SIDEHIKE.NET ROAD TRIP 2008

10. The stars at night are big and bright (clap, clap, clap, clap) deep in the heart of Texas, but they are bigger and brighter way out in far west Texas.

9. Believe it or not, there are people who go to convenience stores looking for health food. (We are not them.)

8. Skunks hate New Mexico so much they will take their own lives to escape it.

7. It just ain’t a road trip without jerky.

6. Despite what people may tell you, New Mexico is NOT hypoallergenic.

5. The cutest Border Patrol agents are in Arizona.

4. Bourbon and chocolate milk do not a mudslide make. (Or even approximate.)

3. Elvis is alive, and he’s busking on the streets of Tombstone, Arizona.

2. The best American pop music stations in So-Cal broadcast in Spanish.

1. If Los Angeles fell into the ocean, most Angelenos would be too busy yakking on their mobile phones to notice.

As David pointed out, I neglected to mention the kamikaze rabbits. But I did not neglect to mention the Benadryl bender, did I? That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it. You’d be a bit loopy, too, if you were as hopped up on DayQuil as I was at that point.

With that said, I find it appalling that David made it through his rabbit report — and even mentioned Bambi — without making a Thumper joke.

Clearly we are both losing our edge as the trip comes to an end…

So when we last left off, our intrepid heroes had just arrived in Monument Valley, Utah — a vast expanse of high desert plateau in the heart of the Navajo Nation where giant formations of sedimentary rock jut upwards into the sky. We arrived late in the afternoon, and had just enough time to get settled into our room at the lodge before running up to the lone restaurant in the area to watch the sunset as we ate. Sorry, but there are no pictures of that. I left the camera in the room, and I was too busy with a bowl of delicious pork and green chile stew to have gotten much in the way of photos anyway.

After dinner we could have joined the other guests at the lodge for the nightly John Wayne movie showing, but we instead went back to the room so Dave could catch up on work and I could sort through the 6 gigabytes of photos I took at Bryce Canyon. We went to bed somewhat early, planning on attempting to rise equally early in case we had to alter our remaining travel plans due to weather.

So we crammed our gear into Norm around 9:00 AM (hey, it’s early for us) and set off southbound towards Arizona. We had both spent our working hours the night before listening to music to pass the time, so neither of our iPods were charged when we got in the car.

No problem, I thought, and I reached over to hit the “scan” button on the radio. We knew there wouldn’t be much in the way of radio reception out here, but we had a laugh when it went all the way around the dial twice before landing on the lone station in the area — a Navajo-language spot on the far left-hand end of the spectrum. Not being Windtalkers, Dave and I couldn’t make heads or tails of what was going on in the chant emanating from the speakers, but it wasn’t long before the DJ (still speaking in Navajo) transitioned into Rod Freaking Stewart’s “Motown Song.”

I shit you not.

When Cortez came to the New World he brought devastating diseases with him: Smallpox and Rod Stewart. After much deliberation, Dave and I still aren’t sure which was worse. (But we’re leaning towards the latter.)

Shortly after we concluded our debate on Rod’s merits (he lost big points for taking Rachel Hunter from us) we crossed into Arizona and headed east towards the Four Corners.

What is the Four Corners, you say? I’m glad you asked!

According to Wikipedia:

The Four Corners Monument marks the quadripoint in the Navajo Nation and Ute Mountain Tribal Lands in the Southwest United States where the states of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah meet.

Or perhaps a better way of putting it would be:

The Four Corners Monument is a tourist trap run by the Navajo Nation that charges a fee for people to come and celebrate two imaginary perpendicular lines arbitrarily drawn by someone else’s government.

Hmm. Perhaps the Wiki needs a little editing … Another time. Back to the recap.

So when Dave and I saw that they were charging a fee to stare at what essentially amounts to a glorified surveying stake, we turned our trusty steed Norm around and got back on the main highway. At this point, we didn’t want to waste a bunch of time anyway. The previously mentioned ominous weather forecasts were still in the reports on the radio (between two more feckless Rod Stewart dirges) so we decided that we would waste no more daylight with sightseeing at worthless monuments or historical markers. Especially since it was cold and windy, and by this time Dave was coming down with the coughy-sneezy-nasties, too. (We place the blame squarely on you, Jason.)

A couple hours later when we got within sight of the Nacimiento Mountains, we knew we had made the right decision. Highway 550 runs due east right up to the edge of the range, at which point we would have the choice of taking a left and enjoying a scenic winding byway going around the mountain range and bringing us into Santa Fe from the north, or we could hang a right and make a straight shot down to I-25 and hit Santa Fe from the south. As we looked ahead of us, the decision was clearly made for us. The weather line appeared to be divided along the same latitude as the road, with snow to the left, and mere clouds to the right.

We only stopped to pee, get gas and stock up on beef jerky (prioritized in that order) and we made it to our hotel in Tucumcari in just under eight hours, using a route that Google Maps insists should have taken almost nine, assuming no stops. Please don’t ask us how we did it. Feel free to use your own imaginations to formulate your own theories. We’re quite fond of the the ones involving worm holes, time travel and various other violations of the laws of quantum physics. Especially since those don’t involve breaking the laws of the state of New Mexico — WHICH WE WOULD NEVER DO.

We pulled into our hotel as the first few flurries of snow flirted with our windshield. We checked in, hauled in our bags, and headed over to Del’s Restaurant on the Route 66 strip (picture taken on my last trip through town with Brad) for dinner because man cannot live on jerky alone.

After stuffing ourselves with enchiladas and chicken and pie and ice cream, we went back to the hotel and took turns steaming out our heads in our personal sauna (AKA the scalding hot shower with towels plugging the gap under the door) while the snow began to fall outside like God’s dandruff.

We watched a little TV (where we were once again haunted by Rod Stewart in the form of a chocolate chip cookie), read the next day’s weather forecast, and started formulating backup plans should we be stuck in Tucumcari for the next couple of days.

When we woke Thursday morning, a solid 4 to 5 inches of the cold flaky stuff covered the ground, but the roads were clear of any cold slippery stuff, so we made our getaway while we could.

The drive through Texas was relatively boring, quick and uneventful until we started to run into ice just half an hour from Dave’s house. By 8:00 we had returned Norm to the rental car agency and were each back at our respective homes, ready to take our respective cold medications and fall into our respective drug-induced comas.

In the next few days we’ll be posting a few more pictures and a few more tales from the road. We will also make a posting or two about the many profound life lessons we have learned on this trip, just as soon as we have enough sleep and/or hindsight to make such observations. So stay tuned.

Thanks for following along, folks. It’s been a fun ride.

Goodnight and good luck.

So long and thanks for all the fish.

Osmosis amoebas.

Day Eight

Day Nine

First, I find it shocking that Bo failed in his update to even so much as mention the Kamikaze Rabbit attacks.

As we were snaking our way through the pitch-black switchbacks approaching Bryce Canyon (including an incredibly long tunnel that cut through a mountain, and which looked like it should be the entrance to NORAD), we were having to keep our eyes peeled for deer. Lots of deer. Platoons of deer. I no longer feel quite so bad about Bambi’s mother, because apparently these little bastards breed faster than rabbits. They also apparently have better survival instincts.

So.

There we are, pitch black, trying not to run into any of the many deer lurking on the sides of the road. Then a jackrabbit runs full-bore under our right tire. Ka-thump, so long Peter Cottontail. We’re maybe another mile down the road, still making tasteless, anti-rabbit jokes like that one (”Did you see what kind of rabbit that was?” “I’d classify it as /lepus undercarus/.”) when another freaking rabbit launched itself from the other side of the road and under the driver’s-side tire. At this point all I can figure is that Norm the Rental Car bears some passing resemblance to The Black Rabbit of Inlé. So the good news is, if we messed up the suspension on the rental car, at least now it’s balanced out

Thankfully, we made it to our cabin without anymore encounters with suicidal animals, and we both got a much-needed night of peace and quiet.

Up at dawn the next morning–okay, not really, but there were roosters crowing while I was packing the car, so I’m counting it–and we spent the morning driving through Bryce Canyon National Park. We hit a half-dozen of the scenic vistas before doing a 180 and grabbing breakfast at the nearby trading post/general store/tourist trap.

Bo’s camerawork on the flickr stream will do a far better job conveying the variety of landscapes we passed through on our way to Monument Valley than I can. It still won’t–can’t–convey the sheer sense of scope and size of the scenery, but it’ll have to do. Unless you decide to take a trip up this way to drive Highway 12 yourself, which I do highly recommend. Suffice to say, we saw everything from towering, alien-looking crags of reddish rock that wouldn’t be out of place in Mordor to snow-blanketed forests right out of a Jack London novel. It was, there is no other word for it, breathtaking. The landscape would change dramatically every 15 or 20 minutes, and the cumulative result was almost as if you opened up one of those scenic nature calendars and teleported yourself to each of the diverse locations, one after the other.

We also encountered two of the coolest roads ever. One runs literally over the spine of a mountain, with sheer drops only a few feet to either side of road. Needless to say, we were both hugely impressed with whoever constructed it and hugely sympathetic toward the big-rig driver that was headed up towards it after we escaped with our lives. The other was a road that looked once to have been paved, but had long since stopped being maintained, leaving it to crumble into a series of gravel-strewn switchbacks crisscrossing back and forth down the side of a plateau. Neither of these are roads I’d care to try and navigate at night, but they were cool as hell in the middle of the day. But for the record, I’d drive both of them back to back while buzzed on a half-bottle of whiskey before I’d try to land on the two-lane road we saw that was, according to the sign, some suicidal idiot’s idea of a landing strip. If you’re trying to land a hover-converted DeLoreon, maybe…

And now here we are, chillin’ in Monument Valley. No, it doesn’t look like it does in the movies. They don’t do it justice.

When we woke on Monday we were in Las Vegas.

How did we get here? The best bet would be I-15, but there’s really no telling.

“There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of a Benadryl binge. And I knew we’d get into that rotten stuff pretty soon.”
— Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (roughly paraphrased)

Los Angeles always makes me sick. I think I’m allergic to pretentiousness, or something. By the time we made our northwesterly escape late Sunday afternoon my sinuses were in full blown revolt.

My instincts told me to do a faceplant in the fluffy bed of our spacious poolside room at the Hard Rock Hotel, but hunger got the better of both of us and we went out for Italian food instead.

If you’re ever in Vegas, there’s no restaurant I can recommend more highly than Battista’s Hole in the Wall, a nifty place about a block off the strip that I first tried after being clued into its schmaltzy goodness by my old college roommate Neil.

Battista’s doesn’t have menus. They have a big sign on the wall listing their main dishes. At first you’d think the prices are a bit steep, but here’s the cool part: Every entree comes with garlic bread, salad or soup, dessert cappuccino, and BOTTOMLESS CARAFES OF RED AND WHITE WINE.

Yes, bottomless carafes of wine. It’s like the anti-IHOP. Sure, this stuff isn’t winning any awards from Robert Parker, but in case you didn’t understand me the first two times, IT’S ALL YOU CAN DRINK!

So we did. Who needs NyQuil when you can just enjoy a carafe or three of wine to put you right to sleep?

When we woke on Monday we were in Las Vegas.

Wait, I said that already, didn’t I?

Is this now day eight?

How many days has it been?

Las Vegas has a funny way of doing that to you.

Despite the copious amounts of all-natural sleep aid we’d imbibed, sleep was not an easy commodity to come by that night. The rooms immediately surrounding ours partied at excessive volumes until the wee-est … most wee? … whatever the superlative of “wee” is … hours and construction crews started jackhammering at the property next door at sunrise.

When we eventually gave up on our quest for shuteye, we packed up our stuff and loaded up on French Toast and blueberry pancakes.

We didn’t do much gambling. I put a few bucks on some ridiculously long shot bets in the sports book (I’ll win $15,000 if Sam Hornish wins the Cup) and then gave Dave a quick blackjack primer before we left the casinos up a few bucks.

Instead of wasting the rest of the afternoon wasting our money by the bucketful, we headed over to the Pinball Hall of Fame where we could waste it by the pocketful. There’s some seriously great nostalgia in that place. After we’d run through our stash of quarters, we got out of town while we were still ahead.

Next stop, Zion National Park.

There are no words to describe how beautiful this place is at sunset.

So I won’t try. Instead, look at the pictures. Like THIS ONE. Or THIS ONE. Or THIS ONE.

I’ll never understand why the Mormons have this in their backyard, but consider Missouri, of all places, to be Zion. Well, they’re welcome to it. I’ll trade them any day.

We ended Monday at some little pine log cabins just outside of Bryce Canyon National Park. In stark contrast to the night before, there was nowhere within 30 miles that was open for dinner so we ate PBJ from the cooler and it was so quiet that we heard maybe three cars pass by on the highway all night long.

It was divine.

Now we’re in Monument Valley, Utah. A recap of day nine’s travels will be coming after I’ve had a chance to download the photos.

Did I get enough numbers in the post title? Good.

In addition to Dave’s eloquent summary of our last few blog-free days, I wanted to jump in and provide a few details as well. I feel like we’ve been neglecting you, dear readers, and I’d really like to make up for our oversight.

So Dave mentioned our brief encounter with the Luftwaffe, right? (OK, check.)

And the overwhelmingly touristy-ness of Tombstone proper? (Cool.)

And that that the Arizona Highway Patrol is so serious about speed enforcement that they buzz the interstate with A-10s? No? He missed that part? Well, let me tell you, these guys mean business!

As Dave mentioned, the drive was otherwise fairly uneventful. We cruised into Yuma at 3:10 (Pacific Time, at least) and we got much more amusement out of that than even the geekiest of roadtrippers should. (Which is to say, really, any amusement.)

After downing a couple Double-Doubles at In-N-Out Burger and spending far too much time at the Yuma, Arizona post office, we got back on the road and put the hammer down as we were free of the jurisdiction of the Arizona Speed Nazis.

In California they don’t worry so much about speeding that they plant highway patrol cars at every other mile marker. In a clear showing of where their priorities lay, they instead perch Border Patrol paddy wagons at the top of every third sand dune.

Leaving any political commentary aside, at this point I was just happy that we could once again make good time. As Dave mentioned, we didn’t get to the Salton Sea in time for me to get any photos around sunset, but I did at least get one semi-nifty night time shot.

After that, it was a quick jaunt up through Coachella, past the numerous combined casino bowling alleys, up I-10 and into the sprawling smogscape of Los Angeles.

For me, the next two days were spent almost exclusively on the HMS Queen Mary, the legendary decommissioned (and supposedly haunted) cruise ship now permanently moored in Long Beach harbor, while Dave and his wife Meredith stayed up in Sherman Oaks and commuted down for the wedding events.

That’s right, the Queen Mary is reputed to be inhabited by the spirits of those who have died on board, or in its powerful wake. They give “Ghost Tours” and have signs posted at the locations of various “sightings” around the ship. Despite the fact that my room was no less than seven feet away from the nearest “sighting” sign, and that my room appeared to have been constructed by a funhouse architect, Jason is the only one of us to supposedly experience an encounter.

The night before his wedding, Jason lay wide awake in his bed, trying to convince a nasty head cold to let him get some much needed sleep. Then he says he felt a terrible chill as the temperature of the room dropped dramatically, and he had the distinct feeling that he was being watched — that he was not alone.

I’m pretty sure that feeling happens to EVERY guy right before he gets married. That’s just a hunch on my part. But Jason swears that he saw a shape or something, too. And saw it move. And maybe heard some noises.

Either way, the next day was jitter free, and the wedding went off without a hitch. I have to say, it was a fantastic wedding (even performed by the ship captain) and everyone had a swell time — complete with the most dramatic post-reception retelling of the Kennedale White Trash Wedding I’ve ever heard Jason perform.

Saturday Jason, his new wife Cynthia, and I checked out of the boat … hotel … boatel, and headed back towards Burbank to take the newlyweds home. We stopped off in Beverly Hills for a quick peek around the grounds of Greystone Mansion.

After dropping off the happy couple, I drove up to Studio City to meet back up with Dave, Mere, and Den, and to finally meet a couple more of Dave’s friends, Peter and Colleen (and Ian Ziering) for a lovely dinner of what Californians like to pretend is Mexican food. It was a nice (albeit loud) evening of writer-talk, and a fitting way to cap off the Los Angeles experience.

Now we’re headed over to meet back up with Jason one final time and try to pack two people’s worth of shit back into the car.

Next stop, Vegas.

So. Where were we?

Ah yes. Tombstone. Land of the Last-Resort Circle K.

Bo and I woke up Wednesday morning and decided to check out the OK Corral gunfight show, because damned if we were going to let our most lasting impression of the town be the teenage taquito-flinger from the night before. We packed up and headed out to our car, passing the huge maroon tour bus that had transported a contingent of the German Air Force to our hotel. Did we forget to mention the German Air Force? Apparently they were doing some sort of training exercise at the nearby air base, but their presence did cause me to note several things: 1) my high school and college German classes were woefully ineffective and 2) not a one of them were wearing those cool spiked metal helmets. Disappointing.

We showed up in downtown Tombstone, which is to say the part of Tombstone that isn’t a hotel, a little before noon, figuring the gunfight show would be at high noon, like any sensible gunfight show should be. Sadly, it wasn’t happening till two o’clock, and with all due respect to the good citizens of Tombstone, there’s no way we were hanging around that long.

Bo has some great shots from the town over on the flickr page, but they may not convey the full atmosphere of the place, which is this: imagine if the cheesy gunfight show at Six Flags were to grow like a cancer and envelop several blocks of real estate in the midst of otherwise unremarkable desert. The historic buildings are undercut by occasional bits of anachronism such as signs warning away any potential rollerbladers stupid enough to attempt rollerblading on gravel roads and wooden-plank walkways. Costumed re-enactors assail passersby every three feet, trying to talk you out of your money and into whichever wild west show they happen to be shilling for. After walking the length of main street, we’d had enough, and we headed out.

Most of Wednesday was spent in the car, traveling through Arizona and on into Cali along the border. The most notable moment aside from the many, many police officers was our late lunch at In-N-Out Burger, which was really only memorable because it was the closest we’d gotten to real food since the glorious Monday-night pizza. The highway blazed a path through rolling sand dunes around sundown, which made for some scenic farfegnugen, but as the sun began dropping closer to the horizon, Bo began to suspect that our goal of reaching the Salton Sea in time to photograph its alien landscape might not be realized. Sure enough, we didn’t reach the Sea until well after dark, so Bo’s valiant photographic efforts were hampered by the fact that the surroundings looked like a dark blur with a shiny blur in the middle. Nor was there any sign of Val Kilmer.

We finally arrived at our Burbank Holiday Inn around 10:30, and were pleasantly surprised when the staff upgraded us to a suite in the “executive tower.” The surprise was slightly less pleasant when we noticed that our spacious suite sported only one bed, but I didn’t mind taking the fold-out couch-bed, so we didn’t make an issue of it. My good friend Den came over bearing booze, allowing him and Bo to confirm each other’s long-disputed existences, and much fun was had.

Thursday, Friday, and Saturday saw the arrival of my lovely wife Mere via plane, our nights occupied by Jason Davis’ rehearsal dinner and wedding, and general hanging about with LA friends. Some highlights:

- Jason’s mom almost murdered a hunchbacked piano player at the rehearsal dinner restaurant, right around the time his neverending set moved into a cover of the Peanuts theme song.

- Bo nearly lost his camera over the side of the Queen Mary when they sounded the foghorn unexpectedly as he leaned out over the railing to get a shot.

- Bo got a room located as far forward into the bow of the ship as you could get and not be on deck. The entire room was on a steep grade, and may in fact have been designed by the same people responsible for the defunct Six Flags exhibit “Casa Magnetica.”

- Jason saw a ghost in his honeymoon suite. Surprisingly, it wasn’t just his own pale reflection in the mirror.

- Jason staged a dramatic monologue recounting of The Ballad of The Kennedale White Trash Wedding on the deck of the Queen Mary. It’s a woeful tale of rednecks, genital warts, and women named Mike, but I could never do it justice. But if you ever meet Jason, be sure to ask him to tell the story.

- Den, Mere and I met this guy in a Studio City Starbucks. He was wearing a ball cap with a name tag attached, reading “A. Nobody C.I.A.” When first noticed, he was dictating loudly into a handheld recorder, delivering a monologue to whatever audience he imagines in his strange, fevered brain, and concluding with the line, “If anyone talks bad about my networks, I will sue them for one billion dollars!” A few minutes later when Den was trying to take a picture of Mere, Mr. Nobody interrupted and said, “Take a picture of this!” He then unfolded a five-foot-wide banner version of his business card. Clearly, his many, many networks spare no expense when it comes to promotion. He interacted with us several more times before we left, most notably when he offered to promote any of our future movie projects on his many, many networks. Did we mention he has many, many networks?

- We saw Beverly Hills 90210’s Ian Ziering in Mexicali on Ventura. He looks more or less exactly the same as he did in the mid-90s, except slightly less employed. Seriously, we couldn’t get Brian Austen Green? At least then we could have asked him what it’s like to sleep with Megan Fox…

That’s all for now. This afternoon Mere boards a plane for home and Bo and I hit the road bound for Vegas. Stay tuned…