6:30am. The cats are loaded into their cages. The car is fueled up and ready to be loaded. Meow.
Meow.
Meow, Ad Infinitum.
6:30am. July Fourth. Our Independance Day.
I start to wax poetic. I write like Hemingway.
Meow.
Ok, enough with the damned fru-fru writing. Plus, I always hated Hemingway. I mean, hadn’t he ever heard of a conjunction? I mean, come on, throw a couple of ands or ors in once in a while! Sheesh!
But I digress. It’s 6:30am, and we’ve just spent the last half of an hour packing our remaining suitcases, and two extremely large cat cages into the car. Time to hit the odometer reset and say goodbye to Hartford, land that we loathe and start the arduous journey west. First stop… somewhere near Chicago… that is, if we make it there because the fucking cat just won’t stop meowing. Janet even elected to sit in the back seat for the first 4 hour segment to try and keep the bloody beasties quiet.
Meow, meow, meow, yowl, yowl, sound of a foghorn, meow, sound of a walrus vomiting, meow, Avery thinking shutupshutupshutup, meow, Janet saying “it’s ok kitties”, meow, meow, noise that makes me wonder what percentage of a cat’s body is made up of lungs and vocal cords, meow, me meowing back at the cat, cat meowing back as if to say “what ‘chu talkin’ ’bout, Avery?”, meow, meow and a couple of more meows for good measure, sound of Avery swerving to avoid live yearling deer that decided to wander in front of the car somewhere near Scranton, meow in a manner to suggest their simultaneous relief that I missed the deer yet distress that the car suddenly lurched, meow for no apparent reason, meow.
10:30am. First break. Rest stop with subway attached to it. Footlong subway club with horseradish and banana peppers. Sated, we switch and Janet takes the wheel. Still, I am disconcerted that I’m writing barely better than Papa Hamingway himself.
Meow, meow, meow, meow, meow… minute of silence, meow, moew, meow, yowl, meow, meow, meow, meow… minute of silence… another minute of silence… Janet going “Kitties, are you ok?” followed by more meowing. You get how the meowing went. Luckily, around 2pm, the cats decided to shut up and we settled in for the rest of the 16 hour drive.
Aside from the deer in the road, day 1 was relatively uneventful. Somewhere near Ohio, I plotted out our first night to be near Davenport, Iowa. One quick call to 800-Hampton to see if there is a Hampton Inn near Davenport (there was) and we also made a reservation for the Sleep Inn in Rawlins, Wyoming for the second night. Other than that, it was just lots and lots of driving. Oh, and watching the fireworks through Chicago (not the big ones, but small ones all around the area)… and the 10,000 fireflies that peppered the area west of Chicago (yes, when they hit the windshield, they leave a glowing streak). That’s it. Driving, driving, driving.
Day 2. Chicago to Rawlins.
15 minutes of meowing followed by lots of Nebraska. Many, many hours of Nebraska. Nice skies, decent truck stops (ah, the Flying J), but all in all, just a long, 16 hour drive.
Day 3. Rawlins to San Francisco.
Wyoming, could this be the most desolate place in the world? No, it’s not. Nevada, now that’s the most desolate place in the world. Not even three pulls on the slot machine at the gas station could make it better. Oh, did I mention the dead cow in the median in Wyoming? Even the livestock wants to get the hell out of there.
Anyway, back to the drive. Between Wyoming and Nevada is Utah. I would say that Utah was a close number two when it comes to boredom, but all it takes is a horrible car crash to break up the bleak salt flats.
About 20 minutes from the Nevada border, in the middle of the salt flats, I was driving along at a decent clip. On the other side of the road, which was seperated from my side by about 70 feet of white salt flats, a speeding white car suddenly barrels into the salt flats. Less than a heartbeat later, the car is flipping in mid air and a second later, after rolling over at least 6 times, it comes to a crashing halt. If it wasn’t for the fact that I was chugging along at 75 miles an hour, I would have stopped, but instead, I called the Utah State police who were already fielding a ton of calls over the accident (PS: if anyone knows what happened to the driver of that car, let us know) and kept on going… a little more carefully though.
California! We hit the border and already we start to forget the horrors of Connecticut. Not even an agricultural inspector almost making us take the cats out (he decided not to) or a car on fire (everyone was out of it – nobody was in danger – or the fact that it seemed that the last thirty miles felt like it took three hours (What? 28 miles to San Francisco? Wasn’t it just 29 miles to San Francisco 10 miles ago?) – could bring us down. We were heading home… and at 10:48pm, we arrived.
It’s official. We’re back.
Meow.
0 Responses
Stay in touch with the conversation, subscribe to the RSS feed for comments on this post.