From sea to shining sea

4,056.6 miles of road, 1,969 photos, and 13 days of bonding time with dear old Mom and Dad after leaving the Atlantic Seaboard, I am back on the Left Coast (and this time with a car!)

I won’t bore you with all the gory details of my trip, but at the end of it all the U.S. of A. actually seems a lot smaller. Paradoxical, maybe, that a land that takes 13 days (at least with all our detours) to cross by car would seem smaller than a country you can cross in 5-6 hours by plane. But before this trip, the middle of the U.S. always seemed like a mysterious, impossibly large expanse. I’d get on a plane on one coast, and get plopped down on the other, without seeing anything in between except for the very little you can make out from a plane window. I might as well have been traveling through a wormhole between two different universes. But now that I can draw a line (or more like a zig zag) across the country along which I’ve experienced the landscape, culture, people, etc., the country seems more manageable and more familiar. I’ve connected the two universes, without having to resort to post-Newtonian physics!

I learned a few things along the way. Things like places of incredible natural beauty are often in close proximity to places of shameless and absurd (and amusing) human development. And that 99% of the time, a sign welcoming you to an Indian reservation is shortly followed by a much larger and glitzy sign for a casino. And that it is actually possible to get heat stroke even long after the sun has gone down (I found this out after attempting to walk two blocks at a street fair in Palm Springs, where it was well over 100 degrees at 8:00 in the evening, and nearly passing out).

And I gained some favorite new places that I will have to get back to some day. Here are some of them, if you ever happen to be looking for awesome places to stop/vacation/etc.:
-Harpers Ferry, WV – quaint and only slightly touristy village in very scenic setting, preserved more or less as it was in the Civil War era. Close to Baltimore and D.C., and a great spot methinks for a romantic getaway (wink, wink)
-Great Smoky Mountains and Gatlinburg, TN – The most visited national park is fittingly right next to an extremely touristy, kitschy, Southern country vacation town—think Myrtle Beach in the mountains.
-Graceland and Beale St. in Memphis – Well, at least some of you have been here. The King’s wonderfully decorated abode and airplanes must not be missed, nor the music and street performers on Beale St. (and the Johnny Cash impersonator who, according to my dad, sings better than Johnny Cash).
-Sweet tea – OK, not a place, but my beverage of choice from Virginia to Arkansas. It made me so sad when we got to Texas and they didn’t serve it anymore:-(
-The many cafes, motels, and other business along historic Route 66 that have shamelessly huge signs advertising their associations with the highway and the whole road trip theme. My favorite place perhaps was the Roadkill Café, with a miniature recreation of an Old West town and their slogan: “If You Kill It, We Grill It”.
-Arroyo Seco – A tiny village near Taos, NM, that we discovered more or less by accident, that has more hippies and brightly colored things on display than I’ve seen anywhere east of the Sierra Nevada. And they have a hostel called the Abominable Snowmansion. Amazing.
-Mesa Verde National Park – Out in the middle of nowhere Colorado, but with amazing cliff dwellings that you can hike and climb into. Those of you who took Scully’s class, I’m pretty sure a couple of those buildings we memorized were here.
-Grand Canyon – No explanation necessary, I think.
-Las Vegas – The mother and father of all shamelessness and human excess, conveniently located within a few hours of the Grand Canyon and other sublimely beautiful national parks.

That’s all—now I can relax, because all I have to do is buy furniture/kitchenware, get officially orientated even after already working here for 2 months, meet other new grad students, audition for symphony orchestra in one week (I haven’t played any of the audition materials yet), take classes that last only 10 weeks before you take finals on them (thank you very much, quarter system), take 3 quarters worth of those classes, then take massive uber-final on all 12 of those classes. But one thing at a time.

Peace and <3 and happy alumni-dom to all,
Andrew