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.