Reno to Las Vegas

Posted by the side of the road we saw warning signs for angry bulls, cows, sheep, donkeys, horses, deer and elk-- but not a single one for tumbleweeds, which were, in fact, the only thing that crossed our path.  One rolled out of total darkness a few feet in front of our headlights, scaring the hell out of us, making Chris swerve into the shoulder, the rear of our overloaded van swinging behind us in a big sickening lurch before he could correct.

Other than that, the drive from Reno to Vegas is mostly very long.  It's hard to have any conception of just how big this country is, unless you drive through it-- after three days (not counting a few day-long stops) driving through all of daylight and into darkness, and we've only crossed a tiny portion of our route, just part of the north to south a little of the west to east.  I sat in the van and stared at the map of the U.S. in the front of our road almanac, and realized that we still have nearly the whole breadth of the country to go.
And to think people did this on horses.
The land here can be beautiful--the rolling brown hills, the ragged multicolored rock hills--but after hours the expanses of brown and gray scrub tired our eyes.  And the expanses are so long; on I-95, hours pass between each tiny outpost town.  A few, like Luning, are ghost towns, or nearly, with hard-weathered abandoned houses and doublewide trailers, graveled roads choked with engines, appliances, and building materials between each small plot. All the houses are torn and broken, perhaps by the hard, constant wind. These places are beautiful to me, though ominous--wandering through Luning there was still movement and sounds all around us.  In the empty place the wind bounced off a sheet of steel leaning against a post so that it made a shrieking, whining sound, curtains in open glassless windows flapped in the wind.  Everywhere there was an impression of people, where no people were... Though some way behind the clearly abandoned area, we saw an RV parked next to a house that looked inhabited-- Who would live here? We wondered.
More photos of Luning to follow...

Weed, CA to Reno

"The road to Reno is kinda desolate.  But it's some of the most beautiful country you'll ever stick your face on."-Chris

Mt. Shasta National park is gorgeous--almost articifically so, like a Disney family camping movie.  You can imagine that just around the next copse of trees there's a troupe of boy scouts in their little kercheifs and shorts, tying knots and gathering kindling. One-hundred foot tall evergreens line the road, with bright green bushes and reddish dirt and underbrush at their feet.
Despite the high elevation and the season, the sun is strong enough that I'm warm in my sweater.  It's the first real sun we've seen in weeks. The Norwest in December has been sadly bleak. In winter it can feel like the sun never rises, and the short days (from about 9am to 4pm) pass in a twilit gloom.  Usually such heavy overcast skies mean warmer temperatures, but this winter has been especially biting, especially sharp.
The sun this morning reveals the forest at its best: the rough, scaled bark of the trees, the bunches of pine needles that appear soft from a distance, like tufts of green fur.  Meanwhile snow-covered Mt. Shasta towers in our rear view mirrors. When we left Weed, CA this morning the mountain was on our left, above and in between parts in the evergreens.
As we drive the road rises and dips around 4,000ft elevation.  Occaisionally there is a cluster of cabins, or a tiny motel and cafe all in one building, serving much the same purpose as a medieval inn.

We stayed the night in Weed, and when we left in the morning we were excited and feeling good, mostly due to the rare (for us) sunlight. We had breakfast at the Hi-Lo Diner, where we'd also had dinner the night before.  It's the kind of place you always hope to find on the road, perfect Americana: thick slices of homemade pie and giant buttermilk biscuits, generous portions of everything, including crispy little wedges of homefries, and the fluffiest pancakes ever, all with a country music soundtrack.  We stayed at the Hi-Lo motel there too, which was okay--cost about ten bucks more, maybe, than it should have that far out, but it was clean and comfortable, and came with a fridge and a microwave (all too rare on the road).
So we were in a good mood when we left. We were headed to Reno for a very cheap night at Circus Circus, about an hour out from Weed, when the tire exploded.
Okay, it didn't actually explode, not with flames--but it blew out, and we had to pull over to the side of the road, and by the time we got there the tire was totally shredded.
We had a spare... unfortunately reaching it meant taking off the bikes and bike rack from the back of the van, pulling out quite a few boxes and setting them by the side of the road, to get at it.  Then once we did so, and jacked up the van, we realized we didn't actually have a tire iron.


Here's a picture of the tire blowout:

And of Chris, with unloaded boxes and bikes...

We were in the middle of nowhere with no idea how far we were to the next town. We looked at each other, shagrined, shaking our heads, considering how much it might cost to call a tow truck to help.  Chris flagged down a car.  They stopped, and the extremely nice couple spent at least half an hour digging underneath their luggage trying to find an iron (they were also on the road, heading to Vegas).  They eventually did find an iron, but it was the wrong size.  We thanked them, and they drove along to the next town, where they called  tow truck for us.  Meanwhile, not knowing they had done this, we flagged down another car (this was far from a busy road, but a few cars passed by).  The driver of this one, whose name was Wendy, didn't have a tire iron--but she called her son to find one and come bring it to us! Then she told us that if we couldn't make it to the next town, she was already having people over for dinner that night, and we were welcome to come join them and stay.  We were amazed at such niceness, and thanked her profusely. She smiled and shrugged it off, then drove away, telling us her son would be along soon.  About twenty minutes or so later he arrived, giant tire iron in hand, introduced himself--I'm not sure how to spell his name, Lane/Layne/Laine--and proceeded to change the tire for us, waving off our attempts to help. Meanwhile a police officer drove up, made sure we were all okay, and then stood watching as Lane/Layne/Laine changed the tire and we loaded up the van.  Then the officer gave us directions to the nearest tire place.
Being from Seattle, I'm used to nice--but this was a whole new level of niceness.  No one wanted anything, just to help.  Though apparently it was also from experience of the danger of the area to tourists.  It gets very cold in Mt. Shasta, and a long way between towns, and people get lost there every season, and some freeze. For locals, I guess a van stranded by the side of the road can mean something more serious than for city people, and so they're even more willing to stop and help.  But they were also just plain nice.
The rampant niceness continued in the little town we stopped in to get a new tire, Burney, a cute place with one main street.  We biked around for about an hour, then wandered around in the biggest and nicest antique store I've ever seen.  At the local burger and shake shack (adorable, pink, with a tall triangular roof), the guy working there struck up a conversastion with us, then gave us free dip cones after we told him our story about the tire.  Small town hospitality can be incredible.

We left Burney as the sun was setting, and every house there had lit wood stoves.  Smoke hung in the air between their chimeys and the highway.
We entered Lessen National Park. The trees were spaced farther apart there, with feilds and rock-strewn underbrush between  This would be an amazing place to hike, another time.
We made it to Reno at about 8pm, checked into Circus Circus, which turned out to be one of the nicest hotels in Downtown Reno.  We spent the night wandering the area, which despite its claims as a 24 hour city, seemed to be largely closed by 10pm.  The best of Reno is what is picturesque about it, like a Terry Gilliam or Quentin Tarantino movie--haggard-faced people sitting in front of the flashing lights of nickle slots, heavy smoke in the casinos, brightly lit pawn shops next to abandoned motels with names like, "Reno's best." After the visit, I understand why people dog Reno.  At best, it's the nicest room I've ever stayed in for  $38, including the resort fee (which included a tiny gym, but no microwave, alas).
The following day we drove from Reno to Vegas-- more about that soon.

Goodbye, Seattle!
We are on the road at last, in Portland, Oregon.  Portland is the capitol of indie bike shops and bike makers--the most famous possibly Chris King hubs--and also has no sales tax, so it's the perfect place for us to stop and equip ourselves before we drive across the country.
We were packing for ten days. We had no conception, when we began, of the sheer quantity of stuff we had managed to conceal in every closet and cupboard.  We shared a big, three storey, five bedroom house with a rotation of  roomates for three and a half years.  Most of our roomates came in with little furniture but what fit in their own rooms, and we had moved in just after a previous girl had taken nearly all the furniture from the common rooms with her.  We came in therefore to a nearly empty house, but with a basement filled with junk abandoned by previous tenents--our landlords never moved everyone out and to start new with a different lease, but left us to sublet on a continuing lease re-signed once every year; I think by the time we moved in the house had been going like this for ten years or so.  
 Since our other roommates were grad-students and hardly ever home and had no time to be invested, we became the house caretakers.  We cleaned out the basement, where we found a great deal of furniture and cool bits and bobs (along with a lot of garbage) and generally tried to make the house homey and comfortable.  It sounds like an awful task--sometimes it really was--but there was also a lot of satisfaction in it. We were setting up a house together, and since our roommates were rarely home, for much of the time we got to make use of the house as if it was just ours--though we were happy when they were; almost all of our roommates were really, really cool.  If only it hadn't been for the alchoholic one who would never leave the kitchen, where he sat finishing off several bottles of liquor every day, laughing at his own bad jokes and listening to Prarie Home Companion, I might be able to say all without the almost... but thankfully he left after just a few months... after drinking literally all the alchohol in the house.  You don't want to know.
So basically, we did our best to fill the house with stuff, so it felt like home.  The downside of that being, as we realized, that we had not just a room to deal with when we left, but essentially the whole giant place. When we set out, we had hoped it would take four or five days to pack, and we had quit our jobs just far enough in advance to leave time for that before we were to head out for Portland on Saturday morning.  We did not leave Saturday morning. On Saturday we weren't even close, still discovering boxes and boxes of stuff, and puzzling over the bits that are so hard to sort and to pack.  It might not have been so difficult if we hadn't at the same time needed to narrow our possessions down to only what we could fit in the van.  Many times I wanted to just throw it all in boxes and go, but we couldn't make multiple trips this time, or sort when we get there--because everything we kept we would be driving across the country to Florida, to store at Chris' mom's house.  My family has no storage areas, and since we might be biking for up to two years, renting a storage space would be expensive, much more than just replacing what we left behind. And frankly, most of our furniture was of the college type, cheaply purhased or found free.  The stuff that you lug along with you to avoid having to go out and buy new stuff, but which you never really like.
But the furniture wasn't difficult, except for loading it up and taking it to Goodwill.  The hard part was getting rid of the accoutrements.  Especially the kitchen stuff.  Chris and I cook all the time, and love to host dinner parties, so we had tons of appliances, bowls, pans, and utensils, everything from a culinary torch (which I kept) to a bagel-slicer (which I didn't).  And then there were my notebooks... boxes from when I was a kid to notebooks from this past year, studying Italian; notebooks filled with parts of stories, poems, journal entries, notes from class and to-do lists, all together.  I couldn't just bring that mass of paper with me, but I didn't want to throw away the journal entries and poems and stories either, as many I had never typed up, and a few were actually pretty good... So I had to sort through it all, tearing out the pages I wanted to keep and recycling the rest. That took a day all by itself.  In the end, I narrowed it down to just two boxes, and while I did so I got to discover that I have been, in certain times of my life, not too bad of a writer.  That was a bright part of the otherwise bleak and exhausting packing experience.  I remember telling Chris, "This is never going to end.  We're going to be packing for the rest of our lives." It didn't help that we were dragging our feet--not that we didn't want to start travelling, but that we didn't want to leave this house we'd loved so much, our first house together.  There are ways of working as hard as you can but still never quite finishing.  For ten days, that is what we did.
By Wednesday night we were physically and emotionally exhausted, but we were also almost done.  It had taken five days longer than we expected to pack what we wanted to keep, give or donate the rest, clean up after ourselves, and run the last errands that need to be done when leaving a place.  For three days my hands had been shaking and we hadn't gone to bed till we were half asleep already, swaying on our feet-- but we were, at last, almost done.  We had managed to pack up the van, giving up a good deal more stuff in the process, as we saw it couldn't all fit.  We went to bed knowing that finally it the morning, after all this time, we would be leaving Seattle.
I slept through most the of the three hour drive to Portland, and Portland is enough like Seattle that when we got there it felt to me like we still hadn't left.  On our second day here, it still feels much like we haven't.  The weather is the same--too cold and darkly overcast--there are the same adorable, multi-story houses with gardens, everywhere (though Portland has far more in the Victorian style than Seattle does), the same neighborhoods with their own little clusters of independently-run restaurants and shops.  It's the Northwest, where I've spent twenty years of my live, and Chris a few months shy of seven.  A beautiful place, but also a place that has, like all places, its own narrow perspective on the world.  I'm a product of the Northwest.  Though I was born in the Midwest, we moved here when I was a child.  I can see that in how I think and behave, and I want to be more than just one place.  I think Chris felt the same way, when he first left Florida.  To see the world is to see yourself, with perspective, perhaps.  Anyway, we want to see it.  And though it doesn't yet feel much like it at the moment, here in Portland which is different, but so very much like Seattle, still we have moved past our front door, we have begun our adventure.

Learning how to ride a bike

Chris and I have never been regular cyclists.  In fact, I couldn't ride a bike until only two, maybe three months ago.  Chris started trying to teach me over a year ago, but I was... resistant.  Not that I didn't want to ride--I wanted to, very much-- but for a long time I've been terrified of riding a bike, and I never really believed it was something I was capable of. 
It's hard to say for sure exactly when the transition happened, when I crossed over into really being able to ride, because for a while our practices were so sporadic; it took me weeks between each lesson to dull my memory of the terror of the last and to work up my courage for another.  So it's difficult to pin down just when my wobbly, panic-stricken jaunts of a few feet to a few blocks, punctuated by putting both feet on the ground, driving into things, and simply panicking until we gave up for the day and I wheeled the bike home, useless and defeated--graduated to me actually riding, turning on purpose, slowing down and speeding up intentionally, and successfully braking by using the bike's brakes rather than by yelling, jumping off, and tripping over my feet or the bike in the process. 
I think my watershed moment was the first time I hit a curb dead on.  I had just steered around a set of traffic cones Chris had placed for me to practice with and was feeling pretty good about myself, when I saw the curb coming directly up in front of me. My arms locked up in terror, which precluded me from steering, and, as often happens when I'm really afraid, I also forgot to brake.  So I went full speed ahead and directly into it.  At that moment my mind blanked out from sheer panic, so I have only Chris' word for what happened next: apparently my two years' training in martial arts took over, because I did a very impressive ninja leap off of the bike and rolled into a comfortable sitting position, with my butt on the curb and my feet on the road, and the bike landed gently on its side in front of me. All I remember is panicking, and then suddenly, to my surprise, finding myself sitting.  I heard Chris a block or so behind me, calling my name.  I was furious because I had been so stupid as to crash.  Now I would be scared and ruin this otherwise successful day of riding (I had gone up and down the block and had steered round in circles without Chris holding on at all), and it would probably be weeks before I could try again.  I was so angry that I smacked the curb very hard with my bare hand, to show it. 
Later, wheeling the bike back to the house, I took stock and realized that, besides a slightly jostled rear-view mirror, the only damage from my very first crash was a sore palm.
It was a decisive moment for me.  All along I had been nearly paralyzed by fear, by the possibility of crashing, sure that if I fell off of the bike I was going to be seriously, painfully injured, break something or sprain something or worse, die. In fact, death via falling off the bike seemed to me imminent and inescapable.  And yet here I was, having crashed directly into a curb, and the bike and I were both uninjured.
After that day I swiftly grew more brave.  Less than a month later we went on several long rides, long enough that I cold no longer deny that I did know how to ride a bike.  On these Chris and I took the Burke-Gilman trail-- a beautifully shaded, paved bike trail that runs through Seattle and North to Bothell.  By our first time on the Burke-Gilman we'd gone several times on trips round the lake near the house, up to 8 miles. Still, I felt shaky and couldn't get myself to stand up while riding.  The first day we attempted the Burke-Gilman we went the wrong direction (we're famous for that), meaning to head Northeast to where there is a park on the beach, instead heading Southwest, but still managed to ride 16 miles, as we picked up the trail about halfway.  A week later we came back and road to the trail's end and back: 30 miles, an unbelievable distance to me, twice as far as I'd ever managed to run in one go.  It was a long, hot, grueling day, with us on the bikes for at least three hours, with a couple extra hours with breaks for food and water and for pushing the bikes up and down the several hilly miles to and from the trail (I was still too nervous to ride in traffic). We hadn't expected to ride so long or so far and hadn't brought enough food, and we were ravenous by the time we finished.  The trail runs near my favorite Mexican restaurant, and when we finally reached it we got a table as quickly as we could and devoured a huge basket of chips while we waited for our tacos, consuming enough tamarind salsa in the process to make us both very queasy the next day.  But we had covered 30 miles, and by the end of it there was no doubt: I knew how to ride a bike.

I had a bike when I was a little kid, something with white tassels on the handlebars, and training wheels.  Someone--I remember a baby sitter--decided one day it was time to take off the training wheels and to teach me how to ride by myself.  I was game for a try, so off came the wheels and I pedaled about three feet forward, and then fell directly sideways onto the parking lot in front of our apartment house, and bruised my arm.  And that was that.  We weren't much for try and try again in my family--our theory was, if you tried something and failed at it, that must mean you stunk at it for life and should therefore never do it again. Instead you should go do something you are good at, meaning something you've never failed at.
It took me years--or rather, it took Chris pointing it out to me over and over for years--to see what a prison this mindset becomes, limiting your field of what you are allowed or ought to do in life, narrowing your life into a series of smaller and smaller boxes of activities and careers you either haven't tried yet, can't fail at, or simply must continue to do out of necessity, whether you fail at them or not (such as walking and going to the bathroom).  The great irony is that, without a doubt, you are going to fail in performance of everything at some point, especially when you first begin.  Who hasn't tripped while walking, or dropped food on their own lap or--in the case of men particularly--peed on the toilet seat?  These are all failures to perform perfectly, yet because they are necessities, if I made errors in these areas I ignored them and continued to eat, walk, and pee.  But as a child I fell off my bike once, mildly bruised my arm, and that was that: I was rotten at biking, doomed forever, sure to only hurt myself more, and I should just give it up and never try it again, ever.
I think I declared as much to my mom and grandparents after the training wheel incident, and as far as I remember it was never contradicted.  No one told me--and certainly no one made me--try again, have another go.  The bike was simply put away and eventually sold.  I am sometimes angry with my family for this sort of thing, but I can't really blame them.  They too live in their own little prisons of failure that dictate what they can and cannot do, until there is very little left remaining.  And theirs are worse than mine, perhaps, because due to Chris, I am learning to pull the bricks out of the walls.  My family may do so too over time, but I think it is harder for them.  Their prisons are bigger than mine; they've been working on them for longer.

Biking is the first time in my life I've ever been really, truly afraid of something and really truly awful at it, and kept doing it anyway.  Except maybe for dating, which is another story. To my relief and shock, despite being terrified and awful when I started, continuing to do it has meant that I have gotten better.  In fact, it's now clear to me that with sufficient practice, there's no reason I can't be quite good at biking, even though the first time I gave it a go as an adult I had a full meltdown just trying to get my feet on the pedals.  I honestly don't know if I've ever been worse at anything. Yet a month ago and a few times since, I biked 30 miles.  And four months from now I'll be biking around 225 miles a week.  
Okay, putting it like that is a bit intimidating, but I don't have to get there all at once. Unlike the several long-distance bike trekkers whose books I've read recently-- Rob Lilwall, who cycled 30,000 miles, starting in Siberia in winter, without having trained first; Polly Evans, who cycled through Spain on a bike she'd never even ridden once before leaving; and Mark Beaumont, who circumnavigated the globe on a bike, doing 100 miles a day, and trained primarily by running--I actually am training beforehand, and on the same bike I intend to ride.  And I'll have Chris for company.
I'm still intimidated, but also increasingly excited, while I work on changing my family's unconscious motto: if I fail at something but I want to do it anyway, then I should definitely keep doing it.

Four months left

Four more months in Seattle... Four months to be treasured, a jewel... Four months of a huge kitchen to cook in, endless food supplies stored in abundance... Four months of a big mattress, controllable temperatures, walls and regular shelter... Four months of a closet full of clothes, of knick-knacks, a giant TV at only our disposal, doors only we can lock.  Four more months of neighborhoods we know: the best bakeries, coffee shops, cheapest fruit, best Thai, Mexican, all-night diners; best walks, best movie theatres, best parks and views and festivals... Four months of fitting in, speaking the language, knowing the culture, knowing the safe and unsafe places, knowing how to get food and money, warmth, clothes, shelter... knowing it all, safe comfortable, beautiful, mostly easy in Seattle, full of flowers and crosswalks, intellectual, quirky, progressive, rarely freezing, rarely sweltering, often dismal but generally mild... complaints we know, jokes we know, people we know... Our own cupboards, closet, storage, backyard, dining room, living room, oven, stove, pots and pans and kitchen knives, laptops, mail, projector screen, couches, bed, dressers, chairs, car... Green Lake Park, Julia's Bakery, Scarecrow Video, Cafe Diablo, Flying Apron, Theo Chocolate, Fremont, Dim Sum King, Trader Joe's, the Public Library, Cinerama, Beth's Cafe, Greenwood, and our house.
Seeing all these places for the last time (or at least the last time for a year, or more) is too big to contemplate, because these are the places of my life now.  But for every place lost, for every friendly face said goodbye to, there will be 10, 20, 100 more, I believe.  We will have to say goodbye to Mike at Julia's-- but how many wonderful bakeries, friendly, bright-faced bakers will we meet? Goodbye to Green Lake and its beautiful water and trees--but how many beautiful views, oceans and lakes, fields and hills and vistas will we see?  Even Beth's... there may be no other 12 egg omelets (and perfect crispy hash browns served up with paper and crayons to draw with), but how many pubs and chip shops, family-run cafes, even hostels and homes where we'll eat welcoming, greasy, delicious comfort food?  And our home-- how many couches and floors and beds kindly offered by friends and strangers, how many party-filled hostels (maybe too many parties...) will we stay in... And how many mornings will we wake up camped on grass, between trees, or on the floors of abandoned old farmhouses, and sit in the fresh air while we heat water on our camp stove for breakfast...
The scope of my missing my current comfort is too big to understand now, because now I have curiosity, adventure and challenge and freedom, of being strange, new, uncomfortable, in awe, pushed, struggling, alive, courageous, joyous and great, calling me... So much so that, though it would be unwise for many reasons-- no visas, not much biking endurance, no route plans, no plane tickets, not quite enough money, the worst time to travel, and not practiced with equipment, or even much of it bought-- I want to chuck it all now, to quit our jobs, sell our stuff, and leave right away, tomorrow.