read and re-read the map. I guess because NYC is all islands, the roads leading in and out of the city are an almost comically complex maze. Eventually I settled on a route out of the city and hit the road, headed northwest, towards Buffalo and Niagara Falls.



The drive across upstate New York was boring. There wasn't anything in particular that I wanted to see, so I just ate, drove, gassed up, drove, pissed, drove, etc. etc. etc. I missed the turn-off onto highway 17, and spent about 45 minutes on a pointless jaunt into the countryside and back. That didn't particularly help my morale. Because of our strange ordeal the night before, I was exhausted before I'd even gotten to Binghamton. Far too proud of my status as a veteran roadtripper to halt for the day so early, I pulled into a country gas station somewhere in the Catskills and decided I'd just nap in the car. Ordinarily that works pretty well, and sleeping in your car definitely boosts your cred as a hardcore insane nutball...I mean roadtripper. But the sun was shining on my face, and it was just too hot to sleep, so, frustrated, I got out and just lay down on a grassy hillside by the gas station, a water bottle resting against my knee.

An hour or so later, feeling much better about the world, I woke up, got back in the Civic, and didn't stop until midnight, at a fleabag motel about 20 miles from Buffalo.