“Show me the photos from your road trip across the country,” said NO ONE EVER. I’m posting this mostly for my own benefit, so I can remember the trip, and maybe Grace will get a chuckle out of it too.
I had sort of looked forward to this road trip. I hadn’t driven across the country since 1982 (for the third of my ski-bumming winters), and I had the notion that it would be fun and relaxing if we took our time and saw the sights. We would play music really loud and sing at the tops of our lungs with the windows down. Grace and I are pretty simpatico; we would talk about life and her big new adventure, starting her Ph.D. in microbiology at Oregon State. I would get through a large bag of New Yorker magazines that I had brought along, and I’d catch up on some work too.
Instead, Grace and I were shell-shocked, exhausted and grief-stricken because we left two days after the funeral of Grace’s 21-year old cousin Jim. Jim had died six days earlier from leukemia. We still couldn’t believe it. In the beginning of the trip, we both did a lot of staring out the window.
The trip started with me taking the train to D.C. on a Friday evening, September 2 — the train part of the Plane (singular), Train (singular) and Automobiles (plural) journey. I Ubered out to Arlington, where Grace, JW and Grace’s roommates were still packing Grace’s car.
JW and Grace strapping in the bicycle. (This had to be undone, and redone, every time we opened the back of the car. Grace became very speedy at it.) Please note the green Ikea bookshelf strapped to the roof of the car, because it becomes relevant later. What you can’t see in the photo is that every square inch of the interior, except the front seats, is full. The bookshelf is ratcheted in, and Grace’s big-screen TV is in a box that had been slid in on top of all the rest of her belongings. My immediate reaction was: “Where is Dad going to fit?” He was meeting us 6 days later in San Francisco, where we would all spend a couple of days before doing the final drive up the coast to Oregon. Grace’s response: “He’s not going to fit. He’s going to have to rent a car.” I was too worn out to fight about it on Friday night, and I was also too tired to argue about Grace’s insistence that she pack up into a cooler all her Asian sauces, dumplings and Kimchi. “What if there are no Asian markets in Corvallis? I need these to cook.” My pointing out that Oregon is a lot closer to Asia than Virginia is, and that there would be plenty of places to buy Asian ingredients, fell on deaf ears.
Grace said her goodbyes, and we set out only a couple of hours later than we had originally planned. In mapping the trip, I’d hoped we could get to Youngstown, Ohio the first night, but we were tired and sad and didn’t want to push it, so we stopped just shy of Pittsburgh.
We took a photo in every state on this trip (Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, California, Oregon). Here is what it looked like driving through Pennsylvania that night:
