…still in it…

I decided to abandon my plan to go into lower Kansas and from there into the Rockies and take a small scenic side road though them up to I-70.  The weather here in the four corners states is horrible…all socked in with clouds and rain.  And it looks like it will be that way for days to come.  I suppose in some of the desert areas they appreciate getting rain, but this seems a tad much and the Colorado river is all floody now.  I drive over it and it’s almost up to the bottom of the road deck on some bridges now.  This throws my plans into some chaos since it means some of the scenic side roads I wanted to travel down might get washed out.  I don’t want to get stuck driving down a small side road in the Utah canyon lands only to have to turn around and drive hundreds of miles back the way I came because the road in front of me got washed out.  Or worse, get stuck because now the road behind me is washed out too.

So when I got to Oakley Kansas I drove US 40 for a while in the plains and then just let it take me back to I-70.  Now I’m here in Grand Junction after going through some serious elevation changes that seriously stressed my out of shape 55 year old body.  Around ten thousand feet I started noticing my heart pounding and my face getting all flushed out.  I stopped at a rest stop at ten thousand six hundred feet and tried to get myself stabilized and just kept being on the edge of too dizzy to drive.  Crap. I guess I my sitting down all the friggin’ time job has left my circulatory system a tad weakened.  Or maybe I just have my mom’s side of the family’s bad heart gene.  So I guess going up the volcano to see Keck is out of the question now… 

It’s memorial day weekend, which I wasn’t aware of when I planned this thing out (I’m a software engineer…I am oblivious to the regular work week of most folks…), so I’ve been watching warily the parking lots of the motels I pass along the way, trying to judge how full they’re getting.  I don’t normally make reservations on these road trips because I want the freedom to adjust my travel plans as I see things along the way.  But this puts me at risk of entering a town tired at the end of the day and wanting to stop now, and all the motels are full and then I have to keep driving and hope the next town over isn’t full too.  That’s happened to me. 

So I freaked when I drove past Rifle Colorado and saw all the motel lots jammed full.  When I got to Parachute I hit the first little motel I saw and asked for a room and they gladly gave it to me, which should have set my alarm bells off.  But I was just releaved to have a room for the night.  The room was around back and while it was nice the neighborhood behind the room was scary.  I sat in the room for a while looking out the window and thinking I’m driving a Mercedes-Benz and it’s going to stick out like a neon sign around here telling everyone who looks at it that there are probably things worth busting out a window in that car for…and breaking into the room it’s in front of…

So I freaked and got back in the car hoping that Grand Junction wouldn’t be full when I got there.  I shouldn’t have worried.  But once I got here I made a reservatin online via Travelocity for Kayenta, my favorite place to stay near Monument Valley.

I’m off now to try and see what I can see in the Utah canyon lands.  Given propsition 8 I’ll try not to spend much money while I’m there (Kayenta is in Arizona).  But the weather may make my trip through here a bust this year and that’s really bringing me down today because I don’t think the price of gasoline is going to allow me to do this for many more years.  This may be my last trip through the four corners area for a long, long time.  And it’s getting rained out.

Truckhinge – Topeka, Kansas

Tomorrow morning around now, bright eyed and bushy tailed, I should be on I-70 headed west.  The Institute is sending me to the Java One conference in San Fransisco the first week in June, and I am taking vacation time to do another small road trip across the great plains, and the Rockies, and a little of the southwest.  I want to do this while the price of gasoline still makes it possible.  Last year at four dollars a gallon plus I simply could not do it.

Lane Wallace, posting on Sullivan’s blog yesterday, put up this image from a current MOMA exhibit titled, "Into the Sunset: Photography’s Image of the American West".  I have a similar image of my own that I’ll post later today for comparison, taken on at the northern approach to Monument Valley down Utah highway 163.  Images like these capture the allure of the road trip for me perfectly…

Dorothea Lange, The Road West, New Mexico, 1938

Escaping The Gravity Of Home

There’s a moment in every long distance road trip that I think of as escaping the gravity of home. Like the Apollo astronauts who escaped the earth’s gravity to go to the moon…there is a threshold you cross on a long distance drive where heading back home to your own comfortable bed is no longer possible, even if you push it bleary eyed into the night.  You must bed down somewhere else.  Keep going and its two nights.  Then three.  You’ve left the safe comfortable orbit of home.  Now you’re traveling among the planets.  At some point, and for me it’s usually the middle of the second day, comes the awareness that no matter what happens, you’re not getting back home any time soon.  You and your car are a self contained capsule, scooting down the highway, looking for whatever it is ahead of you that you’ve never seen before…

Friday May 24, 2003

To really get to know planet Earth you have to travel across it.  Not over it in an airplane.  A train comes closer. But you need a personal, private mode of transit to really get to know it, see its many different faces.  You have to have your hands on the steering wheel, your feet on the pedals, feel your vehicle respond to the road.  Then you are one with the land you’re traveling across.  You should feel the sun and wind on your skin, be completely free, untethered.  Then you can stop whenever, wherever.  Get out of your car.  Feel the land under your feet.  The wind plays with your hair.  It came from over that horizon.  Look.  It’s telling you that there is something over there you should go see.

I’m in Orlando, visiting Disney World, and the damn Comfort Inn here charges for Internet which I refuse to pay (I’m posting this on my iPhone right now). So, expect very little posting here until I get back.

I’m already having a great time here in the park…but some journies are worth the trip, just to see someone smile.

[Update…] My bad…   There seems to be no charge for the Internet after all.  At any rate…I’m using the Motel wireless now and I didn’t have to plug in a credit card number like you usually do for Internet access when they’re charging.  Just for kicks and grins I plugged in to see what the charge was, and instead of being taken to a buy it now page I got my Internet right away.  Nice.

But posting will still be infrequent, because I am on vacation and I am trying to tune out the world for a while.  Also, Motel Internet is seldom reliable.

It’s raining here in Charm City and I’m packing my car and heading for what would have been the Experimental Prototype City Of Tomorrow had Walt Disney not been a cigarette smoker.  But what’s there now is still very nice, and so is the rest of it.  Disney World is Huge, and the first time I went there last November I spent most of my time just gawking at the immensity of it.  Now I have a better idea of what I want to do, and more time to do it.  I also want to wave ‘hi’ to a certain someone, and maybe see him smile one more time.

I’m spending a week, but not in the park this time, which will make it harder to just tune out the entire world like I did last time.  But the hotels inside the park are way too expensive…even the so-called "value" hotels.  There are so many other nice hotels and motels crowding around the entrances to the park that it’s not hard to find something even nicer then the mid priced Disney hotels at, I kind you not, about a third of the cost.  But then you are not in the park the entire time, and being wrapped completely inside that park almost makes it worthwhile.  You really can just leave the world behind for a while, and live in a place where it really is a small world after all, and there’s a great big beautiful tomorrow shining at the end of every day, and find yourself believing that dreams really do come true.

Once upon a time I viewed all that as nothing more then cheap escapism.  But the world, and my life, just stresses me out too much now.  I’m single, I’m desperately lonely, and I’m living in a world that never seems to let any chance go by to tell me it hates my guts.  And there is still that sense in the land of Walt, of all those things I thought the world was, and the future would be.  You can see it slowly fading as Disney’s handiwork is overlaid with newer things, some of which I doubt he would have liked, and some which just don’t hit the mark he would have.  But even as it fades, it lifts the spirit.  At least in someone of my generation.

You have to experience the parks to realize, again if you’re my age and remember watching him on television, how wide Walt Disney’s imagination ranged.  People think of Disneyland and they think of the part of the park called Fantasyland.  But there was Tomorrowland and Frontierland and Adventureland.  There was the little Main Street where everyone entered the park.  There was the hall of presidents, and the river boat and the monorail and the people movers.  There was the ground breaking animation, but also tons of live action film, and nature series and documentaries. Look a little deeper, beyond all the eye candy and the rides and the exhibits, and you see, astonished, a park infrastructure that is still held in awe by architects.  This operation is Huge and yet it runs smoothly.  And Disney World in Orlando is several orders of magnitude bigger, and it Still runs smoothly.  Chuck Jones once told Disney he wanted his job (Disney told him that position was already filled), and Jones was himself an fantastically creative animator.  But there was no city of tomorrow in Chuck Jones, let alone a World.

Last time I walked through the parks down in Disney World, it all came back to me…that it’s a small world after all…that the search for knowledge is a great adventure…that tomorrow was something to look forward to with a smile.  People told me after I came back home last November, how much better I looked, how more at ease I seemed.  One person insisted I must have gotten laid.  I hadn’t of course…but it was almost like that in terms of how good life seemed again.  For a little while…

So now I’m packing the Mercedes for another trip south.  Before I leave I briefly scan the web.  I see Andrew Sullivan reporting the Rod Dreher has replied to Damon Linker, who has in turn replied back.  Linker, you may recall, asked Dreher if he had something, anything, besides The Bible Says So to justify his obsession with the Homosexual Menace.  Dreher gives the expected answer back…

If homosexuality is legitimized — as distinct from being tolerated, which I generally support — then it represents the culmination of the sexual revolution, the goal of which was to make individual desire the sole legitimate arbiter in defining sexual truth. It is to lock in, and, on a legal front, to codify, a purely contractual, nihilistic view of human sexuality. I believe this would be a profound distortion of what it means to be fully human. And I fully expect to lose this argument in the main, because even most conservatives today don’t fully grasp how the logic of what we’ve already conceded as a result of being modern leads to this end.

Note the hyperbole.  The horror of individual desire being seen as more legitimate then his cheapshit barstool prejudices.  The knee jerk slandering of that desire as essentially nihilistic.  But what Dreher is afraid of here isn’t that the human heart is nothing, but that he is.  In the end, the Homosexual Monster, like the Dangerous Black Man and The Greedy Jew represents nothing more then the abyss he stares into every morning in the bathroom mirror.

This is why I am going back to Disney World.  I want to spend some more time in a place where I can have that vision of the world and tomorrow I had as a kid back again.  Where it’s a small world after all.  Where I can return a stranger’s smile and not wonder if they want to cut my ring finger off and stick a knife in my heart, so they can go to heaven.

A few images from South Of The Border, where I spent the night last night.  I love that place.  Besides the fact that all its motel rooms have their own carports, which make it easy to unpack the car for the night and repack it the next morning, it’s delightfully pure tacky roadside Americana…

I seem to get the biggest kick out of photographing amusement parks in their off season.  It’s like…when all the people are gone you can hear the all the fiberglass and wood structures speaking for themselves…

I’m in Orlando now…at the Radisson just outside the entrance to Disneyworld.  My Disneyworld hotel reservations aren’t until tomorrow, and check-in time is 3PM.  Not sure if my Disneyworld hotel will have Internet or not.  If not it may be a while before I post here again.   

I’m hitting the road for Orlando in a little bit, so posting will suddenly become very light, probably until next Wednesday.  I have a bunch of stuff in the queue to put up here, including a really nice photo from the Pasadena Anti-Prop 8 protests sent in by a reader.  But I just want to get away now.  The price of premium gasoline is now hovering around the two dollar mark here in the Baltimore area, and I can see it going lower elsewhere.  So while I have a chance I’m going to take it.  I want to be on the road. 

I’m throwing my cameras and my bags into Traveler and I’m heading out.  I’ll be spending a long weekend in Disneyworld, trying to de-stress and remember what it was like when life seemed limitless and fun.  Hopefully I’ll come back home with a better attitude.  I just want to get away.  I want to be on the road. 

If I post at all in the coming days, it’ll be mostly dispatches from the road if anything.  Maybe with a few pictures.

Talk with you more when I get back…

…and the OSCON Open Source Developer’s Conference therein.   This’ll be my fifth year at this particular conference and I really enjoy the company of so many fellow computer revolutionaries.   My all time favorite T-Shirt slogan is from last year’s:  In A World Without Fences, Who Needs Gates?

I’m flying out from Baltimore first thing tomorrow, with neighbors and Brinks looking after Casa del Garrett while I’m gone.  And I’ll be real busy at the conference so posting may be a tad infrequent until I get back.  I’ll try to post some photos of the scenery out there when I can.  Some of it is just lovely.  And Portland’s not bad either…

So I’ve finally plugged in all the register chits from my Key West road trip, and the total bill comes to $2,119.39.  The bulk of that being hotel costs, and the bulk of That being the high cost of lodgings in the Florida Keys…at least during Christmas week.  I paid $746.99 for lodgings in Key Largo and Key West over three nights…one night in Key Largo at $222.95 and two in Key West at $524.04 and those were the best rates I could find in AAA rated two-diamond minimum motels with Internet connectivity.  By comparison, the motel I stayed at in Orlando only charged me $57 for a night, and the Microtel I stayed at in Georgia on the way home only cost $78.39.  Btw…I Highly recommend Microtel.  The beds are comfortable, the rooms are very small, but sensibly laid out…and Quiet.

Total gas bill came to 324.36.  Food was a total of 303.67, but I ate well while I was in Key West, and since I found out someone very special to me works as a waiter nowadays, I’ve been tipping pretty extravagantly.  Normally while on the road I’m splurging if I spend more then $15 a day on food.  I just don’t eat much.  But the eating was just wonderful in Key West. 

There were some miscellaneous expenses that all told came to $361.76.  I had to buy a new camera strap for the 30D when the old leather one I had on it suddenly broke.  Luckily the camera itself was undamaged.  I bought several new caps…some sandals when I finally saw a pair I actually liked in Key West…and the cutest little Gay Rainbow Micky Mouse pin you ever saw at Disneyworld.  If Disney isn’t officially supporting Gay Days, they’re sure making us feel welcome there nonetheless.  And there was this really eyeball burning tye-dye hooded sweatshirt I saw in Key West that I just had to have…

So…about a week and a day, and it cost me just over two-grand.  That’s about a grand more then I was hoping to get away with.  I have to start planning these things a little more carefully.  But note, the cost of gasoline was still not a very big factor here.  In fact, gas and food Combined were less then the hotel costs.

And this trip I didn’t spend anything on photographic film, because I still have a lot of unexposed black and white and color film I haven’t used yet (and didn’t either on this trip…everything I shot this trip was digital…)

I need to turn one of my savings accounts into a road trip kitty…and just not go anywhere until I’ve got at least two-grand in it… 

More from my wee stroll though Downtown Disney…

A few images from my wander around Downtown Disney and Paradise Island…

Back home.  And…damn…it’s cold outside.

I arrived home late last night, but I know it’s possible now to drive from Southern Georgia to Baltimore in one day.  I didn’t hurry it…just kept driving knowing that even if I got home late, I would have a place to sleep.  Sometimes when you’re on the road, you stop early for a motel room before they’re all booked up.   I’d have loved to stay in Key West through New Years, but I didn’t realize it would be so expensive to stay down there and I basically ran out of hotel money for this trip.  Next time I’ll be ready.  Even with the price of gasoline being what it is now, the major cost of a road trip are the lodgings.  I’m still paying off last year’s trip to Portland, which is another reason why I didn’t have much to spare to spend on this road trip.  When I get everything added up, I’ll post the totals here. In the meantime, here are the stats according to Traveler’s onboard trip computer…

• Miles Traveled: 2832
• Hours Driven: 51.45
• Average mpg: 28.7
• Average Speed: 55mph

All that’s over the course of the entire trip, including driving around Hilton Head for a bit, around Orlando and the area around Disneyworld for a bit, and all the driving I did around the Florida Keys.

I actually got 31 miles per gallon driving back across the keys from Key West to the mainland!  So now I know that my car with that big Mercedes v-6 engine in it will still do over  30 miles per gallon…if I drive it at an average speed of about 45 miles per hour over terrain that is almost totally flat.  But I’ve discovered to my relief on this first big road trip, that it’ll do nearly 30 mpg if I drive it for extended periods at highway speeds.  Typically my trip computer was reading around 29.3 to 29.8 mpg after a few miles down I-95.  That’s Much better then I was expecting.  I have compared the trip computer to my gas purchases  and mileage, which I’ve been recording in a little notebook ever since I bought the car, and they match to within tenths of a gallon, so I’m pretty confidant that the trip computer is giving me an accurate account of miles per gallon as I go down the road.

I’ve put on enough miles now that I can go get my free first tire rotation.  I’ll need to ask them to check out the area around my gas filler.  I pulled over in a small town in North Carolina looking for gas, and saw that the Hess gas station had the good price so I went there and the pumps weren’t working right.  The first pump I went to took about a minute to pump only a half gallon.  So I closed out the transaction there and moved to a different one which was still slow, but not painfully so.  But good thing I always stay near the pump while it’s working, because that one didn’t cut off when it had filled the tank and suddenly I had a massive overflow on my hands.  It was scary…dripping all over the passenger side rear tire and down around the filler cap.  I put the hose back on the pump, doused the area with water from one of the washer stations, and went inside to warn them that they had a dangerous situation with that one pump, and the clerk just nodded her head and said, "Oh yes, you have to watch that one or it’ll do that…"

Christ!  The saving grace of it was it was raining and the roads were wet.  I doused the area with water once again and then drove Traveler through several big puddles and then back onto I-95 where the tire could spray water into that wheel well that got drenched.  Maybe I should have called the fire department on them too, but being by myself in a small southern town I wasn’t sure I wanted to.  I knew they were thoughtless assholes.  If they had a mind to, they could have accused me of damaging their pump somehow and then it’s that little northern faggot against the local boys and I might have ended up being the one in trouble.

So when I take Traveler in for its tire rotation, now I have to ask them to check around the area of the filler cap for damage.  Gasoline is a powerful solvent.  I’ve used white gasoline, the stuff you can buy for camping stoves that comes without all the additives they put into automobile fuel, occasionally for really tough chores like hardened brushes.  But you can’t be too careful with it, and not just for the dangerous fumes, but also what it will damage if it gets dripped on.  So I’m fretting a bit now about what that spill might have done to my new car.

Photo taken at the southernmost part of the U.S., near the southernmost hotel in the U.S., by the southernmost house in the U.S., of the southernmost gay American, the southernmost computer geek, the southernmost shutter bug, the  southernmost cartoonist, the southernmost longhaired male, and the southernmost Mercedes-Benz owner, wearing what was at that instant the southernmost American smile.

If you’ve ever been there, you’ve seen how that one little corner of Key West has a thing for southernmostness.

You can almost see it there in that photo, how the waters of the Atlantic right there were the color of my turquoise bracelet.  The waters around the Keys are just absolutely the most beautiful stretch of ocean I have ever seen.

[New Car Love Alert…]

It felt…good…that first time I checked into a hotel this trip, and wrote "Mercedes-Benz" on the registration form where it asks you for the make and model of your car.

Traveler, my new Mercedes c300, has been a pure pleasure to drive on this first road trip with it.  If I could have dreamed up the ideal touring car I couldn’t have done much better.  It’s not as sumptuous as an E or S class, but sitting in one of those I might not want to be eating road munchies or drinking from my stainless steel Mercedes mug either.  Do they even put cup holders in the S class…?

Traveler is just a pure pleasure to drive down the road.  It hugs the pavement with that perfect balance of smoothness and tight-to-the-road feel that I have always admired in Mercedes suspensions.  I have a good view of the road all around me, and all the car’s controls are within easy reach.  The driver’s seat is comfortable enough to spend hours driving in and the automatic climate control handles everything from Baltimore’s winter chill to the Florida Keys hot sunshine with ease.  It’s been a few years since I’ve been to south Florida, and the intensity of the sunlight down here always catches the northerner by surprise the first time it hits you.  I started feeling it beating through Traveler’s windows when I got down to Fort Lauderdale.  Traveler has sensors that detect which side of the car is getting hit by direct sunlight, and by gosh when I make a turn and the Florida sun starts busting through the front window and right onto my chest, the car adjusts the vents and ramps up the fan speed to keep me cool and I don’t have to touch anything.

The car’s various safety and security features give you a nice sense of confidence on the road.  Going through several sudden and heavy Florida downpours on the way from Orlando to Key Largo, I got a chance to use my fogs…not so much for the forward view, I don’t think fogs are much help in a downpour, as for that nice little rear facing extra bright tail lamp you can switch on to hopefully let the guy behind you know you’re there in low visibility conditions.  I noticed one other Mercedes in the traffic bunch had done the same.  And I don’t fret so much while strolling around unfamiliar territory with Traveler parked somewhere, because the TeleAid service will call my cell phone if the car’s alarms go off.

My only regrets are that its trunk isn’t as big as the one in my Honda Accord, and that it takes only premium gasoline, which is running 3.60 a gallon right now down here in Key West, and 3.30 a gallon back in Key Largo, closer to the mainland.  But everything is more expensive here in Key West, especially the hotels.  The upside to Traveler’s taste for premium is that its appetite isn’t as bad on the highway as I thought it would be.  I was getting 29.7 miles to the gallon on the drive from Washington to Hilton Head, and averaging about 28 miles to the gallon on the rest of the trip so far. 

As far as the trunk goes, I’m still experimenting how to pack it.  In theory there’s enough space in there, but barely, for two sets of luggage.  But I tend to pack along lots of camera equipment.  And let’s face it…I’m gay guy and gay men tend to pack more clothes along.  And I’m a techno geek so double that for all my little gismos.  I have a white noise generator for noisy motel environments.  I packed a sleeping bag along because it’s winter back north and you need to be prapaired in case you get stuck in a snow or ice storm…like I almost did driving to Hilton Head Christmas week of 2004.  Also, the sleeping bag makes a good comforter if your motel doesn’t give you enough blankets and heat.  I tried…I really tried to keep it down for a simple weeklong trip, and I’m Still using Traveler’s rear seat area for storage.  If I ever find a boyfriend, I’m going to have to buy that roof mounted storage bin so there’ll be enough space for both our things.

Despite its expensive taste in gasoline, it’s Really Nice having that Mercedes v-6 under the hood.  It moves the car effortlessly at legal highway speeds and makes a very satisfactory German motorcar roar when passing slowpokes, which it also does quite effortlessly…serenely even.  And that even though it’s feeding torque to an automatic transmission.  That seven speed auto is sweet.  If I’d driven automatics like it back in the 70s I might not have grown up hating them.  This trans just doesn’t feel anything like those old slush boxes did.  It does highway shifts smoothly and solidly.  But where I’m really coming to appreciate it is in stop and go city traffic.  The bumper to bumper, stop and go shuffle in old town Key West with its tiny little streets was no sweat which is really remarkable because I Hate being stuck in traffic like that.  Not any more.  It may not be an E or and S class I’m sitting stuck in traffic in, but it’s damn luxurious all the same.  I just relaxed in my seat, turned up the Harmon-Kardon stereo, let the climate control system do its thing, and just let the car creep forward in drive whenever traffic moved a tad. 

This car is pampering me.  A friend who owns a C class warned me that the car would change my sense of what ‘normal’ is.  I think it already has.  I need to reward it with a nice bath when I get back on the mainland.