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May 11 to May 16, 2003
Route: I-90
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Road Trip |
Road Trip
Places to go
Places to Stop
Day1: OR,WA
Day2: WA,ID,MT
Day3: WY
Day4: WY,SD
Day5: SD,MN,WI,IL,IN
Day6: IL,IN,OH,PA,WV
End of the Road
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Couch potato heaven!
Sit in padded chairs for days at a time, talking nonsense!
Listen to good music on the new stereo!
Stop only for coffee and king-sized beds that someone
else makes and cleans!
Occasionally, get distracted by scenery!
Somewhere over the rainbow is, strangely enough, a farm in
Montana.
Also in Montana
is the valley where Babe the Pig would have lived, if he lived
in Montana.
Interstate-90: a road of one's own.
Just another bleak and wild and scary and fascinating
stretch of Interstate-90.
Herd of buffalo, Yellowstone National Park
Pines in snow, Yellowstone National Park
 Yellowstone Lake.
 Buffalo Bill Lake, east of Yellowstone.
 Flowers, Devil's Tower, Wyoming.
For 3000 miles we meditated on this koan. But don't ask what
conclusions we reached- our zen master won't let us tell.
So why this trip?
Well, I was in Portland for the ICSE conference
and
Helen had to head back to WV
for the summer. We did the sums and figured
that driving a car across with two of us
would be cheaper than
paying for air tickets and car hire for 3 months in WV.
We've already done this kind of trip before. Mid-Feb, WV to OR. Only took five days and the conditions
were awful (hitting and spinning over black ice in Wyoming; driving with zero
visibility through snowstorms in Utah). But now it's summertime and the driving is easy.
Turns out, we were the youngest old couple on the road.
Everywhere we went were older, retired folks were
getting in the sites before the bedlam of the teenager season.
(What's teenager season, you ask? Well, it's an American
high summer thing.
1,000,000
kicking and screaming teens arrive at your favorite
holiday spot,
all dragged by their parents.)
It was a trip of toys.
A new
car stereo (and this time all four speakers worked).
New 3 mega-pixel digital camera with enough memory for
over a day of snapping at everything in sight
before we run out of memory. Each evening was spent
turning the day into web pages.
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Places to go |
Road Trip
Places to go
Places to Stop
Day1: OR,WA
Day2: WA,ID,MT
Day3: WY
Day4: WY,SD
Day5: SD,MN,WI,IL,IN
Day6: IL,IN,OH,PA,WV
End of the Road
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Places to go!
Prairie dogs to see!
Music to play!
I-90: it rocks! Gets reeaaallllyyyy isolated sometimes (Montana)
then it isn't (cutting through downtown Chicago, at midnight).
Back roads in Wyoming between nowhere and nowhere.
Hills with colors that nature never intended.
Yellowstone National Park: it bubbles, it smells, and its
set to explode! Americans can't do anything by halves. When this puppy
blows, it'll take out most of the USA. So see it now, while you can.
Prairie dogs! Give yourself a treat and watch
someone else run the rat race for a while.
And some highlights weren't visual:
- Delerium's "Poem" took us through
some back road in Montana through bizzarely-colored sandy foothills.
- Moby's "Play" took us through
this
steep snowy pass through mountains of granite
in the dead of night with a full moon lighting our way.
- Even cruising a
boring interstate became sublime, if Chill Out Mix #1 was
playing.
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Places to Stop |
Road Trip
Places to go
Places to Stop
Day1: OR,WA
Day2: WA,ID,MT
Day3: WY
Day4: WY,SD
Day5: SD,MN,WI,IL,IN
Day6: IL,IN,OH,PA,WV
End of the Road
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Try this yourself: find a little patch of nowhere,
sit down, and listen.
Check it out:
no cars, no honks, no boom boxes;
no squeals, no screams,
no shots;
no shopping malls or shopping
channel or CNN.
What could be finer?
Some nice nowheres:
On a back road to Yellowstone. A deserted and untamed
place the likes of which I have not seen in years.
I loved it.
Yellowstone Lake
when the wind is low, and the cars stay away.
You can get minutes without a sound, staring at the
purity of this iceland wonderland.
 Hanging out with the homies, in
Wyoming. Actually, watching prairie dogs is kinda soothing-
maybe cause it's someone else running the rat race.
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Day1: OR,WA |
Road Trip
Places to go
Places to Stop
Day1: OR,WA
Day2: WA,ID,MT
Day3: WY
Day4: WY,SD
Day5: SD,MN,WI,IL,IN
Day6: IL,IN,OH,PA,WV
End of the Road
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Portland,OR to Spokane,WA
Portland is a nice town, though a little weird. For example,
the locals can say
"triple venti soy caramel macchiato" in one syllable.
And some of the locals still live the yellow and brown of the
70s. In fact,
my friends either stopped
taking acid decades ago or moved to Portland.
And as for Vancouver (just over the river), what a perfect made-for-Batman
locale. "Meanwhile, in an abandoned warehouse/ shopping center/ whatever on
the outskirts of Portland, the bad guys are camping up another plot".
Portland/Vancouver are cities that love their highways. Like concrete
with your spaghetti? Then this is your kind of town!
The Columbia river gorge starts
right at Portland and goes east for, er, an hour
or two.
Trees love the Pacific Ocean. We know this because
as we drove east down the gorge (away from the ocean), the trees started thinning
out.
By the time we left the gorge proper, not a tree was in
site.
In fact, eastern Oregon's main growing thing seems to be
electrical
power lines.
Oh- the other thing out here is big-ass trains. A mile or
two long, sometimes double-stacked.
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Day2: WA,ID,MT |
Road Trip
Places to go
Places to Stop
Day1: OR,WA
Day2: WA,ID,MT
Day3: WY
Day4: WY,SD
Day5: SD,MN,WI,IL,IN
Day6: IL,IN,OH,PA,WV
End of the Road
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Spokane,WA to Ennis, MT
We were so lazy yesterday. Started at 10, stopped at 5. Slept for
a few hours at the hotel in the early evening.
Out to a bistro for a quick bite to eat then back to the hotel for some
more ZZZing (actually, Helen did the ZZZs while I hacked web pages).
Got lost
on Spokane's bizarre one-way street system. A town this size needs
this many one way streets? And that would be because???
Glad to see the back of eastern Washington. Not a real lot going on there.
East of Spokane, Interstate-90 does a quick sprint across the narrow top
bit of Idaho.
High mountain lakes, scary-ass hunks of granite looming over the road
and Helen laughing at my Australian-ness for saying
so. So unkind: just cause Australians aren't forever surrounded by
thousands of feet and billions of tons of rock all designed to crush you
(mentally and physically)
into total, utter, and complete insignificance. Intimidated by big mountains?
Me? Are we at the beach yet?
After Idaho, we hit Montana and the Rocky Mountains. My, how big
and pink they are.
Still pink.
Definitely, pink.
Mountains can have shapes like a raccoon-
-or a huge old hole big enough to house several science fiction
disaster movies.
After the Rockies came the
flat lands, and cattle country. Here's me rassling the Sinclair
oil company's dinosaur. This fella was sure hornerary. Mighty
pissed at all his kin getting turned into petrol, sold at
discount rates, and him not getting a penny.
But eventually I broke him enough to make him safe for the women folk.
Let's retire to Montana:
all the other super stars are doing it.
We should have pushed
onto the big city of West Yellowstone but this motel in Nowhere Montana
looked so sweet. The
owner thought I was British and thanked me for my help in Iraq. I accepted
as graciously as I could, then left shaking. At least he didn't thank
me as an Australian.
After parking the car we realized that we'd been either the grim reaper
or the Montana bug bus company for about 10,000 insects.
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Day3: WY |
Road Trip
Places to go
Places to Stop
Day1: OR,WA
Day2: WA,ID,MT
Day3: WY
Day4: WY,SD
Day5: SD,MN,WI,IL,IN
Day6: IL,IN,OH,PA,WV
End of the Road
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Ennis,MT to Buffalo,WY
Long, long day: through Wyoming
(including Yellowstone Park), finished driving about
11pm. And that was after starting
with a wake-up call at 7am (6am western Helen time). Memo: never wake up wife that early again, ever.
Town names you'll never see: - Crowded, Wyoming
- Beachview, Wyoming
- Gay, Wyoming
- Democrat, Wyoming
There's just no avoiding it, it has to be said,
Helen is a geothermal snob. She was born
in a country full of towns that smell of
sulphur, mud that bubbles, or mountains that explode.
So here she is, walking round mud pools in Yellowstone going
"why, after leaving New Zealand, am I now visiting
yet another thermal area?".
 "I mean to say", she went on,
"you call that a pool of boiling mud? Come on,
it hasn't even got a death toll."
 Helen was very encouraging
to the locals. "Well done, little fellow.", she remarked,
"You keep working on it and one day
just might get to be a real geyser, like the ones
we have in New Zealand."
 Her majesty, Queen Helen
awaiting Old Faithful with some of her American
fans.
"O.K.", conceded Helen, "Full
marks
points for effort and showmanship but my mother and I
refuse to live at any volcanic site that
didn't go BANG in 30 A.D. with
a sound so loud that they heard it in China."
(Actually, Queen Helen may
get her wish sooner than she imagines. Turns out that
Yellowstone sits on a HUGE volcano that is due to BLOW
any century
now- and take out much of the USA with it.)
 Buffalo warning, Yellowstone National Park.
 Buffalo, Yellowstone National Park.
These things are so shaggy and dirty. We saw lots of Buffalo poop
around Old Faithful. Maybe they're in denial about the
whole dirt thing.
Results in a fetish that makes them stand around
watching hot showers while refusing to
get into them.
 Wolf, Yellowstone National Park.
 Deer, Yellowstone National Park.
Yellowstone Lake kept breaking my heart. My camera
was full of dozens of crap photos, all failing to
capture
this stunning ice sheet, surrounded by snow-capped mountains,
that goes for miles and miles and miles and...
Finally, Helen tamed it using a little foreground
material to kind of squeeze it into one photo.
Driving east from Yellowstone, it was like some big switch
was thrown. One minute we were going through alpine forest,
 then we came down a HUGE
ravine and SNAP! we were into desert country.
 The contrast from the park
to Wyoming farm land was amazing. In the park, herds of majestic
buffalo roam free. Outside in Wyoming, herds of silly hairy
things are raised behind barbed wire.
 Helen
calls this
"My Friend Flicka" country- after a series of horse adventure
books set in Wyoming that every teenage girl reads.
On the way back from the end of the road,
we found a little
side-track. Spent a glorious hour, near dusk, zipping over
sand hills that just shouldn't be that color. This
is the least populated state in the USA and we were barreling
down a road that wasn't on any map, Delerium blaring
out of the speakers. Surreal and scary and fantastic.
That wasn't the end. After dinner, we spent hours
climbing up through some
narrow windy pass in the darkness Just us, huge hunks of
ghostly granite lit up by a full moon,
and a road that never seemed to stop
going upwards. At the crest we got out of the car
for 60 freezing seconds to stare at a snow field sparkling
in the moonlight. Then back to the car, heater on full,
to drive on and down.
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Day4: WY,SD |
Road Trip
Places to go
Places to Stop
Day1: OR,WA
Day2: WA,ID,MT
Day3: WY
Day4: WY,SD
Day5: SD,MN,WI,IL,IN
Day6: IL,IN,OH,PA,WV
End of the Road
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Buffalo,WY to Sioux Falls,SD
The morning was grand: Devil's Tower and the gosh-darndest
cutest rats god every gave this earth (they're called "prarie dogs").
The afternoon was tedious: I90 through South Dakota. Look,
there's a rock. (Long, long pause). Oh, there's another one.
But when the sun set a little, and added a touch of soft light to it
all, South Dakota was beautiful. Kind of like the
green felt on a billiard
table, but seen from really, really, really close up.
 Close encounters, anyone?
 This artist- I like her work.
Prarie dogs build their mounds as a dam against heavy rain
and as a look-out. They have different barks for territorial stuff
and a special hawk warning.
 Prairie dogs like in "towns". Half their
life is spent underground.
 American robin nesting,
Devil's Tower
I-90 stretching
across South Dakota. Barely visible through the bug splatter
on our windscreen.
This must be west, where the deer and the antelope play.
Stunning red rocks.
A strange sign.
Another strange sign, miles later.
What is this "Wall drug" thing, anyway?
Hey, these signs stretch for miles and miles.
 At last!
 Inside. A veritable museum of the Wild West.
Dozens of rooms, arcades, walls and walls of historical photos,
exhibitions, displays, stuffed animals... We saw more
Indian and pioneering memorabilia here than ANYWHERE
since Portland.
And, in a very un-American style, FREE to walk around.
 Pictures of how far around the world
these folks have posted signs about Wall Drugs. Here's one from
the Great Wall of China. Other pictures came from the Tag Mahal and
the South Pole. Wall Drugs- not so much a store as a world view.
So, that was South Dakota. Lottsa flat, lottsa green, probably
impassible in winter,
and one incredible drug store. In all,
not a dangerously exciting place. Highly recommended, for those
with weak hearts.
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Day5: SD,MN,WI,IL,IN |
Road Trip
Places to go
Places to Stop
Day1: OR,WA
Day2: WA,ID,MT
Day3: WY
Day4: WY,SD
Day5: SD,MN,WI,IL,IN
Day6: IL,IN,OH,PA,WV
End of the Road
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Sioux Falls,SD to Portage, IN
Got on the road incredibly late, noon (woke up late).
Helen drove
most of the day while we listened to Bill Bryson's "Short History
of Nearly Everything".
If I was a windmill, I'd love the wind and hate
anything that blocked it. Hey! I should move to Minnesota!
 Tree, church, Adrian, Minnesota.
 Farm, Minnesota.
 Farm.
 Big farm.
 Hmmm... lots of farms in these parts.
 Helen
reading "18 Wheels Singles: Where Country Singles Meet".
Lots of ads from "Incarcerated,
Springfield, South Dakota",
saying things like that "I haven't had a drink in 18 years"
and "I don't think love is a dirty word".
 Mississippi. End Minnesota.
Begin trees and the up-and-down stuff (they're called "hills"
and are illegal in Minnesota).
 Pulled over to some Kiwki-Mart clone after dusk to watch
a total eclipse of the full moon. Talked trite, watched the man
in the moon got eaten, tried to photograph it all but just got silly
little blurs.
Much later than night,
serious traffic on I-90 went through downtown Chicago.
11pm at night
and there were cars whizzing about EVERYWHERE,
all diving sideways over all lanes without indicating. Miles and
miles of barreling through narrow little lane ways through
"under-construction" zones being chased by other cars doing 60mph.
Is Chicago a mighty industrial giant? Don't ask me-
when I drove through it I was too busy dying
of terror.
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Day6: IL,IN,OH,PA,WV |
Road Trip
Places to go
Places to Stop
Day1: OR,WA
Day2: WA,ID,MT
Day3: WY
Day4: WY,SD
Day5: SD,MN,WI,IL,IN
Day6: IL,IN,OH,PA,WV
End of the Road
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Portage,IN to Morgantown, WV
 OK, so not much to see today.
Ohio. Kind of like Minnesota, but less so.
Pennslyvannia, cooler than we remembered. Soft forests over rolling hills
cut by spectacular highways.
 The parting of the ways:
we leave I-90 after thousands of miles. Hail and farewell-
we will meet again.
Home by 7pm to a cat that we were most happy to see was
most pissed off to see us. That's just good manners, for a cat.
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End of the Road |
Road Trip
Places to go
Places to Stop
Day1: OR,WA
Day2: WA,ID,MT
Day3: WY
Day4: WY,SD
Day5: SD,MN,WI,IL,IN
Day6: IL,IN,OH,PA,WV
End of the Road
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Any road trip is doomed, must fail.
If you get
off before the end of the road, your journey is incomplete.
And if you chase the road to its end, you'll never complete.
For the
road goes forever- pushed on by those
unhappy with what they are.
Like the end of the rainbow, the faster you run along it,
the more the end of the road flees from you.
Unless, like us, you get lucky and stumble onto
the end of the road. Which we did, in central
Wyoming.
The key to finding the end of the road is not to search for it.
Which, to the untrained observer, might appear to mean "getting lost".
This road looks like any other road on the map. Except for one
small detail- its closed!
Not that you'd know of course.
We cruised down this thing for miles, not another car
is sight, before we found out
that it was a one way street.
In any other state, the lack of other cars would have been
a dead give away. But Montana is the most under-populated
state in the union. So we drove on.
blissing out on the plains and the hills all around us. Not
having to share the open view with anyone else except
each other.
Here's Helen at the end of the road. See the mountain
bleeding red behind her
because
a goat track has been tacked onto the side?
See the gate across the road closing the track (just above Helen's right shoulder)?
And strangest of all,
see Helen grinning like a lunatic at being
tricked into this dead-end, miles from anywhere?
Why is Helen so happy to be here, at the end
of the road?
Well, right next to the end of the road is an old highway fallen
into disrepair. If you dared to venture up it, you get two great
views. One was the plains we'd just crossed with snow-capped
mountains behind. And the other was at our feet.
Helen
went nuts over this crumbling road being
recaptured by the desert. "St. Liebowitz lives up this road!"
she declared, "staff in hand, with mysteries to tell."
Her glee wore out the camera.
Shots of tiny cacti clawing their way into the middle of
the road.
Macro-photos of crumbling asphalt.
Little videos, panning across the rubble of the ruined road.
Finally the camera was exhausted. Its little "battery low"
light came on, pleading for mercy.
We left, declaring that we'd retire to this
post-apocalyptical hillside in the middle of the
desert, at the end of road.
Notice that we didn't tell you where the end of the road was.
Tee hee- you'll have to look for it yourself.
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