"But no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time in the world. Whatever it meant."*

Road Trip Part II           

              This is the story about how  my dear friend Mike and I continued our journey to the Grand Canyon and Las Vegas. You can find the first part here. And yeah, you're gonna wanna read that.

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             Mike and I scooted in under the wire and moved our In-and-Out fattened butts over to the edge of the Canyon in record time.

            I have to take a moment to explain how awe-inspiringly beautiful The Grand Canyon is. It actually brought out emotions in me that were totally unexpected. It’s like as if the world held all of these sort-of sub-par moments and then you experienced one that was just beyond all of that and you saw something that was so much greater than any painting or book or piece of music and it just left you utterly stunned and moved in a way you never thought possible. 

The Grand Canyon just after sunset.

            It hits you in the solar plexus and bleeds out your eyeballs. 

            Also, the air is a bit nippy at night, so you might start looking like you’re tearing up, even if you’re just having an awesome time and you’re not crying at all. You ARE NOT crying, okay?

Still doesn't capture it.

         

         So we immediately set about taking a gazillion pictures of ourselves from every angle imaginable and ended up looking so cute in one that I almost proposed to Mike right there on the spot. (If you look good in a picture together, what difficultly can the world hold for you, even if you are not at all in love romantically? A story that illustrates this point: I was dating a guy one time and someone took a picture of us kissing and it was so gross, I wanted to break up with him when I saw it. See? You gotta look good in the pictures.)

My lord, aren't we adorable?

            But then we realized a bunch of things needed to happen if we were going to be happy for one more minute: we had to pee, we had to find our digs, and we had to eat.

            So Mike busted out his incredible navigational skills while I popped on my driving glasses (which I keep in the glove compartment and which he kept insisting I should keep over by my door, probably because the glove compartment door kept hitting the knees of his tremendously long legs. But I explained that I don’t drive at night all that often so maybe he could keep his big mouth shut), and we wrangled our way to our lodgings.

            (Bossy Mike had made me the person in charge of lodgings all along the trip, so this was destined to be the first in a series of letdowns for him. But he was a butthead to leave it to me in the first place! I’m poor! And I’m horrible at planning things!)

            We pulled in to the cheapest of all possible venues: The Maswik Lodge, on the south rim of the Canyon. On first glance it looked like the summer camp I attended as a kid, but on second glance it proved to be much awesomer. (Yeah, I said awesomer. Suck it.)

            Maswik Lodge is essentially a lobby with a big cafeteria inside and a bunch of little cabin-style rooms scattered out around the premises. We retrieved our key and headed over to our cabin with mixed expectations.

            I opened the door and turned on the light.

            “Oh my god, Mike! It’s just like a regular room in here!”

            He laughed and followed me in. We settled ourselves and picked beds and took turns in the WC. His turn was running a little long so I stepped onto the porch to call my mom.

            It was an obliterating view. Pitch blackness and smothered in stars.

            After I talked to Mom, Mike met me on the stairs and we got in the car. The woman on the phone at the Bright Angel Lodge said it would be a quick drive, but it was definitely not walk-able, and this was where we planned to eat dinner. We followed her directions and found ourselves taking a series of left-hand turns and ended up in front of the Bright Angel approximately 2 minutes later (with traffic).

            There was no parking and it was one block from our hotel room anyway, so we took the car back and parked again.

            So then we set out on foot, but found it difficult to navigate because it was so utterly dark outside. He lives in San Francisco and I live in Los Angeles, so neither of us had seen stars in some time, let alone experienced darkness so profound as to allow for stars of this abundance.

            Mike, ever resourceful, pulled out his iPhone and used the LED light as a flashlight. He pointed at the sky and said that he could see the Milky Way. I pretended to know what he was talking about.

            Then I made a confession.

            “Mike, I’ve been known to fake constellations before.”

            “What?”

            “I pretend to know what people are pointing to, but the only thing I’ve ever seen is the Little Dipper. Or maybe the Big Dipper. I can’t tell them apart.”

            “Yeah, I can’t really see too many, either. Except Orion’s Belt. And the Seven Sisters.”

            “Oh, where are they?”

            “Um…”

            Mike craned his neck up at the sky.

            “Yeah, I don’t really know,” he finally acquiesced. “Do you think I can take a picture of these stars?”

            He tried. It didn’t work. We walked on. It was black. (It occurred to me later that mountain lions or bears or even aliens could be standing three feet away from the pitiful light from his phone and we would be none the wiser.)

            As we approached the Bright Angel Lodge (which is settled right on the rim of the Canyon, on the south side), Mike pointed up at the sky.

            “There’s Venus!” 

            “I thought Venus was the morning star?”

            “Nope, Venus is the evening star and that’s it. Right there.”

            (Okay, I did a little research and in a way we were both right: Venus is known both as the morning star and the evening star.)

            “Okay.” I lied and pretended to believe him because I was hungry.

            We sauntered into the Bright Angel.

            It wasn’t that much fancier than the Maswik Lodge, but it smelled like tourists and old people. And the Bright Angel turned out to be named after a scary, Native-American themed bird sculpture hanging over a large fireplace. And it was neither bright nor angelic, but sort of...hmmm, hideous?

            So we rerouted and put our names in for a forty minute wait at the more unassuming restaurant in the lodge. We then wandered down the hall and found ourselves in a quaint little bar with a man playing endless covers of Van Morrison songs (with a huge tip jar in front of him) and ordered some strong, fortifying cocktails.

            There was nowhere to sit, but a nice couple offered to share their table with us. Our butts were too sore from sitting all day so we passed, and stood there in the middle of the bar sucking back our cocktails.

            Ugh…this is long, so I’m stopping.

            More later…
*More from Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

“We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like, ‘I feel a bit lightheaded. Maybe you should drive.’”*

Road Trip Part I         

A Joshua tree, though not a fair likeness because this picture makes them look tall and most of them are really short.

            Mike and I were nowhere near the edge of the desert because we were in the desert because the desert pretty much starts four minutes away from East Los Angeles. We were still feeling pretty friendly towards one another because we always get along for the first 24 to 36 hours we spend together and then the casual nit-pickery begins.

            He’ll say something like, “Maybe we should plug in my iPhone and listen to some tunes.”

            As though the rocking-ass tunes I’m playing from my iPod aren’t really doing it for him.

            Then I’ll say something like, “Maybe we can revert the temperature from 64 degrees to a more temperate 78 degrees.”

            As though I would rather live ON THE FACE OF THE SUN than in the freezer he’s turned my car into.

            Sigh.

            But really, it was fun. Mike had his laptop and his iPhone (and thus, thank the lord, a map of where we were going, which I hadn’t bothered to calculate) and a bunch of tunes.

             I had a cooler packed with healthy snacks that would prevent us from falling prey to fast food temptation along the road, a suitcase full of wardrobe changes, a couple of bags full of board games, my laptop, some movies, a basketball, a tent, a hat rack, a magic lantern, and a house plant. Just in case.

            We were heading to The Grand Canyon and then to Las Vegas.

            Mike has been my friend since we were both five-years-old. He is probably the closest thing I have to a brother. That means this: I compare myself to him, he makes more money than I do, he’s smarter than I am, he tells me how to do stuff, he tells me when I’m “wrong,” we fight sometimes, and, maybe most importantly, I love him a whole lot, even when he’s being a butthead.

            That said, we were only 40 minutes into the desert when he started to piss me off. (Mike if you read this, I wasn’t really pissed off: I was irritated. Totally different!)

            I could tell the feeling was mutual.

            We were both sipping our $5 coffee drinks and agreeing—for the most part—on what to listen to, but we were both irritable and somewhat sleep-deprived and it made for a bit of hyper-sensitivity in the car.

            My theory is this: road trips are actually kind of boring.

            Before anyone gets the wrong idea, I’d like to point out the fact that I used to be something of a road trip aficionado. 

            I love to travel and I love maps (though, as it turns out, I’m hopelessly inept at reading maps. Short segue: I used to score abominably in the map skills portions of the ITBS standardized test they made us take each year. The fact that we took that test at all was bizarre because the “I” in “ITBS” stands for Iowa and we lived in Nebraska. Okay, two segues! But the mere sight of a map just enthralls me! I’m sure that’s somehow indicative of a psychological disorder.).

            But back in my road trip days I used to smoke like Humphrey Bogart (i.e. profusely), stop at a whim to sample the various chicken fried steaks of the great U.S. of A., and be perfectly willing to veer 200 miles off course to see an unknown “marvel” of the United States. (I’ve been to Carhenge three times, for instance.)

Carhenge. Alliance, NE.

            But now that my time is money and most of my trips involve getting to the destination rather than enjoying the journey, I’m kind of over the whole “road trip” thing. Also, I’m not a pothead or an acid freak, so what’s fun about driving in the desert for eight hours? “Look! Another Joshua tree!” It’s just miles and miles of desert. And it’s mostly a truly hideous sight, reminiscent of that movie Mac and Me (you know, the E.T. rip off about the aliens who drink Coke in Palm Desert by the windmills? My sister and I used to love that creepy movie). 

So creepy. Or good? I don't remember.

            And yet I’ve always romanticized road trips, likening them to the times when Jack Kerouac wrote that boring book about his road trips or when I actually liked Tom Robbins’ novels or when Laura Ingalls Wilder kept having to get back in the covered wagon and go farther into the unknown with all her pathetic crap in one tiny, little trunk.

            I have four times her luggage and none of her patience.

            So, in order to prevent you all from having to read the poetry journal I wrote under the rainbow skies that are America, I will fast forward to our actual arrival at Grand Canyon National Park.

            We were really eager, toward the end of our eight-plus hour journey, to just get to the damn park. We were bored with each other and bored with the scenery and bored with driving. And, despite all our better-laid plans, we’d eaten lunch at In-n-Out! So we also felt like a pair of fat assholes who’d lied to ourselves about how this whole trip was going to go down.

             At Grand Canyon’s south rim, there’s a stretch of highway where there are only two lanes and one is prevented from exceeding the 60-mile-per-hour speed limit. And after exceeding speeds of 75-miles-per hour to get there, it’s torturous.

            But we arrived and filed into one of the multiple lines for entry into the park.

            Dusk was setting and I was dying to see the Canyon before the sun went down. But, just like my mother before me, I have a habit of picking whichever lane wants to move the slowest.

            There must’ve been an RV-load of morons in front of us because every line filed through in no time but ours and the sun waits for no man. So we finally made it through the line and were tempted to bee-line it through the three or so miles of forest at the entrance of the park, but since, apparently, there are deer and such all around the woods, we kept it real and hit the park just as the sun was setting.

            And it was breathtakingly beautiful.

Grand Canyon. More on that later.

            But this has gotten a bit long, so I’ll regale you with the rest at a later date.

Find Road Trip Part II here.

*Quote from Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.