Road Trip - Day One

I take back everything I said about fearing a horrific driving experience with our kids!  They were awesome! No meltdowns, no crying, no fighting...and of course no napping, but hey, I'll gladly take that over the alternatives.  As we drove through the snowy southern Oregon wilderness, Lauren was especially amazed by the scenery. You'd hear a whispering "Wow!" and turn around to see her staring not at the DVD player, but out the window at the huge snow covered fir trees.

We blew right past our usual first stop of Yreka since the kids were doing so well, and pushed right on through to Redding where we stopped for a first.  The first trip to In-N-Out for the girls.  They weren't nearly as eager to gorge as their father was, but they did power down a grilled cheese and had a few fries.  They never get fast food, so it was still pretty exciting for them.

After Redding, it was another 4 hours to Windsor. I had forgotten how the last 20 miles or so on Highway 53 can be an absolute nightmare of a drive.  20 miles of hairpin switchbacks coupled with snow covered fog lines and a road still covered with cinders in the dark makes for one stressful drive. Kelsey curled into the fetal position for the majority of it, which was comforting. But we made it, and the Windsor resort is so nice!  I wish we could stay a little longer, but today we push on to Rancho Cucamonga. It looks like our good luck with travel weather is going to continue.  Day 1 is in the books!

Load up!

Tomorrow we're loading up the Suburban and hitting the road for a 10-day trip to Glendale, Arizona. We're on our way to the BCS National Championship Game to watch our Oregon Ducks play in the biggest game in their 114-year history. But more on that later. This trip was actually the reason that I started this blog; a way to record the things that we see and do along the way and share them with our friends and family so that the next time you're craving a double-double south of Bakersfield you'll know to get off at Kettleman City and hit the In-N-Out.

I was also hoping for some interaction along the way, where friends could suggest places to stop, places to avoid, places not to miss, etc. But in the middle of all of the holiday madness, I was much to late in getting this page up and running.  Anyway, it's here now, so let's go.

September, 2006

The road trip.  In days past it meant weeks of fast driving, alternate routes, and long trips up and down the West Coast.  I started making solo road trips shortly after turning 16.  In 1997 (I think) I loaded up my Honda Accord with Corby Wilson and we drove from Lebanon to Rosarito Beach, Mexico.  Back in the good old days when there was little fear of being shot in a border town or kidnapped for ransom.  Or the fantastic road trip that Kelsey and I (and Luke) took to Santa Barbara and Palm Desert for our first wedding anniversary.  Carefree and loose, with the open road stretched out in front of us...the world was ours!

Tomorrow, we embark on a different kind of road trip...the family road trip.  The first drive of more than 2 hours that we'll make with our 2 and 3 year old girls.  Now I love my kids, and they're great kids...but somewhere in the back of my mind I have a vision of a double-meltdown somewhere near Stockton with nowhere to hide, and not a cold beer in sight.

Maybe I'm wrong.  Maybe we'll hit the road and they will entertain themselves and stay happy for the entire trip!  We did borrow a sweet dual-screen DVD player from the Gaskey's that may just be our saving grace, and on a trip of 16 hours no amount of TV is too much.

I just want them to have fun and enjoy the trip.  They're going to meet some family that they've never seen before, as well as spend some time with extended family that they know and love.  Isn't that what family travel is really all about.  Hopefully along the way we'll have some amusing stories to relate, and we'll experience places and things that we'll be dying to tell our friends about.  And hopefully, I'll have the fortitude to open the laptop and share the day...or at least open a cold beer and share it with my wife.

In 12 short hours, they journey begins...

Two Safe Drugs, Relatively Speaking

They say the first step to overcoming addiction is admitting that you have a problem.  Well, I have a problem, but I have no desire to overcome it.  There are few things in this world that can capture my attention for hours on end.  The kind of things that envelope and engross you to the point that you look up and two hours have flown by.  So what is it?  Booze?  Pills?  Streaming porn?  Not even close... I'm addicted to Yelp and Google Earth.  There, I said it.  Sometimes I use them both together, at the same time; like an internet speed-ball.  Let's face it, if these vices were physically harmful I'd have been dead long ago.

Let's start with Google Earth. It's zoomable pictures of the entire world, people!  I mean are you kidding me?!?  Anywhere you want to go, anything you want to see, punch it up and there it is!  Blows my mind.  Then they added the street view feature so that you can actually see how shitty your old neighborhood looks now from right in front of the curb. No plane ticket, no driving, just zoom on in.  If I'm driving somewhere new, I'll actually go to Google Earth and look at the path/turns/directions whatever, so that when I'm coming up on a turn I already know what to look for.  Does this make me a loser? No, but it definitely means I have too much time on my hands, and that brings me to my next obsession: Yelp.

Now Yelp's been around for a long time and maybe you've already heard about it or used it, but I'm telling you that the Yelp concept is the greatest thing that's happened to dining in the last 5 years.  Yeah, you can check out a bunch of other crap on Yelp, but this site (and the people who support it) are all about the food!  When you're on the road in a strange town, do you want to archive some bullshit online review from a blowhard food columnist who got a free meal AND a free bottle of wine in exchange for an ass-kissing review of an otherwise overpriced and overrated restaurant.  Of course not!  You want real, honest reviews, from people like you.

This is why I love Yelp.  For the most part, the people posting reviews are average Joe's who know what's good and what sucks, and they're not afraid to tell you about it.  I have a personal success story involving Yelp that lets me know that the owners of restaurants also read the reviews and care about the image of their business.

After our third less than stellar meal at a nearby upscale restaurant, I wrote a scathing review on Yelp, bitching and moaning in great detail. Low and behold, a week later I received an email from the owner explaining that he was sorry to hear of my bad experiences and would I please provide my address so that he could send me a gift card for $100 as a way to try to win my business back.

Now being the cynic that I am, I smelled this dirty dog a mile away.  No way in hell was I giving out my address so that this guy's buddies could leave a flaming bag of dog shit on my porch for me to stomp out on a warm summer evening.  So I did what any of you would have done, and I gave him my in-laws address just in case there was a surprise coming my way.  Just kidding...I gave him my work address.  Two weeks later, the $100 gift card arrived and the next weekend my wife and I went to dinner on the owner.  And do you know what I discovered? A free meal tastes a hell of a lot better than one you pay for!

So, do something good for your community and become a Yelper!  Try new places, write reviews, and be a voice for the average Joe! Then get on Google Earth and look for other nearby places that you can visit and Yelp about.  You'll be speed-balling in no time, trust me...I'm an addict.

A Lost Habit

Santa Barbara High School

During my senior year at Santa Barbara High School, I had an AP English class with Mr. Dovgin.  At the time he was probably in his mid-50's, but he was one of those teachers who was just absolutely cool.  Not cool in the, "I don't give a shit what you do in my classroom." kind of way, but cool in that even as a 17 year old kid, I could tell that this guy had his shit dialed in and at some point back in time (hell, maybe even on the weekends) he was the kind of guy that probably threw some really interesting parties.

Every time you walked into his class, he had music playing.  We're talking vinyl. From a 45. Random shit, too.  One day it was Miles Davis, the next, Hendrix.  In my mind, I could see Mr. Dovgin sliding around the corner of the building during his lunch hour and burning one down.  The thing that made me like him most, was that he often went outside of the box with assignments and teachings, and he could be a bit of a hard-ass grading papers which was often frustrating to a student like me who enjoyed bullshitting his way through a paper every now and again.

One of Dovgin's assignments was a journal, turned in weekly and graded.  I absolutely hated this journal. You had to write it in one of those shitty manila covered composition books and of course every entry had to be at least so many pagers long.  I wasn't a fan of "letting my thoughts flow" onto paper at the time, so this term long assignment just plain sucked to me.

As I move through life, one of the things that I see more often than not is that it's often the decisions of others that have the most influences on our own, and this played true with Dovgin's journal assignments.  As much as I hated them through his entire AP English class, when I stopped doing it a funny thing happened.  I missed it. I realized that I was always fascinated with the passing of time and periods of time in history, and my own life was no exception.  I found that I liked picking up that journal and flipping through it to see what state of mind I was in on any given day, and when the entries stopped so did my ability to connect with my past. I missed that habit.

So on a January morning in 1994 in the bookstore at UCSB, I picked up a small hard cover blank journal and decided to start up the tradition once again.  My first entry was on my 19th birthday.  I did my best to keep it current; sometimes I'd knock out 2 entries in a week, other times I'd lapse for 2-3 months at a time, but I'd always come back to the journal.  I would travel with it and make entries from wherever I was on vacation. I'd break it out and read through past entries when thoughts came to mind or when I was trying to remember when or where I met someone.  It was a really helpful tool, mostly psychologically. The journal became a therapist of sorts.

I would bitch about the crappy part time job that I was working at, or excitedly count down the days to my Catalina Island vacations.  Whatever was at the surface at the given moment went down on the page, and that was what made it so relevant.  I could flip back 3 years in time, read an entry, and remember the feeling of that day based solely on the way that it was written.  That always captivated me, for some reason.

Eventually the book fizzled out for good, gone the way of many other good intentions in my life that I meant to keep up but never did.  Let's face it, the more years that you pack on, the more complex life gets by nature, and that's a really shitty reality at times.  I often long for, and am jealous of, the simpler lives led by many of my friends or old acquaintances, but I wouldn't trade a moment of my past or present life with them. Where I've been and where I am make me who I am, and where I'll be. But the little joys in life (like the book) often fall prey to the complexities.

Now, I spend a dedicated portion of my day with a computer on my lap or in front of my face.  Why, I asked, don't I take the concept of the book and apply it to my modern world to see if it can survive and thrive once again.  So here I am, propped up on my bunk at work, rediscovering a lost habit. And it feels good! 

What will it be? Different from what it once was, that I'm sure of. But isn't that how things work? Time passes and things evolve, and this will too.  So this will be a new place for the proud parent stories, the animated rants, the details of travel, and the minutiae of life.  Here we go again...