Road Trip Installments
These are some short notes I penned at motels and road stops between Portland and Chicago, during a roadtrip I undertook with a friend last October. They were intended for another blog, which never materialized. So here they are, instead.
Portland, OR (10/18/2006)
An old friend of Joe’s let us park the rig on a big gravel lot behind the strip joint he owns. So we did. The effect was like putting up a billboard for tits and ass. Folks pulling in for a beer and lap dance took note of us, as did the girls who came out on smoking break. We dropped some t-shirts and fliers, and Joe got to eavesdrop on some idiot’s conversation with the bartender at the bar. Seems this guy thought he knew something about Flairtending, so he’s spouting off about what superstar Flairtenders he knows and critiquing the bartender’s technique. All the while Joe, who as it turns out was the guy who first brought Flairtending from South Florida to Vegas in ‘88, is sitting there and listening and nodding to himself. “What an ass.” It occurred to me just how easy it is to be that guy who’s gone and opened up his mouth and made it abundantly clear how smart he is not. Note to self: Don’t be that guy.
Medford, OR (10/18/2006)
In Medford we met old friends and discovered a higher-than-average number of women with enormous breasts. The mall was filled with them. They were wholesome, nice looking girls with a respectable future keeping the appreciative men of Medford warm during the formidable winters. They even smile when they walk by. It was nice.
On the way out of Medford, Joe and I parked the rig north of the city and spent a few minutes talking about a restaurant that was for sale right on the Rogue River. It had promise. There was a nice big parking lot and a few hundred feet of waterfront, with lots of room in the back to host a real good time. We imagined boats and waterskiers and a hubbub of river-based activity, all coming to have a beer and spend a few hours in our care. We dubbed it the “Dream Exit” and moved on.
Pendleton, OR (10/19/2006)
An RV Park with a big neon sign at the end of a dead-end street is a strange place to find your Mojo. But that’s just what Joe and I did today. We pulled in the night before and took our place on one of the concrete parking slabs near the showers. The showers were good. The next morning it was crisp and sunny and we walked over to a sort of ledge with a fence that separated the RV park from the endless farmland that ranged out in gentle hills for a hundred miles in every direction. The wind was coming down from the blue sky on the other side of the valley and running down along the inside of the bowl. It came up from below us and blew on us on that ledge where we were stretching out our arms and legs. Joe closed his eyes and stretched out his arms and was quickly born aloft. I planted my left foot forward, dug my right elbow into my ribs and put out my left hand out like the Heisman. The same wind that got Joe got me and I began to run upon the clouds. Of course I wasn’t really running, it was just that I was breathing as if I were running and the wind was blowing against my face and it felt just the same as running.
Fort Collins, CO (10/21/2006)
Though we had planned to spend the night at the Vedauwoo Rocks State Park east of Laramie, Wyoming, we came down into Colorado instead. We spent most of the day crossing the Rocky Mountains on Intersate 80 between Rock Springs and Cheyenne. At a maximum elevation of nearly 9,000 feet, we suffered snow, wind and difficult road conditions. By Laramie we could see that there was blue sky ahead in the distance, but it was still just too cold and miserable there to think about adhering to our original plan.
Once we crossed the state line into Colorado, everything changed. The sky opened up above our heads, the sun melted what snow and ice still clung to the wiper blades and the air was dry and crisp.
We still wanted to camp some place beautiful, so at the suggestion of some locals we made our way to the Horsetooth Reservoir State Park. About 10 miles outside Fort Collins and up a little ways into the Rocky Mountain foothills, the RV park and picnic area sits in a basin and skirts the southern end of the reservoir.
It was plenty cold there come night, and it even sprinkled on us a bit. But we geared up for it and dragged our pampered city asses out onto the lake bed. Joe had a miner’s type halogen light strapped to his forehead and I carried a 6-volt lantern in my hand.
It was nearly as dark as it was cold, and we set ourselves the simple goal of finding water’s edge. We couldn’t see shit. At one point the ground under foot became oddly soft and training my lantern beam on it I saw a mat of short weeds and a texture of dirt that reminded me we were walking in a lake bed. A few steps later we could feel big, fat drops of lake water carried up by the gusting wind against our faces.
Did I mention it was very cold?
We never made it to the water’s edge. But on the walk back to to the rig we understood something about playing in the cold and how much of the fun you have when you’re “out there” depends on having a warm place to return to when you’re done.
Council Bluffs, IA (10/24/2006)
We were looking for a strip club owned by a fella named Jeremy that was supposed to sit on the Nebraska/Iowa state line. That proved difficult, since since the state line is the Missouri River. Just across the river on the Iowa side side we followed a sign for “casino” thinking we might ask casino type folk about the location of a strip club. A feisty fifty-something blonde named Karen overheard me asking at the door, came over and bade me follow her to the “best litle tittie bar in Iowa”… a place she owned. How could I refuse.
When we got there 2 girls named Trina and Roxy were sitting at the bar, looking bored and lamenting it being a Monday. Behind the bar was Rachel, with a great smile, a good head on her shoulders, but no apparent desire to leave the place where she was born. Ogre was a 6 foot 6, 400 hundred pound, baby-faced good ole boy, just a few years past his small-town football hero prime. He was obviously there to bounce the occassional tittie toucher, but was trying to graduate up to the higher-paying, less violent work behind the bar.