The Great American Road Trip

Recently billboards have been popping up around our fair city that depict two hipster chicks sitting happily in a lovely green field with the caption "Visit Nebraska. Visit Nice".  So much is wrong with that billboard that I hardly know where to begin.  First no such field exists in Nebraska, they clearly took the picture somewhere in Vermont.  The obvious reason for that is that Nebraska is not nice which is obvious to everyone who has ever been forced to drive east on I-80 (don't laugh Kansas, you're next). And second, the irony of the billboard is that everyone in Nebraska can't wait to get the hell out of there and come to Colorado for vacation.  What makes them think we want to go visit a place where the locals flee each summer?  What's next? Is Oklahoma going to start running radio spots around here?

One of the most American things about America is that Great American Road Trip (GART). You know, pack the kids in the minivan, make sure they are all wearing head phones, and go somewhere like Yellowstone, or Great Smokey Mountain National Park.   This year ours took us far away from Nebraska to the northwest for my sister's wedding in Tacoma, Washington.  The wedding was lovely as was the quality family time, but that won't make these virtual pages.  Nope, instead we will give you random observations from life on the road.  And since I recently learned that humans love lists, and in fact our brains might just be designed to naturally make lists, here are my observations in list form.


1. Radio Free Wyoming

Entertaining yourself on the highways of this broad land can be a challenge!  I tried my best to sock away CD's and Audio Books to help pass the time.  But invariably once you have listened to Shakey Graves new album a couple times you end up surfing the radio airwaves.  All I can say is thank God for NPR.  At almost no point in the trip were the comforting tones of Robert Siegel and Terri Gross not there to guide us across hostile territory.  Our trip took us across some of the bright red places in this nation.  Idaho, Wyoming and Eastern Oregon are not places to find much more than preaching and the pulpit of Rush Limbaugh on the air.  At one point in the middle of Wyoming I was flipping through the AM offerings and found that I could hear Limbaugh on at least 12 different stations.  But the voice crying in the wilderness was always there as a guiding light.  Bless you David Greene!

2. Thanks Dwight

It is pretty great to live in a country that has such a great Interstate Highway System.  Before you bring up that the Autobahn is better or that we should all take the train take a minute to appreciate that you can jump in your car tomorrow and drive almost anywhere, for free (if you don't count gas taxes). The guy who gets most of the credit for the freeway system is President Dwight. D. Eisenhower.  One element I'd like to thank him for personally is the Rest Stop.  Nothing is sweeter when your bladder is ready to burst or your wife is punching because she has to go than to see that beautiful blue sign announcing relief in two miles.  We humans crave familiarity and nothing is more familiar than a rest stop.  Cars go one way, and RV's and trucks another.  The bathrooms are always dark sixties style construction with big map hanging in the lobby.  Sometimes there is free coffee and always there is good people watching.  Do yourself a favor next time you find yourself at one of those highway oasis's and stand in the grass and smell the farms or the sage brush ocean just beyond the fence.

3. Saucy Sisters

Something I don't get to do very often living in a flyover state is to ride a ferry.  A day or two before the wedding we took a family trip across the Puget Sound from Tacoma to Vashon Island for some wet, green Washington fun.  The light house and beach were great!  Of course it rained. And my nieces are adorable!  But the best part of Vashon Island that day was Saucy Sisters Pizza.  Don't go to the Saucy if you want one of those thick Chicago style pies.  These guys make paper thin, topping loaded amazing-nous that bake for only 90 seconds in a 600 degree brick oven.  You can order one online while you're on the ferry and it will be ready for you when you get off, how cool is that?  I had a pesto pie with Gorgonzola on it which was really good except that my brother who supposedly hates pesto ate half of it.  Next time you're anywhere between Portland and Vancouver B.C, do yourself a favor and take a detour to Saucy Sisters!

4. Living in Livingston  

I gotta say Montana is pretty sweet.  I should clarify by saying the western half of the state since I haven't been to the east but I hear its pretty stark.  The Montana I did see was big and mountainous and dotted with cool towns like Missoula, Bozeman and my new favorite, Livingston.  Not far from Bozeman where I-90 meets the Yellowstone River is a town of seven thousand very lucky men, women and children.  It's got cool mountains, a very vibrant and artsy downtown, cool writers like Jim Harrison and of course one of the prettiest rivers I have ever seen.  My wife says to never decide to move somewhere without seeing it in winter which is sound advice, but I might have to make an exception in the case of Livingston.

5. Hay There

I have a confession to make.  I have a thing for hay bales! Maybe it's the way they sit so serenely in those picturesque fields by the millions this time of year.  Maybe it's the smell of fresh cut grass or the way a tractor rakes the rows. Whatever the reason it's a great time of year for the GART especially if you're a hay bale freak.


6. Motel Sierra

It turns out that the back of a GMC Sierra makes a pretty sweet sleeping spot, especially when you are in a part of the country that gets no rain this time of year.  Just pump up your air mattress using a cigarette lighter adapter and curl up for the meteor shower.  The only problem I can see is when you have that night in Montana when the temp drops into the thirties and you didn't bring enough warm clothes.  Hopefully you don't have to pee in the middle of the night because there is no way you're getting out of that bag.

7. Bugging Out

There is a mystery about road trips that I have been trying to solve the last couple days.  It's the high number of bugs that off themselves against the grill and windshield of your vehicle.  What's got me confused it that even as I drive around town or on the local freeways at speeds near or matching those of the open road, I can't remember ever having a bug kamikaze my ride.  The wife and I debated this on one particularly lonely stretch of road.  Her argument was that there is so much grass along the highways and bugs love grass so the sheer volume means more bug deaths.  I countered with what I was sure was the fact that bugs eat crap and dead stuff so there should be more window splats around the city.  The mystery remains unsolved but I will say that road trip etiquette does not allow you to pull into a gas station just to clean the bugs off your window.  If you forget to do it while your tank is filling up you are doomed to curse yourself for the next three hundred odd miles.  It's called learning the hard way.

8. Bumpers

We saw a lot of bumper stickers on the GART.  But only one stands out and we will close with it.

                "God was my copilot but we crashed in the mountains and I had to eat him"