On the Road with Rolo

Though I don’t promise to stay in one place in the real world, I do promise to stop changing blogs so often. Regardless, the newly redesigned and very spiffy www.nomadchronicles.com will remain the place to track me down online. This is my last entry from this blog, since I’m certainly no longer on the road with Rolo. Over and out!

Some pictures from Kansas, courtesy of my cousin, and a few more pictures of Rolo’s final day are in the Midwest album. Enjoy!

So I’ve made it to New Jersey, and all’s well… no immediate plans to go elsewhere–except to Ithaca/Syracuse next weekend for my brother’s band’s final show.

Thanks for reading, and I’ll let you know when I get a new blog set up.

Amazing how everything can change in a millisecond. Still completely enamored of the blue highways (see earlier post), last Friday I mapped a route from Chicago to Louisville, Kentucky, that would take me almost all the way to the Kentucky Derby, and the globalfreeloaders who’d agreed to host me for Louisville’s biggest weekend of the year, without getting on the interstate. I was desperate to avoid Chicago’s high gas prices (up to $3.25 for regular at some stations), and finally found a “reasonable” ($2.79) price just across the Indiana border. All gassed up, oil topped off, and Rolo bathed to remove all the bird droppings that accumulated while he was parked under the El tracks for four days, I was raring to go, and eager to move beyond the urban congestion of northwest Indiana. Sitting at a red light in the unremarkable town of Hammond, I pulled out the atlas again to determine whether I would indeed have to get on the interstate for a brief bit as the sign up ahead suggested. A few seconds later, there was a massive BOOM! and Rolo jerked forward. I had no idea what had happened, but after seeing in the rearview mirror that my back windshield was completely smashed, and that there was a medical transport van unnaturally close to me, it started to make sense. Read the rest of this entry »

Available here. I suppose Denver isn’t technically considered the Midwest, but whatever. Unfortunately my cousin Keri has all the pictures from my adventures in Kansas on her camera, so those will have to be posted later.

I’ve been to Chicago several times (although my friend Connie and I found that our collective memories of those visits are hazy at best, and we’re not even sure if I’ve seen her there once or twice or more, and whether my trips were for business as well or just to see her), so didn’t spend much time doing touristy stuff on this visit. Mostly I hung out at Connie’s sweet pad in Wrigleyville (that means near Wrigley Field, of course–you can hear the cheering from her place during games!), got some work done, ate tons of great food (two tasty brunches, Vietnamese, sushi, Mexican, Chicago deep-dish pizza), went to Hemingway’s birthplace and museum in Oak Park–an interesting but very down-home affair, and hung out at a bar where we played yahtzee and triominoes. Good times.

I drove all the way from Salina, Kansas, to Aurora, Illinois, without getting on the interstate. I quickly realized the appeal of what writer William Least Heat-Moon calls the blue highways because they were that color on old highway maps: the act of driving itself is more enjoyable, I can focus on my surroundings instead of the tail lights ahead of me, when I stop for gas or to get a snack it’s at a local place where the other customers are locals instead of all those passing through on the interstate, I get to pass right through the heart of old towns instead of bypassing them entirely. I’ve seen lively towns, near-ghost towns, attractive towns, not so charming towns… As Heat-Moon puts it in Blue Highways, “I turned south onto state 4… after that the 42, 500 miles of straight and wide could lead to hell for all I cared; I was going to stay on the three million miles of bent and narrow rural American two-lane, the roads to Podunk and Toonerville. Into the sticks, the boondocks, the burgs, backwaters, jerkwaters, the wide-spots-in-the-road, the don’t-blink-or-you’ll-miss-it towns. Into those places where you say, ‘My god! What if you lived here!’ The Middle of Nowhere.” Read the rest of this entry »

Our time in Denver was spent with old friends, catching up on each other’s lives, eating good food… We went to see the Bodyworlds exhibit, a fascinating way to learn more about the human body. It made me realize how much we take for granted that our bodies work relatively well most of the time, and made me feel like I should be doing everything I can to help out. After Aaron left town I spent time with travel friends I’d met on my trip around the world as well as elementary school friends I hadn’t seen in almost 20 years! Reuniting with five former classmates was a lot of fun–it’s amazing that people really look inherently the same even after so much time has passed. It also snowed while I was in Denver, so Rolo and I had our first “winter” drive together… luckily it didn’t stick to the roads even though it was snowing like crazy, and we made it back to my friend Gina’s place in Highlands Ranch without any problem. I think my California license plates probably helped clue in the other drivers to my concern and my reasonable desire to drive less than 60 mph while they cruised past.

From Denver it was just a five-hour drive or so to my cousin Keri’s place in Hays, Kansas, mostly via I-70. We went to a local brewery to hear some live music, a few local college bars where we were probably the oldest patrons, had some tasty food (a must anywhere I go)… a nice relaxing few days. It’s truly small-town there; everywhere we went Keri was running into people she knew! As I plotted my route from Hays to Chicago, Keri recognized that by taking the back roads I’d be passing right through the area where her boyfriend was headed for a friend’s wedding, so she came along for part of the ride, and I even got to be passenger and co-pilot for a while since she knows how to drive stick. I had been planning to drop her off at the wedding reception and keep driving, but when we arrived in the small eastern Kansas town of Onaga (oh-NAY-ga), they invited me inside for a bit and I ended up staying all night!

Read the rest of this entry »

The other day, a Kansas farm boy told me that he just didn’t understand why anyone would want to live in the city (I think he was referring specifically to New York, but I’m sure his sentiments would apply to pretty much any big city) with “all those people, the traffic, the noise…” I couldn’t relate at all and thought something along the lines of “if the alternative’s living in Kansas, I’m going to stick with the city.” But after spending about 20 hours driving through eastern Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, and western Illinois, I arrived in Chicago last night, and driving around this morning with my friend Connie I was very aware of how crowded and noisy and crazy it is in the city. I actually had a moment of thinking how strange it is that all these people live crammed into such a small area when they could have so much space and quiet to themselves out in the country. I had to spend a few minutes purposefully reminding myself of the good things about city living. What’s happening to me?

I just realized I went on to write about Utah before I was done with Vegas. I’ll keep it brief: The next day we went back to the Hoover Dam and leaned way over the edge and photographed it from every possible angle. That night we were back on the Strip, meeting up with my friend Jen, her boyfriend, and some other travel folks at the Wynn, the fanciest, newest casino. Then we were off to the Bellagio to see the fountains, which were probably my favorite thing in Vegas. They go off every 15 minutes, with different choreography and song every time. We watched the first time from the bar inside the Bellagio, which I think is called Fontana. We crashed a poker tournament to get out on the balcony. After we parted ways Aaron and I headed over to Paris, for a little more gambling and picture-taking. The pictures I took there turned out cool–they look like a weird cross between inside and outside, which is pretty much what it looks like! The eiffel tower and arc de triomphe are a trip. Vegas really is over the top.