The Long Way Home

The adventure began in Washington. Jenny flew out from Pittsburgh to the north west about two weeks earlier than I. She tied up loose ends and gathered up her belonging scattered across the state, tokens and reminders of her college days there. I arrived on the scene just as she was saying her goodbyes. The day after I flew in, we said goodbye to the state of Washington by visiting many of the places in which she had lived. We drove north to the Olympic National Park and hiked a couple of miles through the forest—still amazingly lush even in January. We then took a ferry to Seattle and enjoyed an exquisite meal before returning to Centralia. The next day we said goodbye to her many friends there who turned out for a large meal hosted by the family we were staying with. Clearly many would miss her.

The original plan was to drive back from Washington to Pennsylvania in her Jeep Wrangler (filled to the brim) via such convenient and direct stops as Santa Cruz, California, Phoenix, Arizona, and Okalahoma City, Okalahoma. Okay, so perhaps we were taking the long way home, but we had people to see and places to be along the way. However, just before we left for California we learned that our stop in Phoenix was not to be, so we took off without quite knowing what direction we might take after Santa Cruz.

We spent one rainy day in sunny California visiting Jenny’s sister, Angela. While there we got a glimpse of the Pacific Ocean, once again found ourselves in the woods, and in a cafe downtown met Richard, otherwise known as the man with dreadlocks down to his toes. In addition to telling us some rather amazing stories about never wanting to brush his hair again, Richard also gave us better directions out of California than MapQuest.

Since we no longer needed to stop in Phoenix, we had considered changing our course from a NIKE swoosh across the country into more of a straight shot across the Midwest. However, to our surprise, from Santa Cruz to Pittsburgh, there isn’t much difference in distance or travel time between venturing south on highway 40 versus the northern route through Utah on 80. Seeing that it was January and that we were returning to a land recently visited by heavy snow falls, we decided to stay south and enjoy the warmth of the desert as long as it would last. Besides, it would still give us the chance to visit Jenny’s uncle in Okalahoma.

When you’re crossing the country in a Jeep Wrangler you quickly notice two things: one, the car just simply isn’t going to go any faster than seventy miles per hour no matter how much gas you give it and two, you finally have time to tell the long version of every story. Each day Jenny and I ended with little voice left after yelling story after story to one another over the rush and roar of the road. We turned out to be well suited as traveling companions.

Santa Cruz to Okalahoma took two days. In that time we transitioned from the mild warmth of the desert winter to the stiff cold winds of the plains. Our most dangerous moment came when, against our better judgment, we stopped at Denny’s for a bite to eat. Now, I have nothing against Denny’s per say. In fact, I’ve enjoyed plenty a wonderful meal there in the past. For whatever reason, this was not one of them. But soon both Denny’s and Arizona were behind us (Arizona in general was gorgeous) and after a full course of New Mexico and a dash of Texas we rolled into the driveway on her uncle’s farm.

Though it was already very late, in classic country fashion they fixed us up some hot chocolate and heated some spaghetti before saying good night. The next morning we awoke to the bright and brisk air of Okalahoma. Before taking up our journey again, we had a chance at a decent breakfast and a visit with Jenny’s cousins living just down the road (I got the feeling that everyone lives just down the road in Okalahoma). As in Santa Cruz, it was hard for us to leave the comfort of family for the rough ride ahead. Yet now home was in sight, well, it was still twelve hundred miles away, but when you start in Seattle, that counts as “in sight” and so we began the last phase of our trip home.

Now let me just say that the United States is big. I’ve seen quite a bit of it as this was not my first road trip across the country. I remember when I lived in Taiwan that when asked about America somehow or another I always ended up emphasizing how big everything is there. The roads are bigger, the cars are bigger, the houses are bigger (perhaps not taller though—Taiwan residences tend to be stacked rather high on top of one another), goodness, even the people are bigger there. That sense of vastness can overwhelm you when you have the chance to drive each mile and watch town after town, person after person, life after life, slip into the rear view mirror. The slow addition of so much land and so many lives indelibly leaves one with a sense of awe at the sheer size of the nation, and in extension (if one is quick enough to observe it) the world and space ad infinitum.

Road trips also tend to cause even computer geeks to wax philosophical when attempting to capture the movement of life one sees when glancing up from the glow of the laptop computer and out the window at the blurred collage of trees and gravel and light posts and mountains. There goes another one of those green highway signs. And we actually passed that semi-truck (usually it’s a challenge for the Jeep to pass anything that isn’t already stationary). The sun is setting behind us and the road ahead has turned from a line of grey rock leading to the horizon to a trail of white and red lights marching into the darkness. And just how many billboards are there? It appears I can’t even cross the country with the radio off and escape commercials. And interestingly enough, right now, I don’t think either of us knows exactly where we are, but we know where we’re going and that’s all that we&#