Days 5 and 6: Almost There!

Tonight I am so tired I hurt. I also hurt from being in the car so much. I think my fibromyalgia is playing into both the tired and the hurt.

So I'm not going to write much. 

Yesterday we spent most of the day in Joshua Tree National Park and so didn't get as far as planned. However, tonight we are halfway from last night's hotel to Seattle, so that's good. We've had to put in a little extra time driving, as we will tomorrow, but it will be worth it. I have no idea yet how my pictures from Joshua Tree turned out, but I will share them in the pictures blog post.

Tonight we are in Yreka, CA. For those who don't know, it is pronounced "why-reek-uh". Possibly because there is also a Eureka, CA. We encountered a fair amount of rain and clouds today and tonight we are at almost 3000 feet above sea level and it's in the mid-50s. Brrr! Tomorrow I will be wearing the warmer clothing I packed. No more shorts or thin tee shirts for me for a while!

My body doesn't travel well and it gets all discombobulated. I'm down to eating yogurt for dinner because that's all that sounds good. I felt lucky that there was a crockpot full of oatmeal at breakfast this morning. I felt rather queasy much of today. But I'm feeling better tonight. I am currently in bed with the computer on my legs. I'm going to post this and then probably go to sleep very early.

I am glad we are almost done. I am also extremely grateful that Steve flew down and has been helping me drive my car to Seattle, even if we have wanted to push each other out of the moving car from time to time. I've probably gotten some good pictures here and there and it's been cool seeing things that I haven't seen before, or haven't seen in four years. I'm excited about getting back to Seattle, and I'm looking forward to seeing my "family members". I'm also looking forward to a good and stable internet connection and sharing with y'all pictures from my trip.

Talk to you again soon!

Home and the Holidays

Last year, I spent Christmas in a hotel room. I had dinner at The Waffle House (which makes pretty awesome, filling, way too fat for you foods, especially waffles, of course). It didn't bother me at all; it bothered everyone else a lot.

So worry not this year: my mother is coming to spend the holiday with me. Mom and I have long planned that when Gram died, Mom and I would do something different for Christmas, because the same old thing would make us miss Gram even more. This year we are spending some time in San Antonio, at the Riverwalk Plaza, the place I stayed last year in early December, before I arrived in Houston. The city et al. were just beginning to put up the holiday lights when I left to continue my journey, so I look forward to seeing the end result this year.

December in Houston

Hello all

I arrived in Houston this afternoon. It is snowing.

Yeah, that's why I left Oregon.

I am where I am because it's near a AAA office and I wanted some in-person service. So they got me one of the few hotels in the area, and they sent me to a mechanic that is AAA-certified and that they know. The latter item is why I stopped here and went no further. I really didn't want to try to get further into Houston with car that is acting a bit squirrelly.

At least the hotel has coin-op laundry units; it's just too cold to use them tonight.

Oh, and my hotel has few channels available, so I cannot watch The Mummy Returns on the FX channel tonight. I think I'll just pull the covers over my head and go to bed.

I just wanted to share.

-Skye

Laundry in Las Cruces

I arrived in LC on Wednesday, around 3:00. I was tired and had been driving for over 250 miles. I wasn’t thrilled at being on a minor highway, especially when the AAA travel person had said the hotel was downtown. It isn’t. And there are train tracks on the other side of the minor highway.

But I fell in love with my room. I stayed at the Best Western Mission Inn, and it was done in Spanish Mission style, with heavy, carved wood furniture, plaster, and lots of tile. The entire wall behind the bed—king sized!—is built in, creating a tile-topped headboard and surround. The surround has electrical outlets built into the top; the lamps and phone are on the surround and there is plenty of room for laptop, books, water, small children and pets, etc. The ceiling has beams…and acoustical tile, unfortunately. The tile floor in the bath and dressing area is heated radiantly from below.

The hotel has a restaurant: the Blue Agave Café. It wasn’t busy most evenings, so I had lots of time to talk to the waiter. He’s in school, studying to be a special-ed teacher. Nice guy. He said he wished he could be someplace where it rained. The next night, I had thanksgiving dinner at the café. It was quite busy and the servers were jumping. It was raining lightly when I went in to dinner, then slightly harder, and my waiter from the night before teased me about bringing the rain; I proudly took credit for it. Then it started to pour outside and everyone—patron and server—stopped to look. I’m sure they don’t usually get rain that hard.

I did my laundry Friday, in a Laundromat. Most of the machines were running and there were people in and out of there—Hispanic people, Caucasian people, mixed ethnicity people. The attendant was a Hispanic woman, maybe a bit older than me. She was warm and friendly and talkative, and the two of us had a great conversation for over half an hour. She had a big Thanksgiving: her husband, her kids from both marriages, friends from the Laundromat who had no family to be with.

She loves Las Cruces. But some of her family have no jobs right now. So when they all get together for a birthday or something, she said the ones who are working pitch in to cover the ones who aren’t.

I haven’t done laundry in a Laundromat in so long I don’t remember how long it’s been. Mostly I’ve had in-unit or in-building laundry facilities, when I didn’t have my own washer & dryer. The machines here were clean and they work very well. The building was clean. It was a comfortable place. My comfort zone has expanded a couple of notches.

I also shopped for groceries, for books, for another cell phone (my friend Steve put me on his plan as an additional line in the hopes I will help him use up some of his enormous amount of rollover minutes and not go over what seemed like enough minutes on my other plan: if you want my new number, email me), and then got an oil change (over 3,000 miles since my last one, a week or so before I took off).

Las Cruces is very nice and I liked it. But it is too small to give me the kind of work I’d like and it is too sleepy for me. I need somewhere more energetic now, after 7 years in a very sleepy place.

I Gotta Get Out of This Place

Friday, November 7, 2008: I was aiming for a departure time of between 9:00 and 9:30 am. We hadn’t packed the car yet; as of last evening, I hadn’t yet even opened my tent, much less set it up. (See next post.) Mom woke me at 7am and after 2 mugs of tea, PB on toast, and a shower, my mom and I proved to be a major force in physics: we got everything into that car first time, more or less. No major repacks, just one or two tweaks. I finally accepted that I will not be a stealth traveler: the car looks more like I am moving than that I am on a vacation for one or two months. I have to wonder how much of this I will discard over the next few weeks.

I drove away from Mom’s at 10:15 am.

But I still had one or two things to do. I had to return the other air mattress and pump (I finally decided to live with the slow leak in the Aerobed until I could find another Aerobed and return the first one). I needed a flu shot. And I needed to change my address at the DMV (and they will be sending me a sticker with my new address in the mail…which is so very helpful; why can’t they print it right there and be done with it?).

It took 5 minutes to return the bed and pump. It took 40 or 45 minutes to get my shot (same place, too). I still don’t know why. I have been working on my arm all day in the hopes that it won’t hurt tomorrow. We laugh.

I finally called friend John to tell him I’d be a wee bit late, given that I was on the order of 2 hours late already. And I still had to stop at Best Buy to return the digital voice recorder: it wasn’t until I got the package open and looked inside the manual that I discovered that it didn’t support Macs. I considered buying a more expensive one that said PC and Mac compatible, but I had questions and the line to the Computer Services desk was too long. There was that little matter of 2 hours behind that was bugging me.

I want to learn that life isn’t Pass/Fail: that it is okay to be two hours later than planned on vacation if there is no flight to catch.

I didn’t do too badly. I arrived at friend John’s place about 2:15. It was great to catch up for almost 2 hours! The only problem was, that I didn’t get to Ashland (my chosen resting place for tonight) until after 7, thus after dark. And I really didn’t know where I was going. I am so surprised that I found one of the motels I’d picked from the AAA book!

Now, it’s a 2-star motel: inexpensive, few amenities, older. The first room they gave me smelled kind of funny, but I can live with that. And when the water came out of the faucet all rusty, I knew I could just let it run and it would most likely clear. In a while. A longish while.

I didn’t expect the water to grow warmer. From the COLD water tap.

Maybe the taps are reversed? I thought to myself.

I turned on the one labeled “H”. It got hot too. I wondered if I had somehow been assigned The Haunted Motel Room.

Turns out the remodeling that is supposedly going on messed up the plumbing. I say “supposedly” because it is dark and I cannot see if there is anything going on. I should consider working on that paranoia of mine, too.

They gave me a different room. It doesn’t smell. It’s not freezing cold. And the plumbing works just right. As I'm feeling a bit like Goldilocks at this point, I wonder if there is porridge in the continental breakfast in the morning?

PS: There was no continental breakfast! Bit of a mis-communication. Probably. Or just the overall aura of that odd place....