On Christmas Day Herself and I were chatting on the phone with my sister and her husband when the topic of New Year travel plans arose.
“Now, I know he never wants to go anywhere, but how about you?” my sis asked Herself.
Well. Sheeyit. It’s a true fact that I hate to fly, because air travel combines the joie de vivre of the DMV, the ER, and the county lockup with the airborne equivalent of a midsummer greydog ride from Bakersfield to North Las Vegas in the company of refugees from dentistry, flat-assed hookers, and a shoeless, flatulent freegan with facial tats, fresh from a FoodMaxx Dumpster.
But there’s more than one way to travel. And somebody sure put a ton of hard miles on the eight motor vehicles I’ve owned since 1977.
That was the year I drove from Greeley, Colo., to Burlington, Vt., and back again, mostly because I could. I had a used Datsun pickup, a friend who needed a lift to Wellsville, N.Y., and the promise of a couch to crash on in Burlington (Winooski, actually, but Burlington sounds hipper, though no hipsters ever proposed building a dome enclosing Burlington).
While I was in the neighborhood I took a spin up to Montreal to collect another friend at the Dorval airport, and landed a job as a dishwasher who also delivered pizzas to the local college kids. Or a delivery guy who also washed dishes. There was free beer and the kids tipped in weed; the memories fade.
Despite these perks it wasn’t long before I found myself light in the wallet pocket and motoring back to Greeley for a third friend’s wedding. I didn’t expect the marriage to last (it didn’t), but I’d already had a taste of what Burlington called “weather,” a “living wage,” and “Mexican food,” and it was either learn to like them or be elsewhere pronto.
See the USA in your Chevrolet (or Datsun, Toyota or Ford)
Maybe the Great American Road Trip appealed to me because I was late to the whole driving scene (no license until the end of my first year of college in 1972, lost it almost immediately, and didn’t slide back behind the wheel until I graduated in ’77). Or maybe it was that when I was a sprat my family nearly always took its vacations by automobile, to Montreal, Toronto, the Redneck Riviera, Iowa, Arizona, and the like.
Whatever. Turned out I liked driving places. I would drive somewhere at the drop of a hat and drop the hat myself.
After leaving Greeley for good I drove that Datsun to my second, third, and fourth newspaper jobs, in Bibleburg, Tucson, and Corvallis, Ore. In between relocations there were local digressions and adventures further afield, to Phoenix, Nogales, Riverside, San Diego, Flagstaff, Eugene, Portland, Ashland, Spokane, and Seattle. In California and Oregon I drove haplessly up and down the coast, mesmerized by the Pacific but unable to land a job of work within eyesight of it. Corvallis, a speed bump with a college on the wrong side of the Coast Range, was as close as I ever got.
A brand-new Toyota pickup took me away from Oregon and back to Colorado — another daily in Pueblo, then a chain of weeklies in Denver — and fueled by unemployment insurance from the latter I made one last run at California, annoying friends with couches in Santa Rosa and Ventura and mooning at the goddamn ocean like a fish who wished he’d never learned to walk, or drive. Still no sale. Back to Denver where a buddy had an extra room in a ramshackle house on the site of a former plant nursery.
With the unemployment insurance knocking up against the E on my fiscal fuel gauge, I coasted to a stop in Española, N.M. — and California finally gave me that long-awaited come-hither look. The Ventura paper, which had snubbed me some months earlier, decided I might do after all and offered me a job. Sorry, already got one, in Santa Fe, I replied.
Driving to ride
And thus the Great Bicycle Racing Travel Era commenced. From first Española and then Santa Fe I drove the Toyota to races in Los Alamos, Albuquerque, Los Lunas, Ruidoso, Moriarty, Las Cruces, Grants, Durango, Glenwood Springs, and Bibleburg. When Herself and I quit our jobs (mine in Santa Fe, hers in Los Alamos) and moved to Bibleburg the races were up and down the Front Range, from Pueblo to Fort Collins and all points in between, with occasional detours to outliers like Pagosa, Durango, Gunnison, and Salida.
By this time I was getting paid to watch other people race bikes, or make them, or sell them, so I was off to Boulder, Scottsdale, Monterey, Laguna Seca, Laguna Hills, Anaheim, Las Vegas, Casper, Seattle, Breckenridge, Bellingham, Bisbee, Santa Rosa, Petaluma, Palo Alto, San Francisco, and Prescott. I drove when I could and flew when I had to.
Some events, like Cactus Cup, Sea Otter, and the North American Handmade Bike Show, I visited more than once. Interbike I attended — was it really 19 times? — in two different cities (Anaheim and Las Vegas), for three different publications (VeloNews, Bicycle Retailer and Industry News, and Adventure Cyclist), from three different hometowns (Bibleburg, Weirdcliffe, and The Duck! City), driving six different vehicles (three Toyotas, two Subarus, and one Ford F-150).
Come to think of it, when we closed on El Rancho Pendejo in The Duck! City back in 2014 I had to drive here from Bibleburg, scrawl my Juan O’Hancock on the paperwork, and before the ink dried scamper off to Vegas for that year’s Interbike. Afterward I roared back to spend the night in ’Burque before returning to Bibleburg — a 2,138-mile dash, all in all — to continue the back-breaking process of what I hope will be my last move ever, barring that final trip to the camposanto. Which will be someone else’s problem.
I did skip five Interbikes — the 2007-10 editions in Sin City and 2018’s Grand Finale in Reno — the first because Bicycle Retailer and Industry News grew weary of paying me to remind the industry that its annual “Gathering of the Tribes” was primarily a vector for upper-respiratory ailments, cirrhosis, and other bad ideas, many of them involving bicycles, and the latter because not even Adventure Cyclist, which treated me to Interbikes 2011-17, would spend good money to have me perch upon a bust of Pat Hus at the Reno-Sparks Convention Center, croaking, “Nevermore!” I wouldn’t pay my own way to Reno even if God promised to meet me at the Silver Legacy Resort Casino, forgive all my sins, and let me win a couple-three mil’ at blackjack.
Whenever I wasn’t motoring for money I would drive for free — to Wyoming to see Charles Pelkey get his head shaved; to Santa Rosa, Moab, or Truckee to ride bikes with Chris Coursey and Merrill Oliver; to Fountain Hills to pitch a tent and shred the gnar at McDowell Mountain Regional Park; or to Tucson, to ride the Adventure Cycling Association’s Southern Arizona Road Adventure.
For one 2012 outing I did without the automobile entirely, taking a leisurely three-day bicycle tour that started right at our front door in Bibleburg and looped through Penrose, Cañon City and Pueblo before heading back to B-burg.
There were occasional bouts of air travel, too, to Tennessee, Maryland, North Carolina, and Hawaii. Plus one daylong clusterfuck of a preposterously buggered U-turn from Bibleburg to DIA and back again (I was supposed to be flying to Sacramento for the 2012 NAHBS) that set me to hating on United Airlines via social media for months until the sons of bitches finally refunded my money. I spent about 40 minutes in the air and the rest of what turned out to be a very long 12-hour day split between two Colorado airports only to wind up right back where I started. Shortly thereafter I abandoned both air travel and social media.
Don’t Bug me
I’ll confess that my wanderings shrank dramatically in scope starting in 2018. We lost Mister Boo, Field Marshal Turkish von Turkenstein, some equally dear two-legged friends, and Herself the Elder over the next few years. I broke an ankle but survived, though with the Bug in full swing I decided against physical therapy and out-of-town travel, even by car. Entrusting one’s health to the whims of strangers suddenly seemed unwise, especially considering what they’d done to the government in 2016.
My income dwindled from marginal to laughable, so I sat up, let capitalism roll on up the road, unpinned my number, and climbed into Uncle Sammy’s socialist broom wagon. I was expecting a Coupe deVille with color TV but it looks a lot more like Ghost Dancing, the 1975 half-ton Ford Econoline with the bald tires and bum water pump that William Least Heat-Moon herded around America’s blue highways in 1978: “It came equipped with power nothing and drove like what it was: a truck. Your basic plumber’s model.”
In 2022 I attended two celebrations of lives, but wasn’t paying much attention to my own. Suddenly 2023 was hitting the door running and I wasn’t going anywhere. So I suppose I can see how someone might get the idea I didn’t want to.
But I do. As it happens I have a new Nemo Dagger Osmo tent that’s only been pitched once, in the back yard. A copy of AAA Explorer landed in our mailbox yesterday. And Sue Baroo the Fearsome Furster is going in for her 150,000-mile checkup on Jan. 4, 2024.
Eight automobiles down the long and winding road I’ve lost track of my own mileage, but I’m not worried about either of us. I don’t know where we’re headed next, but I refuse to believe it’s the junkyard.
For sure it’s not the airport.
Mad Blog Media 
I also did a metric shit ton of travel In the Army for 3 years and 31 years of Federal Civil Service. Plus a bunch of oblications (that’s visiting family during your vacation) back East in KY and IL. Now, as Dylan said, I ain’t going nowhere. Maybe a day’s drive somewhere, but not much of that. This seems to frustrate the older Americans I know. “That’s what you are supposed to do when you’re retired.” I tell them I have traveled enough.
I think that sort of full-bore traveling is a young person’s game. I still have to get out of Dodge now and then — this year the big getaway was to meet our friends Tim and Jill for lunch in Santa Fe — but I can’t run and gun the way I used to. Shoot, I had to have the driver’s seat in the Subie reupholstered after a hundred thou’ or so. I was the only item getting softer in there.
I tried to remember all the places I’ve lived once and it added up to two countries, 11 states, and 20 towns (some of them more than once, or in more than one place inside a given town). I’m pretty sure B-burg has the jersey, with six houses/apartments over five residencies adding up to … 25 years? We had to do VOQ/BOQ at Ent AFB and at least one shitbag Platte Avenue motel when the fam’ got transferred there in 1967, too.
That’s why when people ask me, “Where are you from?” I reply, “I have no idea.”
New Year’s Eve is a perfect time to enjoy this hearty and delightful dispatch on traveling the “dirty road” and the vehicles and stops along the way. Thank you!
Happy and healthy 2024 to you, Patrick, Herself and to all!
You’re welcome, Libby. Happy New Year to thee and thine. Remember when 2024 was something we read about in science-fiction stories? Where’s my flying car?
I used to travel a bit as well. But then the world stopped. It’s interesting, I didn’t think it would be like that. I wonder sometimes if I didn’t die and my apparent conscience is residing in another dimension. But that is a warped thought and we have a new year rolling over us. I hope to travel again. I believe then it will be a like a new experience. What fun to have again.
I recall your stories of the move to Alb-ee-Q. That seems like yesterday. My how the time flies. Doesn’t the idea of relativity indicate that time goes faster the slower you go; and as you travel faster, time slows down. That must be the issue. As we age, we go slower taking the time to smell the roses not realizing that actually we are losing time, pissing it away because we are going slower. So the idea is to go fast. Get off our asses and get out and enjoy life as fast as we can. Damn the torpedoes, the political whores and the comforts of our Amazon Costco Whole Foods upholstered utilized and fed lifestyles. Get the fork out there and stab life in the ass.
What? What’s that honey? I fell asleep again on the throne of porcelain and was spouting superlatives of time travel. Uh, oh sorry. Yes, I’ll let the old dog out before he pisses on my shoes again. Happy New Year !
Time flies, indeed. We’re coming up on 10 years here. Can’t say I enjoyed The Bug Years. We had Herself the Elder to mind, and any kind of roaming around and about meant running the risk of catching The Bug far from home (been sick on the road a time or two, don’t like it, not at all) and maybe upon my return delivering it to Herself and worse, her mom. HtE got it anyway, of course, but not from me.
Also, I didn’t feel good about running around off the leash whilst Herself was stuck running the ranch, with a full-time job, her mom in The Place, two cats to wrangle and no one to cook for her. It seemed pretentious and disrespectful. I wasn’t contributing much to the bottom line by then but at least I could hit the grocery, sling the hash, empty the litter boxes.
Things have settled down a bit, or so we hope, so a bit of moseying hither and yon can be justified. I don’t really need a reason to go, I just like the going. Must be tinker blood from County Clare.
Damn POG I got winded just reading about all the moves and journeys you made. By jingoes I’m with you on airline avoidance. This fall, coming into Toronto from Halifax en route to Detroit, we were delayed a tad and then Canada custom process added a few minutes of hilarity. Run to the gate in Toronto to board and they say No GO Joe. Your luggage didn’t get aboard , so neither do you. Don’t worry Mr. Herb-you can take the next flight to Michigan in 12 hours. Told them I would catch up with my luggage whenever it was forwarded and they said Not An Option. Had to pitch a fit to get a puny food voucher out of Air Canada which was spent on beer since the chow options in Toronto Airport were surprisingly bad. I used to fly about every 3rd week with only rare cluster fucks but now….it’s the norm and like POG….I pretty much stay put.
The neighbors just flew to B.C. with their two girls, 9 and 7. ’Burque to SLC to Seattle to Vancouver. Something like 13 hours. No thank you, please. And he told us another air-travel horror story that was straight out of “Planes, Trains and Automobiles.” Everything that could go wrong, did.
I have fond memories of exactly one flight, from Seattle to Bibleburg. I was covering cyclocross nationals for VeloNews and the deadline was upon us so I had banged out a basic piece in the hotel and filed it from there and was writing the full version on my laptop during the flight home, with a succession of adult beverages close at hand. I felt like a sho’nuff Pro Scribe, Our Man in Seattle bringing you the Latest News from 30,000 feet. Och, thim was the days. …
All in all I preferred roaring up on Sea Otter via Barstow and Bakersfield, Interbike by way of Laughlin and Searchlight, or Cactus Cup via Holbrook and Payson. And don’t ask how many miles I’ve logged on the Loneliest Road over the years. I know Ely, Austin, and Fallon better than I do some of my own kinfolk.
I have friends that went to Africa. They wanted us to go, and we said no. Then they said we should have bought a hybrid Corolla instead of a gas version. I reminded them that the two of them flying to Africa and back put more CO2 into the atmosphere than 7 years of normal driving in our Corolla. By the way, there is a grass roots effort here to prevent the development of a lithium mine in the Wilcox playa. Big money in the lithium business without much concern about environmental impact of mining it.
We tend to jump on bandwagons, don’t we? Hybrid cars, electric cars, self-driving cars … how about fewer cars?
Yeah, yeah, I know, this from the guy who just described driving a few million miles, mostly solo, in eight different vehicles (I think we’ve actually owned 14 or 15 between us). The guy who lives in the desert, where the water mostly isn’t. Everyone should definitely focus on me when I’m scattering the old wisdom pellets around the barnyard.
Thing is, we’ve built this sprawling Rube Goldbergian nest of stroads, shit all over it, and think electrifying it will somehow make it smell better. Who are we buying the e-things from? I don’t wanna buy nothin’ from Elon. How does it get here? Three-masted schooner? Nope. Where does the go-juice come from? Dig, slaves, dig! And there are all these roads to maintain! Someone remind me, what do we pave those with again? Angels’ tears, reclaimed organic non-GMO Fryolator oil, and recycled Patagonia kit? Nuh uh.
Makes you want to strap on the old Goodyear sandals like the Tarahumara and run away, duddn’t it? But to where? I don’t think the Tarahumara want us shitting in their nest. Even if we bring our own sandals.
Word. By the way, we watched Part One of Dune. Got it on 4K Blu-Ray at Best Buy for $7, but sale is now over. It was really good, especially if you have read the book. Part Two released to theaters on March 1st. We will go watch, and then buy on Blu Ray. Yea, I know, loss leader on part 1 makes you buy part 2 at whatever price they can gouge you with.
I agree, “Dune” was solid, tracked the book nicely (and not an easy book to translate to film). The Baron reminded me of Kurtz from “Apocalypse Now.” I’m very much looking forward to Round Two.
On my last flight from Portland to Denver on United remember the 70’s poster with a duck being fornicated in midair. Describes economy I am a third of the way back in cattle ca class when two gentlemen come to my row. I am 6′ 2″ about 235, One guy is about 6′ 5″ about 265, and a beard like a Zztop band member. The next guy is about my size and around 250. We are seated in the same row and a fright “attendant” looks at this row and giggles. The 6″5 guy who is from interior Alaska growls from under his beard ” You think this is f%$king funny?” She scoots to the front of the plane and the head attendant comes back, she takes a look and assigns another attendant to tend to the Barbarians in the middle. there were empty seats but no accommodation was made. Crappy people on a crappy airline. I took a father-in-law from Kalispell, MT to Haines Alaska in late March pulling a 1973 Airstream trailer with a broken heater and a small block Ford F 250. Over Mountain passes and snow and wind, that was a drive that I will never forget but not enjoyable. I remember driving from Fort Collins to NW
Iowa in January and a drive from MT to LA in an 86 Chevy s-10 unairconditioned in the middle of August from Cedar City Utah to La Temperature never less than 100 degrees F. 126 degrees in Barstow, CA I am glad to see someone else did these treks. Good on you Patrick makes me feel less not smart.
Great minds, hey? I’m only a 6-footer and never topped two hundy but once I got sentenced to one of those little jump seats at the ass-end of the plane, doesn’t recline, right next to the toilet, the flight attendant doesn’t know you exist, etc. I decided then and there that I would rather push my Subaru than fly United.