planning for snacks on hand
As long as you're not one of those parents who won't give their kids American Freedom Fries, this is one thing you don't have to worry about on the interstate.
Well, I was thinking to save money - sandwiches, etc. Stopping at roadside picnic tables rather than hitting up a McDonalds. But I suppose McDonalds with a play area is the way to go.
Remember, McDonald's food doesn't spoil for six months. Buy it, duct tape it to the hood to keep it warm, and have it at the rest area of your choice.
It's a 17 hour drive when I've done it without kids.
Over the summer we're going to drive to motherfucking Montana. That is a 35 hour drive. OTOH we can camp at Yellowstone on the way.
My family did 2.5 and 3.5 day road trips every summer to visit my grandparents. They couldn't afford airfare for four. I don't remember it being too awful, but it's hard to say from my parents' point of view. They'd throw us into the car at 5 am, with the kids in pajamas. We'd usually nap until breakfast at 7 or 8, then they broke out new books/music/toys that we'd picked out weeks earlier but not played with. The first day, we'd picnic. We weren't allowed to eat or drink in the car. We'd stop at lunch, then mid-afternoon, then check into a hotel with enough time for the kids to swim in the pool to burn off some extra energy.
I'm just now starting to find road trips fun, and it's been more than twenty years (25?) since I took a trip like that.
Yellowstone is in Montana, heebie. I'm not sure how that qualifies as "on the way".
I mean, not to be the bearer of bad news or anything.
It's a 17 hour drive when I've done it without kids.
Oh. You're all going to die.
We weren't allowed to eat or drink in the car.
I'm sure I've read crazier things on the internet, but I can't think of any offhand.
This spring we're doing a Cincinnatti -> Nashville -> St. Louis road trip that I'm trying not to dread. It might almost be worth buying a second iPad.
I can't even remember what I used to do in the back seat of a car when I was a kid on a long trip. Did I read books? Stare out the window? Did we sing road songs? I literally have no idea.
Yellowstone is in Montana, heebie. I'm not sure how that qualifies as "on the way".
We've done Denver -> Missoula before. Yellowstone is about 2/3 of the drive there. Missoula is way west in Montana, so you get to Montana and then drive west for maybe 7 hours?
I have done Austin to Miami and back. You get to Pennsacola and you're like hooray we're practically there and then the horrible truth dawns. My friend I did the drive with and I passed the time by playing "We're So Better Than" but it's a more fun game for adults.
But yeah, the Atchafalaya is neato.
I guess the furthest we did when they were that little was about 5/6 hours actual driving, 7/8 hours trip. That was the Dordogne to St Malo when they were 6, just 5, 2 3/4, and 10 months, and it was the end of 3 weeks of being in 3 different places, and a lot of time in the car. It was fine. You'll be fine, surely? I don't really agree with tv screens in cars (or on my lawn!) for no reason other than that I am an old codger and we managed perfectly well, but I suppose they will help. (Do you make them wear headphones? I don't let them have noises near me. Listening to a film going on behind me might drive me a bit mental.)
If your kids are like my kid, it is almost impossible to overestimate how much easier the portable DVD player has made a long road trip. 2-3 movies in, headphones on, stop for lunch, no big deal. We haven't done a 17 hour trip but we did a 7 hour trip followed by a 7 hour return with only a day in between and it wasn't a big deal at all, not even any complaining (from a complaining-prone kid) until maybe the last hour of the return.
14: gotcha. Just make sure you don't let the kids eat or drink in the car, and everything should be fine.
10 hours of Toronto to New York when they were 11, 9, 7, 5 was a piece of piss. We barely even stopped on the way back. It gets so much easier heebie!
We took road trips from Florida to NC, and a few times all the way to Maine, growing up.
My kids don't complain, but in that last hour (and it never seems to matter how long the journey is) they start getting a bit hysterical, and will get sillier and sillier and laugh louder and louder, until someone hits someone on the head or something and then they all start arguing. I guess there are pros and cons to having more than one.
12: My parents kept cars until the car died but basically never cleaned the interior (and rarely cleaned the exterior). I'm not sure they vacuumed the inside more than twice per decade. Food and drink would have forced their hand on cleaning.
13: Individual music players with earphones? License plate games? My parents didn't really entertain us. I'm not even sure they put the radio on. Maybe the traffic reporting station.
I do like the idea of being somewhere where you could drive for 3 days and not fall off the edge. We're going to Belgium at Easter and that will only be about 4 hours.
Just get the kids to play the sensory deprivation-induced hallucinations game.
During long car rides, we'd have Dad tell us stories, like every event that happened in Watergate or how car engines work.
Ooooh, with the cut-in-half table tennis balls, and the white noise? My dad used to do that with my brother. Not that we had a car growing up.
25: I understand the Crimea is quite pleasant, and surely it can't be too far from Belgium?
We did a lot of drives and I stared out the window. That's why I'm the boredom-proof man you see before you today. We hold the ipad in reserve until the older kid gets complainy, and that entertains him for a long time. The younger one just wants to eat. And eat. And then maybe eat.
Oh, goodness. Stop worrying. My parents drove us around for weeks at a time and dammit, we had fun. And this was in a VW bus that occasionally broke down and definitely didn't have a tv. I don't think I even had a personal music player until I was 16. Get CDs of music they like (you just have to suffer) and sing along!
On the more practical side, my mom drove from CA to Ohio with me when I was 3. She said the secret was a tape of Annie and a present (generally something fun for the car the next day) for every day (that, of course, I only received if I was good).
Yes, I did a lot of staring out the window. And a lot of reading once I was old enough. Also a lot of terrorising my sister (and vice versa). I can't imagine it was always fun for my parents but it certainly wasn't awful.
My parents could have been auditioning for a farce with our trips in childhood -- stay up till 2 am the night before packing, plan to hit the road at 7 am, still waiting for everyone to take a shower and eat breakfast at 11, around noon, start jamming things into the trunk or car-top carrier, embark, remember 90 miles out that the oven was left on, yelling, back on the road, bathroom break around mile 91, whining for treats, more yelling, drive until 11 pm, find out that there's a fireman's convention in the small Ontario town where had planned to spend the night, so have to sleep in the overflow part of the motel managers' apartment, everybody cranky next morning at 8 am, littlest one is afraid of the motel shower, much screaming ensues, on the road again...
(PS: 32's 'stop worrying' was meant to be supportive, not snarky!)
32: Forgot to mention: Father's ongoing monologue about how this would all be more fun if we had a VW bus.
13: The first leg of that is nothing and St. Louis->Cincy is not bad either if you come back that way, though not a lot of interesting scenery. Audiobooks can work well, and I'm a big fan of starting a drive with dinner and putting on pajamas so they fall asleep in the early bit and then are out for the bulk of the drive. (And I say 5 hours is nothing, but the drive back from Chicago where Selah screamed for an hour straight and then Mara screamed for an hour straight and then we got home and Nia started screaming sure felt like a long time. Ugh, and we're thinking about a spring break trip????)
The first time my family drove across the country I was 2 years old, and the story is that I kept everyone entertained by demanding that someone read me the Curious George book ("dinosaur fall down-boom!") over and over.
I've driven to Yellowstone in 4 hours or so. West. Gardiner would take maybe half an hour or 45 minutes longer. Your real problem is the part of the park that's still in Wyoming, where you'll feel like driving 35 is making great progress.
We did a lot of road trips when I was little -- I liked them then and like them now. If I didn't have a job and a wife, I'd probably spend 6 months of each of the next few years just driving around. And you know, stopping at various spots.
Unlike your upcoming road trip, driving here has long stretches without much in the way of food options. We tell out-of-state guests that there's no point in looking for food in the 200 miles between here and Bozeman. Not strictly true, since they could stop at Wheat Montana in Three Forks, or have a burger and a beer (and maybe a fistfight) and the M&M in Butte -- but it serves to keep people focused on the need to provision in advance.
Wyoming is worse.
40: Not to mention the stretch between Bozeman and Spearfish. At least you can drive 100 mph and have cocktails while you're doing it.
Stopping at roadside picnic tables....
Some travel writer -- maybe Bill Buford -- mentioned, in an essay about his childhood family travel experiences in the '60s, his father's habit of stopping for picnics of hard-boiled eggs, Twinkies, marshmallow fluff, Jell-O salad, etc., on the fringes of the saddest, poorest towns and neighborhoods on their route.
I just want my childrens' memoirs to have some texture.
So that I can blog about them.
"Staring into each others' navels: a memoir about blogging about my childrens' memoirs."
We took tons of car trips, come to speak of it. Oklahoma to Philadelphia, Kentucky to Dallas, &c &c. I think of them very nostalgically though probably they were really boring. My dream mode of travel is having someone drive me around, since trains barely go anywhere. I guess driving myself is an option but my ability to concentrate is so decimated I'd have to do it in half-hour leglets.
Some travel writer -- maybe Bill Buford -- mentioned, in an essay about his childhood family travel experiences in the '60s, his father's habit of stopping for picnics of hard-boiled eggs, Twinkies, marshmallow fluff, Jell-O salad, etc., on the fringes of the saddest, poorest towns and neighborhoods on their route.
James Lileks made a career of writing about this, but he loved it!
47: I remember the writer being comically, but profoundly, mortified by his parents' insouciance in front of the audiences of poor black and white kids watching them eat chemical-miraculous middle-class mid-century food. Not Lileks' tone at all.
If you're going to camp in Yellowstone you'll want to figure out the dates and reserve your spot like now. We go up there most every summer and tent camp usually either Grant or Canyon Village. I reserved our 9 nights in August this week and there's already a ton of sold out nights in the tent spots for June and July. Our drive up there isn't quite as short as Carp's but not too bad. We go east to WY and then cut north through Teton. About 5-5.5 hours to Teton and then another hour to Yellowstone Lake.
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Not having seen the movie yet, I can't say if this is the last image of endcredits
You got a path leading who-knows-where, an umbrella on a sunny day, a Lack/loss of the artist
The painting is of course an image on an image. Cirrus clouds (Wiki:"Since cirrus clouds arrive in advance of the frontal system or tropical cyclone, it indicates that weather conditions may soon deteriorate.") while the "reality" shows cumulus, and otherwise not matching what we see outside the painting.
But what struck me was, on the canvas, the image of the isolated great tree that reminds somehow of a tree seen from the house in My Neighbor Totoro. Do they grow it, magically? But I can't find an image online.
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50: Yes, the tree on the canvass clearly evokes the Totoro tree(although it's not a perfect match).
In Totoro, there are 2 giant trees (camphor it says, although acorns?): one is the real one in the forest adjacent to the house, where Totoro lives, and the other grows by magic right beside the house, but is only giant in Mei's dream.
Umbrellas also play a role in Totoro, but only black ones, so probably not intended as an evocation of that.
We used to play Trivial Pursuit when we were older.
49: oh, good call. Although if we had to get a hotel for our first 35 hour drive, I think I'd be okay with that.
Actually the plan is for Jammies to fly with ace to Denver, because he has limited vacation and that leg is cheap (and ace is free). Then me and HPs pick them up for the second half.
49 -- It's funny but Goggle maps if giving like 4.5 hrs from SLC to West. Obviously, there's time at both ends to get from where you actually start to where Google is starting, and from West to the Lake.
We took plenty of daylong car trips when I was growing up, but the only ones longer than that were to Poland. Otherwise we would take a plane or overnight train. Crossing borders into the East Bloc was a nightmare and sort of impressive, what with all the signs in the quite wide border zone explaining that if you get out of your car you may be shot without warning, emphasized by dudes in towers with guns pointing in your direction.
I don't think I even had a personal music player until I was 16. Get CDs of music they like (you just have to suffer) and sing along!
Not sure when I got my first walkman but it was around that age. CD's, in cars? People and their weird hi-tech childhoods. Cassettes were the thing, all copied (don't tell Halford but people ripped music all the time before the internet).
54 -- you should read Lonesome Dove before starting out on this TX-MT trip.
55: That's probably pretty close, we're around 15 or 20 miles south of what they're likely using as the starting point for SLC. But, IMO that route to West Yellowstone isn't as awesome. We go east to Evanston and then north up through Star Valley in WY and then to Jackson, Teton, etc.
56.2: Oh, ours were all tapes. But I was trying to update for Heebie. And even then I was probably off - more like, load songs onto the iPod.
59: Especially if you are a pit bull.
Books on tape* are really great. Little House books, Swallows and Amazons.... And you parcel them out a bit, which breaks up the experience of the drive (for everyone): a few hours of listening to the story, a few hours of amusing yourself, an hour of singalong, then back to the story, etc.
We've also listened to grownup books on tape, which the kids reliably ignore, so it's not as if you need to pick super-carefully. I mean, something violent or sexy would probably be bad, but a memoir or some genre fiction will bore them before some incidental adult content will shock them.
We've driven out to Boulder and back twice now, and it's gone pretty well. The first trip we didn't really have any video entertainment for them, but we let them use my old phone for video games or whatever this past trip.
*aka audiobooks, I suppose
Rexburg isn't so awesome when you just want to ogle the Tetons.
All my memories of childhood road trips (St Louis to Birmingham and Palm Beach) are of terrible, terrifying weather: windstorms and flooded roads and following a snowplow at about six feet (where the station wagon could still make it through the deepening snow). I'm amazed we did this more than once.
Probably I was just reading when not afraid for my life and have forgotten the normal trips.
FOR BEN! Update re: turntable quest, posting here because can't find your e-mail and think you may post comments under different name than Ben??? Confused. BUT the one with knowledge of such things says that this is a "good deal": http://www.analogplanet.com/content/u-turn%E2%80%99s-remarkable-179-orbit-turntable-crosley-killer
Happy spinning about discs and listening to music! Anyone in more direct communication with Ben please let him know about this, thanks!
And now back to your regularly schedule programming ...
Actually, that post is kinda dirty:
"The "female" bearing element is of plastic and incorporates the spindle. It includes a bronze bushing with a Teflon insert at the point of rotation below with an additional insert up towards the ball end."
Sounds like fun!
"The molded "female" bearing element also includes a tapered outer shaft terminating in an ample diameter platform upon which rides the MDF platter. The taper and platform produce sufficient stability to prevent platter rocking."
This makes me a little sad, the platter rocking could be delightful. :(
"The drive assembly is effectively plinth-decoupled via a circular viscous element. "
Sounds more like it!
"Though the plinth itself is rather "lively" if you tap on it while a record plays, the three rubber upon which it rests provide surprisingly effective isolation from the outside world."
Troubling, perhaps? Maybe a weird sex cult???
"Hanging from the back via a polymer ring is an under-slung cylindrical counterweight secured with a plastic grub screw."
Grub Screw - neo punk band name? Plastic a bit of a let down. Polymer Ring - Devo tribute band?
66-70 are delightful. As is 65, but in a different way.
Books in the car all day err day. (And resultingly not knowing where anything is ever.)
We used to do long car trips all the time. We did Albuquerque to Houston, which is about 17 hours, several times. I think I mostly stared out the window.
73 referring to when I was a kid, although I've done several long road trips as an adult as well.
I'll call this the map thread. Judgmental LA I know Halford has left clues but I've not really paid attention, Gangs w/Scattered Artists? And i think someone here lives in either Secret Hippie Enclave or Hipster Wannabes from Orange County.
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Another notable lawyer ad, although quite different in character, from a young lawyer here in the 'burgh. "Did I mention I'm Jewish."
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76 reminded me of the time a year or so ago when I was following a couple of young lawyers down the courthouse steps and overheard the one lament to the other, "At least your guy used his gun."
ms bill lived in El Paso for HS but her family had a house near Ventura CA where they spent the summers. A 17 hour drive - she says they would do it in a day to leave TX but would always split the trip going back. They drove an "unsafe at any speed" Corvair.
Grub Screw - neo punk band name?
Reminds me of the discovery that the guest publications on "Have I Got News For You" can be classified into either "album title" or "reggae or blues singer".
Blues/reggae:
Rug Hooking
Catfish Insider
Drain Trader
Cracking Matters
Fishkeeping Answers
Windsock International
Album titles:
Rubber Stamp Madness
Emu Today and Tomorrow
Screw Machine World
Biscuit World
Dental Glove Update
Shock & Vibration Digest
Global Slag
I've never done a drive longer than about 9 hours, even as an adult. That was London to central Scotland, with a detour into Glasgow, and only took 9 hours because Birmingham.
We didn't have a car as a kid, so we went on long bike rides. Which were quite nice, I suppose. Rather than the misery of long car journeys.
According to google maps, driving to my wife's parents' house in rural Bohemia would take about 12 or 13 hours [we might even do that some time soon]. And driving about 17 hours would get me from our house to Rome.
I have done Glasgow to Oxford non-stop, once. Just blasted down the motorway with sleeping flu-ridden wife in the car. That was pretty good. There's something quite satisfying about the relentlessness of it.
For an activity that's mostly sitting, driving is surprisingly age-sensitive. The longest one day drives I've done are Chicago to Boston, which is about 14 hours. I can't imagine doing that now. I would need to be lifted out of the car at the end of that.
81 is always mindblowing when you stop to think about it. No wonder the Nazis were able to blitz through everywhere so quickly! North-of-the-Rio-Grande American distances are just on a different scale. It's so weird to think that MPLS is the closest large city to Winnipeg, or that the closest larger city to us -- Milwaukee/Chicago -- is 7 or 8 hours. 8 hours from Berlin and you could have gone through like 6 countries!
Never get involved in a land war in Canada.
Right. We really did drive 140 miles for groceries. My impression is that if you go that far in England, you actually travel through time.
Christ no, how would you ever find anybody?
140 miles south or east would land me in the sea. West would be Swansea, so, yeah, about a decade backwards.
I just mapped how far I will travel in England. 90 miles, and my impression is I will also end up in 1830, so seems legit.
You can find out if the laudanum was all it's cracked up to be.
Oh man I would be so psyched if I could find a laudanum hookup while there.
84 just shows how much better use we've made of the space than you lot.
I just mapped how far I will travel in England
Hang on - when/why/where?
Why did the Englishman travel 90 miles?
To get to the other side.
I once did the non-stop 25 hour NY to Florida road trip. No drugs were involved (other than caffeine). This was in an 87 Volvo with the most uncomfortable bucket seats known to humanity. After an hour your butt was killing you. It was so bad we used to measure drive times in asshours. Oh, and the electrical system developed some kind of fault while we were driving on alligator alley in the middle of the night and we lost our lights. We were so close and so tired that we didn't let that stop us, there were very few cars on the road so we just shone a flashlight out the rear window to warn any cars that were overtaking us. Good times.
50 I have plans to see that next week so thanks for that, now I know to stay for the end of the credits (and now I feel like I've outed my self as some kind of philistine, I usually do stay for them but lately, c'mon). I remember the tree in Totoro being a bit different, more wide than tall but searching for Totoro + tree in google images shows at least two different trees. Maybe I don't remember that film as well as I'd thought.
93: a week from sunday/for a symposium/lakes district and then a night in manchester at the end
93: he's going to the Lake District and stopping off in Manchester, IIRC.
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"Current Student": if you speak truly for yourself and for others, then you should leave academia, since you are a danger to a university community, to the rule of law, and to the freedom of thought. You lack all perspective and are clearly unable to even evaluate evidence, including the evidence of what has been on my blog over the last several months.
Brian Leiter, provoked by
Brian Leiter, since you're here, I think you should know that myself and a number of other women in the graduate student community found your latest post nothing short of sickening. The actions of the students at Northwestern were inspiring, and they deserve praise for supporting a member of their community and mobilizing so quickly to protect themselves and their peers.
The fact that you are most concerned with academic freedom and due process in the face of this likely sexual assault is indicative of your extraordinary level of privilege as a person who will never need such protections from abusive and dangerous mentors.
Please consider the effect that your blog has on the vulnerable members of the philosophical community. It is so demoralizing for us to see that these are the issues relating to this case that you -- as a representative of the professional elite -- deem most worthy of concern.
Itself a reaction to this.
I continue to be boggled by why well-regarded academic philosophers continue to participate in allowing Leiter's personally "branded" platforms to be the mediums through which they judge each other's reputations and put a public face on their profession.
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We've got DC to LA and then LA to Cincinnati coming up this summer, speaking of long road trips. The longest I've ever made alone, non-stop, was Madison, WI to Houston, TX, which I think took about twenty-one hours and was, in retrospect, objectively a bad decision.
We make 9-12 hours car trips a few times a year to visit our respective families (and are about to be in the market for a bigger car, because it's silly to have a small, efficient commuter car when we don't commute by car at all and are uncomfortably cramped with Stuff when we go anywhere significant).
When I was about 12 we spent six weeks on a round-the-country road trip, stopping with friends and relatives for a couple of days at a time, but there were a lot of long-driving days in there. I read a lot of books that were much too sophisticated for me ("The Plague", notably).
Did you keep an accurate accounting of the dead?
I miss driving up and down the Pacific coast states but I'm never driving from Eugene to southern California via the coast in one day again.
We've got DC to LA and then LA to Cincinnati coming up this summer, speaking of long road trips.
Good lord.
103: The boyfriend and I did a Bay Area to LA via PCH drive and it took so much longer than I expected (and sucked a lot more at the southern end). I can't imagine starting so much farther north. How long was your one day?
75 is surprisingly accurate for that kind of thing. I grew up in "Rich White Families" but now live in "Ripe for Future Gentrification" both of which are 100% on the money.
Speaking of PCH, I had insomnia last night and re-read through summaries of VM Season 1. How nice that I've seen it enough times to make that come to life.
PCH is kind of a thing in itself. I took 101 down from the Bay Area. Well, down from Oregon where the road from Eugene hit the coast. It was about 960 miles, left at 9 got in at 3, windows open in the car to help keep me awake.
106: Yeah, it fit pretty well with my (out-of-date and not really very specific) mental map of LA.
We did Seattle to San Fran mostly down the coast (but over the course of a week). Really would like to do that again spending even more time. I found the coast north of Mendocino to be one of the more magic landscapes I've experienced.
I really want to do a SF-Oregon coast drive, which I've never done. The best thing about the PCH, though, is this reptile store in Lomita. Huge monitor lizards walking around fuck yeah!
re: 108
I read that, and read it as 6 hours, and then wondered what kind of supercar you were driving. Then realised you must have meant 18.
Longest in distance was probably Pittsburgh to Nashville, or maybe Pittsburgh to Ocracoke. Longest in time was Orkney to Newcastle, taking the A1 along the coast around Berwick with a bunch of unnecessary stops as we had trouble finding open restaurants and petrol stations.
I grew up in "Rich White Families" but now live in "Ripe for Future Gentrification" both of which are 100% on the money.
Yeah, I grew up in "UMC Asian Families" which is totally true.
106: Yep. I grew up in MEH. My Mom taught at the college for B students.
103, et al.: Yup, that drive is definitely a doozy. I've apparently repressed that I once drove from Irvine to Astoria in a single shot, and that was easily as hard as Madison to Houston.
104: I know. We're going to be in each place for a while, so there's really no remotely affordable alternative.
I really want to do a SF-Oregon coast drive, which I've never done.
Yes. Like, what is in Eureka? Must find out. And then go visit the Goonies rock (in Brookings, IIRC?).
And then go visit the Goonies rock (in Brookings, IIRC?).
Not even close. Brookings is like the 1st town on the Oregon coast. Cannon Beach is like the 3rd to last. 200 miles away.
MPLS-to-Maine drives were always fairly interesting from scenery perspective, except for Ohio. Our one big trip (made when I was already a young adult) to the West was less good, as it involved going all the way through Nebraska. So tedious. The MPLS-LA journey I took in my early twenties on the dog was definitely grueling, but the scenery was amazing, and of course you get a lot of good stories. One of the saddest/weirdest Greyhound experiences I had was picking up some guy in the middle of nowhere on a trip east, clearly going to the city for work, but then he freaked out and jumped bus a couple of towns later to wait for the next bus back because he couldn't stand leaving his family. Wonder whatever became of him?
Over a couple of years, I hitched from Whitefish to the coast and back -- sometimes to Seattle, Eugene, BA -- a bunch of times and ended up going pretty much every which way. Hitched from Anchorage to MT over the course of 5 days, which means a lot more time moving than standing still.
My parents drive from the west coast of Florida to the east coast of Vancouver Island every year, and back. Sometimes via LA, this spring they'll be coming via Vermont.
For a bunch of their retired years, my mom's parents lived in Colorado Springs -- they had a trailer, and would spend X mas in McAllen Texas with a regular gang, and then the next 2 or 3 months fairly deep into Mexico.
I guess the roadtripping thing is genetic.
Like, what is in Eureka?
Hippies, tweakers, and rednecks. But hey, you're almost to Pelican Bay!
(I actually got a really bad vibe from Humboldt County. It's gorgeous but the combination of economic misery and intense reliance on tourism dollars was a bad one.)
117 -- There was a place in Trinidad that served a bottomless glass of milk. So there's that.
My ex-gf had a brother who owned a fishing lodge several miles up the Rogue from Brookings. Ended up there more than once.
I really want to do a SF-Oregon coast drive, which I've never done.
My wife and I totally want to do this and are probably going to try it in three years or so after my next two salary bumps. Maybe head west to the Lassen area first to where the family cabin is and then continue to the coast and work our way north for a couple weeks. I think it would be badass to have one of these Roadtreks but more realistically we'll likely throw a tow hitch on the minivan we're buying this year and get something like this pop up.
Brookings s/b Gold Beach. It's been a while.
Re: scenery, When we were driving through Nebraska one year, my father decided to do a countdown to the state line of Kansas. We got all excited - 10 miles until Kansas! I guess we'd confused Kansas with Oz, expecting there to be colors other than amber. It was so anticlimactic. Dad thought it was hilarious.
Oh, Cannon Beach. I now have to revise a memory I have of seeing the Goonies rock in Brookings.
I wonder if there's a way to get one's ability to concentrate back. I really used to like those long drives. I did Kentucky-Texas (which I think clocked in at 14 hours) tons of times. I miss seeing the country that way but it got too stressful to have an hour of every trip where I had this very stressed out "can't focus!" feeling. "Can't focus and am in large fast-moving thing!"
People who are coming through Cincinnati should say hi. I can't offer much in the way of a meetup, but maybe peep or urple could be coerced to drive in if we needed to increase the body count. (There's a less-frequent commenter who's closer, but I'm not sure if she's the meetup type.)
When we moved from MT to DC I had to drive it twice, because the wife didn't want to drive with a 2 year old, and we needed both cars -- second time in 2.5 days. Learned on the first one not to drive across NE, and haven't made that mistake since. ND is way better, and with SD at least you get the Heads and Devils Tower.
129: Definitely will do come mid-August, when we arrive. We've really enjoyed meeting up in other places over the past few years.
12 years ago my best friend and I did 11,000 in 3 weeks, from California to Maine and back with a whole lot of squiggly detours in the middle. Sometimes incredibly scary (my main memory of Scranton, PA is having to pull to the side of the interstate because the rain was so heavy) and incredibly boring (South Dakota, I'm looking at you), but also just full of fun and adventure. There is something about just getting in the car and going!
Come to think of it, it was really more like 11,000 in 2 weeks, since we were forced to stay put in Maine for a week thanks to car troubles. (And it turned out no one in Bangor really knew how to fix a Mitsubishi. North Carolina, on the other hand, finally managed it.)
Anyone want to try that "touch every (48) state" drive that's been posted at the other place?
The Summer of 73, my parents packed the three kids between 6 and 12 into a Dodge Dart to see America over a two month Summer. A Dodge Dart is not large. We looped from New Jersey to California and back, Yellowstone one way, Grand Canyon the other, Yosemite, Big Sur, and Disney Land (and two family weddings in different states) in between. Six weeks traveling by car, with a few . No DVD player. Some of the motels didn't even have TV in the rooms. No tape deck. Radio some of the time, but not in the emptier sections. A good time was had by all.
134 -- sure. But I'd rather try to beat the 29 hour cross country Cannonball Run record.
The longest road trips my parents did with us kids was an L.A. to northern WA with stops in northern CA, Gold Beach in OR, etc. and then one summer we went from L.A. up to UT, then Yellowstone, meandering across the north to Lake Itasca in MN and such before crossing up into Canada at Sault Ste. Marie and working back west and coming back into the U.S. through Glacier.
(I actually got a really bad vibe from Humboldt County. It's gorgeous but the combination of economic misery and intense reliance on tourism dollars was a bad one.)
Have I mentioned that I dated a Humboldt guy long distance for a while? The crowd that I saw weren't exactly reliant on tourism dollars.
OTOH, this was in 2004, so maybe pot was more lucrative then.
Back in '96 BOGF and I drove out to CA and back over the course of 3 weeks. We kind of ran out of money along the way*, so we cancelled our planned northern swing, extended our stay with a friend in SF, and then raced across the country in 4 driving days: SF>SLC>Denver>Chicago>Pgh. Denver to Chicago was IIRC 13 hours of driving spread over 16 hours; I did all of it but one hour in Iowa when I was getting a bit delirious. We spent a day just recuperating in Chicago.
Oh yeah, and this sucked: it was a ~8,000 mile trip, and the only ticket I got was outside Columbus OH. I was so desperate just to get the fuck home, and I forgot it was Labor Day weekend, with the attendant extra highway patrols.
*blew through more or less all our cash, maxed out my credit card, leaving BOGF to finance gas and food, and making paid accommodations infeasible
Brock Yates actually had interesting things to say on this very subject of long drives. I remember a piece of his from about 10 years ago about needing to trailer his racing car across the country, and the state of reverie that he experienced with that once-familiar now rare long drive.
We drove across Nebraska in the 80s, hot summer day, no ac. Wind amazing, very Mari Sandozian. Stopped and climbed a little mound, grass bending over in the gale, and met the eyes of a pronghorn about 10 feet away.
We've all driven across Nebraska in the 80s, but I don't recall seeing a pronghorn except when I went to a national park specifically to see one.
Sandoz has a dorm named after her, just like Cather.
134: A Dodge Dart is not large.
Canonically, it's supposed to be a '74 Dodge Dart, so that was obviously a big part of your problem.
139.3: A friend's sister made, I think it was about $4K? Maybe 6? For a month of hanging out watching someone's crop dry. This was in '09 I believe.
Somehow I convinced my parents in the summer of '73 that for our planned trip to Ottawa from Columbus, the 3 of us should take our '71 Corolla Wagon to save gas. My dad and I were both over 6'2" and over 200 lbs.
We did it, although it amazes me now to think about it. They were in their mid-fifties, I was 21. It was a 4-speed, to really save gas we could've used a 5-speed but I don't think they were available on that model.
These days the Corolla is a decent-sized car; we lease one and it's all we need for a family of 4 who only take day trips. But back then it was small, and loud.
Ottawa was transformed from the city we had left less than 10 years before: bigger, more cosmopolitan, with a lot of public and private construction. When I'd left, hockey was a winter game mostly played outdoors even for leagues. In '73 I wandered into an Arena in the middle of the night, not able to sleep, and found scheduled cradle-league games, in August. Eleven year olds.
The National Gallery on Sparks Street had been re-done, and was spectacular. I remembered the Nathaniel West Death of Wolfe from my childhood, but there was a tremendous amount more.
Our host was a longtime family friend, WWI vet and former hotel sous-chef, among other things. He and I cooked together. He was remarkable, like James Beard it seemed to me. Great stories.
I'm driving from Virginia to Louisiana in May, and I have a few days to do it. I'm torn between going down to Savannah first (because I loved that town when we passed through it on a band tour) or going through Nashville, which I've never visited.
The two times I stayed in motels in the Humboldt area were the two sketchiest motels I stayed in during my trips up and down the coast. I'm not sure if anyone was dealing rather than just smoking, but I wouldn't have been surprised if they were.
Canonically, it's supposed to be a '74 Dodge Dart, so that was obviously a big part of your problem.
Is it? I had a '73 that was a hand-me-down.
When I came back from Canada, I drove up around the Olympic Peninsula, up the Columbia to Stonehenge, then down 97 to southern Oregon, crossed over to 395, down 395 to 14, and then across to the coast. In retrospect, I wish I'd take more time, but I was out of money and on the way to long unemployment.
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