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Glocks Are On Sale At Radioshack
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Rio Rancho: Family Hospitality
I ended up staying with my Aunt and Uncle in their home in Rio Rancho for a little over two weeks. I hadn't planned on staying that long, but after settling into a routine of daily showers, good company, and good food I found it hard to find a reason to leave in any particular haste. I was also sleeping in a real bed for the first time in weeks, and that was enough to keep me stationary for at least a little while.
While I was there I spent my days working on a garden box. It was was simple satisfying labor that kept my afternoons occupied and my meals guilt-free. It was built by laying down lumber, drilling holes into it, and then cramming a piece of rebar into the hole and binding the lumber together. Like Lincoln Logs on a larger and more permanent scale. I was assisted by the increasingly blind and deaf dog Petra, who would start every morning by barking at me like she hadn't seen me the previous day. After the initial hysteria she would follow me around the yard as I worked.
Two of my cousins are still young enough that they were living at the house and attending the school. The routine of a house with children was comforting and familiar while also making me feel old. Perhaps old is an exaggeration, but middle school was still a while ago.
Eventually I finished work on the garden box, and I felt like it was time to go before I got so comfortable that I wouldn't want to leave. My next destination was with a different Aunt and Uncle who lived in a place called The Woodlands which is north of Houston in Texas. The distance between the two was roughly twice the distance that I had hitchhiked, and I was kindly purchased a bus ticket by my Aunt and Uncle. I would be taking a 22-hour ride aboard Greyhound, something I had never done before.
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Hitchhiking: A Ride from Stacy
I had just been in Phoenix the day prior where the high temperature was around 70 degrees, very nice for the middle of winter. It was around 40 degrees in Holbrook. Not terribly cold but as I stood trying to get a ride I stared at an ancient Dairy Queen that was opening for the day across the street and wondered how much soft serve they managed to move during these colder months.
I was actually a bit afraid about my situation in Holbrook. I was standing at the on-ramp to I-40 as it is illegal to walk along interstates and the ramp is pretty much your only legal place to get a ride. On that particular morning there weren't very many people using the on-ramp, and those who did just gave me increasingly familiar looks of astonishment. I'm still waiting for a genuine spit take.
I needn't have worried, as I was picked up within half an hour by a friendly trucker named Stacy who wasn't driving a truck. He explained that he was driving to Wisconsin where he would drop off his rental car and pick up a truck to drive back across the country. His car was full gadgets, in particular he was very fond of his radar detector. I have to admit it was neat being able to know where cops were before you could see them, but I think I'm just going to keep driving like a sane person.
Since he was going all the way to Wisconsin he was able to take me the rest of the way to Albuquerque, which was about 4 hours away. We talked about the usual stuff before I nodded off and slept for most of the trip. I woke up as we were driving into town and it was about five minutes later that was I getting my pack out of the car and watching Stacy drive away.
It was surprising how in many ways hitchhiking had proved very easy, as long as a person was willing to be patient. On the other hand I had quite a few blisters as I had decided to break in a pair of boots on this leg of the journey and I was exhausted in general. I slowly made my way over to a Barnes and Noble where I sat and zoned out until my Aunt was able to come and pick me up. It had been fun and exciting, but I was ready for a break.
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Hitchhiking: Old Racist Dude
It wasn't long after stumbling down the hill and sticking my thumb out on the side of the highway that I was picked up. The man who picked me was getting on in years, I'd guess late 60's, and I can't remember his name. I also can't recall the details of many of his stories, but I'm not too torn up about it because they were boring racist fishing stories. For instance he waxed lyrical about the times he almost went deep-sea fishing, but couldn't because of weather.
He was able to take me quite a ways, all the way north to the town of Holbrook where I would take I-40 the rest of the way east to Albuquerque. This gave him plenty of time to talk at me about the good ol' days and for me to yell my replies to his infrequent questions. I was fine with the arrangement as it meant I didn't have to think and could just sit passively and enjoy the warmth of a heated car.
About halfway through our journey together he stopped at a Circle K to get a brown bag of something that he promptly stowed in the trunk. Further up the road we stopped in a town called Snow Flake to try and find title insurance agency place and he took the opportunity to visit his little brown bag in the trunk. The distinct odor of cheap liquor that accompanied him back into the car quickly solved the mystery. Fortunately I was dropped off about 15 minutes later at the on-ramp to I-40 and didn't have to deal with the old guy getting increasingly erratic in his driving.
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Hitchhiking: Sleeping
Although I fell asleep without much trouble, sleeping through the night proved to be something else entirely. The largest problem was that I was an imbecile and decided to sleep on an incline rather than keep looking for a level place to sleep. My head was higher than my feet and any time I moved I would slide a couple inches off of my sleeping pad and into the dirt. Every hour or so I would wake up to find myself a couple feet further down the hill with the bottom half of my sleeping bag in the dirt.
At about 2 in the morning I was woken by the sound of dogs howling at something. There were dogs barking all around me, I had decided to lay down in the middle of some sort of canine chat room, so I didn't think much of it at first. It took a good 30 seconds for my sleep addled brain to realize that the sound I was hearing wasn't made by dogs, but rather by coyotes. It occurred to me that I was fairly vulnerable, fully zipped up in my sleeping bag like a living burrito of sorts. Luckily for me they never got that close and I was able to make it through the night without being eaten.
It turned out that over the course of the night my water had frozen solid. I hadn't noticed the cold in my sleeping bag and was glad that I had sprung for a bag rated for freezing temperatures. I quickly noticed when I tried to get out of my sleeping bag at first light and decided to wait in my bag until it was a little less frigid. By the time the sun had risen a bit more and it was warm enough to leave my cocoon I was glad to be leaving that hill and getting on with things.
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Hitchhiking: The end of the first day
After my first and mildly successful ride it took another fair chunk of time for anybody to do anything beyond giving me strange looks. My favorite was an older gentlemen who returned my thumbs up gesture in kind as if to say that he approved of my endeavor while continuing on his merry way. The double takes are also pretty funny, but most people just stare at me like I'm crazy.
I got my next ride from a Vietnam vet who picked me on account of his own experiences hitchhiking after he got back from the war. He told me his name was Steve and that he was going as far as the casino. This turned out to be about a mile up the road and about the time that he finished explaining this to me Steve was pulling over to the side of the road to let me off.
It turns out most of the cars were passing me on the way to a Casino that I didn't know existed. I'm not sure if this really hurt my chances of getting a ride from someone, it certainly felt like it at the time. I walked a ways up the highway to get away from the corrupting influence of the casino and found a nice spot with plenty of shoulder to stand and try my luck.
There were considerably less cars passing by as I waited and it took me the better part of an hour to get picked up. This time I was picked up by a Navajo driving his minivan up to Payson to meet with his mother. This was a good 60 miles further up the road so I was glad to get the ride. With the distance came the opportunity for a longer conversation and we spoke about the same things that I end up talking about with every person who picks me up.
This conversation almost always includes: my age, my destination, my point of origin, the purpose of my trip, time spent on the trip, the weather, local news, what I did back home, and some reason why they did the obviously insane thing and picked me up. This time around the weather was very nice and I had been picked up for the most common reason; back in his youth the driver had hitchhiked himself. I got dropped off in the middle of Payson and had to walk a mile or so to get out of town to a place where I could try and get a ride.
By this time darkness had fallen and it became clear that I wasn't going to get a ride that night. I decided to keep walking along the highway and made my way to a very small town called Star Valley. There wasn't much to this town and I just walked through it. I kept on walking a little while before deciding I was tired and so I walked up a hill off of the side of the highway, got into my sleeping bag, and went to sleep.
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Hitchhiking: My First Ride
After arriving at the highway I took a small break to rest, drink some water, and work on my sweet Albuquerque sign. I had brought the lid from a pizza box and for whatever reason decided to wait until the last possible moment to actually create the sign. By this point I knew how to spell Albuquerque correctly and using a sharpie I managed to write "Albu" before realizing I wouldn't have enough room. I did my best to cram the rest of it in there legibly, but I wasn't very successful.
I tried to use the sign for about 10 minutes, the entire time wondering if the 400 mile distance to Albuquerque would just discourage people, before I decided to ditch the sign and just stick out my thumb. It wasn't long after that I had someone pull to the side of the road, unfortunately it was a police officer who wasn't too interested in giving me a ride anywhere, let alone to New Mexico.
Overall he was friendly and didn't harass me much. He inquired about my destination before asking me my age, which was the primary reason he had pulled over. It has been said that I have a bit of a baby face by a few people, most people say I look like a 13-year-old. To help put it in context, I'm 24 and still get carded for R-rated movies. Once it was clear that I was in fact an adult, he ran me through the system to see if I had any outstanding warrants. I didn't and he let me continue hitching with the warning that what I was doing was dangerous and stupid.
I'm not sure how long it was before I got my first ride, it was a nice day and I occupied myself by trying to walk backwards along the highway without tripping. It didn't feel like too long, however, before a pickup truck pulled to the side of the road and I got my first ride from a guy named Maddy.
It turned out he wasn't going too far, about 15 miles up the road, but I figured it couldn't hurt. He was surprised to see me hitching and pretty concerned for my well being. He said that 6 years ago he had come to the states without speaking a word of English and drove across the country to Arizona. It wasn't always easy to understand what he was saying, but he was super nice and bought me lunch before dropping me off.
Although I hadn't managed to make it very far, I was pretty excited about the prospect of hitching the rest of the way to Albuquerque. When I had first set out there was more than a little doubt that nobody was going to pick me up and I would just stand on the side of the road for five or six hours before returning to the Urban Farm defeated. Clearly it was going to be slow going, but I felt encouraged and stuck out my thumb.
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Arizona: Escaping Phoenix
Brian returned to Oregon a few days before I left the Urban Farm myself, giving me a some time to get used to being on the road in a relatively familiar place before embarking on my own. In that time I further condensed my belongings from what would reasonably fit in the back of a Honda Civic to what I could carry on my back. It was a little strange at first, seeing most of my worldly possesions reduced to such a small space. Now I'm kinda diggin' it.
My first stop on my own was to be with family in Albuquerque and in order to get there I would first have to get out of Phoenix itself. I had chosen a highway going north out of town as my route rather than the interstate for two reasons. First, it was a mildly more direct route. Second, it is illegal to hitchhike on the side of the interstate in the state of Arizona. And nearly every state in the union. Instead you have to hitch at on-ramps or other roads leading to the interstate, which didn't jive with my vision for hitchhiking.
This highway (87 if you're curious) was on the east side of town about a 20 minute drive away from the Urban Farm. I set out with my entirely-too-full pack at about 9:30 in the morning. I walked about four blocks to a bus stop where I got on a bus that took me downtown. From there I got on the light rail and road the train east until the end of the line. From there I took another bus east, before taking my final bus north a ways.
At this point I had exhausted the Phoenix public transit system and had to make it the rest of the way on foot. It wasn't too far until I would reach the highway, about two miles, and then I would finally be hitchhiking! Although I had been wearing the backpack on and off during the public transit portion of the trip, it wasn't until I had walked a while that I realized how much my crap weighed, even trimmed down as it was. By the time I got to the highway it was 2:30, a meager five hours from the farm to the road. At least the hard part was over.
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Phoenix: Separation Anxiety
Pretty much since the beginning of this trip it was assumed, at least on my part, that Brian would get his fill of the road long before I did. For whatever reason I am totally committed to this endeavor of seeing a greater portion of the United States and having some sort of an adventure. When I think on it, I come to the conclusion that videogames are largely to blame.
This is for two reasons. First they have colored my thinking since I was a small child and instilled a thirst to strike out on my own and see the world (books and American culture in general probably had a hand in this as well). Secondly, and unfortunately probably more importantly, I no longer own any. When I decided to do embark on this endeavor I sold the many videogames and game systems that I had amassed over the course of my life. I also sold everything else, but I wasn't attached to my old textbooks the way I was to my Game Boy Color.
Without the siren song of material objects there wasn't a lot that I felt like I was leaving behind. In turn there's nothing much that I feel like I need to get back to anytime soon. This is, of course, entirely ignoring my friends and family, but barring some terrible tragedy they aren't going anywhere anytime soon.
All this rambling is just to explain why when after two months of living on the road (and even longer away from home due to the sojourn in Lincoln City) I chose to keep on going when Brian made the entirely reasonable decision to return to Eugene, Oregon. I do think it's a little ironic (at least I hope it's ironic) that Brian was loving the relentless sunshine of Arizona while I found it grating and longed for constant gray wetness that is the Oregon winter.
The Civic was Brian's car and has returned with him to Oregon. I am now making my way via public transit, Greyhound, and hitchhiking. I have always wanted to hitch and against the better judgement of pretty much every I know or talk to decided to use it for the next leg of my journey.
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Phoenix: Urban Farm
After San Diego we headed east to the city of Phoenix where we would be working for two weeks on a farm nestled in suburbia. Dubbed the "Urban Farm" it was just a regular house with around 40 chickens, a few garden beds, and a couple dozen fruit trees. While we were staying there the farm acquired a nursery after years of planning and we did a fair chunk of work there.
In addition to the daily tasks of feeding the chickens, collecting eggs, and watering the beds our afternoons were spent working on a larger project of some sort. The first thing that we did was build a chicken coop using a bunch of mismatched pieces of wood that were on the side of the house. The only component of the coop that was new was the hardware, everything else was reclaimed from something else. It took us a few days to finish the thing, and in the end we had a functional if ugly chicken coop.
After finishing the first chicken coop, we apparently did such a good job that we were enlisted to construct a second one. Secretly I suspect that it had less to do with the quality of our craftsmanship and the fact that our services were being rendered at the low low price of free. Well, nearly free. I did have a place to sleep and pretty much all the eggs I could eat. The second one actually turned out halfway decent, turns out measuring twice and cutting once is actually a pretty good idea.
The rest of my time at the Urban Farm was spent working at the nursery. There were a little more than 150 fruit trees that were purchased and delivered bare root, I spent around three days putting them into pots. A large portion of the time was spent shoveling dirt, which gets pretty tiring after a few hours. On the plus side, I have started to develop some pretty sweet calluses.
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San Diego: Television
After seeing all that the great city of Los Angeles had on offer for the very low price of free we headed further south to the city of San Diego. I don't know much about San Diego, other than that they have a killer zoo and the bits and pieces I learned from repeated viewings of Anchorman. It almost certainly has a rich history, I remember driving through an Old Town at some point, but in my mind it will always be associated with 3D television and sleeping somewhere other than the car.
We stayed with my incredibly generous cousin Russell, who lives pretty much in the middle of downtown. The first couple of days he showed us around and played the gracious host, but it wasn't long before he had to take off for Philadelphia to conduct business. While he was gone we had access to downtown and the many adventures it offered but cable TV won out more often than not.
I am not proud to say that my time in San Diego was spent primarily in front of a large high quality television, watching whatever happened to be on. In fact other than to get food, I think I only left the apartment once under my own volition. In fact there's not much else to add to the whole experience other than I don't think I should get cable anytime soon.
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Los Angeles: More Star Wars!?
While browsing a Goodwill in Los Angeles I found what I thought was another great find, a copy of pre-special edition Star Wars on VHS!
Sweet, right? As long as you still have a VCR at least.
Closer investigation reveals that all is not as it seems, a common problem with shopping at Goodwill.
What's this? The first episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation?
I guess they couldn't find their copy of A New Hope and felt bad?
To make matters worse, the two tapes that are Star Wars are special edition!
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Los Angeles: The Sights
While in the great city of Los Angeles we decided to hit up a few of quintessential tourist destinations. The first place we checked out was the Santa Monica Pier. The Pier was pretty underwhelming, it was a pier overlooking the Pacific. At certain times of day the view may have been nice, but we were there in the late afternoon so it was painfully bright looking anywhere near the direction of the ocean. The attractions on the pier were the same as you would see on any coastal tourist trap anywhere. The only thing that caught my eye was the fact that you could rent Segways and go on some sort of guided tour of the beach.
They were moving so fast I could never manage to capture the shirtless tour guide. The paramedics were unrelated to the Segway tour.
We briefly visited Hollywood, checking out the Hollywood Walk of Fame and the hand prints in front of Grauman's Chinese Theater. The sights themselves weren't very captivating, the sight of signatures set in concrete isn't diminished by the medium of photography. What was interesting, however, was the strange mix of people the place attracted.
The streets were lined with people waiting for the premiere of that New Years Eve movie. I hadn't even heard of the movie at this point, but apparently a lot of people had and were going to sit and wait for the privilege of seeing their favorite star walking into a theater across the street. To be fair, I once did pretty much the same thing only instead of seeing Robert De Niro I bought a Wii the morning it was released.
We stopped at the Griffith Observatory, which was probably the coolest place we saw in Los Angeles. It sits up in the hills and really gives you a great view of the city. It lets you look and see how far it stretches, how it just keeps going and going and going. It had been stormy a few days before, so it was relatively clear of smog and was quite the sight.
We ended the night in the parking lot of the McDonald's that sits across the street from Disneyland in Anaheim. It simply wasn't in our budget to actually enter the happiest place on earth this time around, but we were able to enjoy the magnificent fireworks that were on display every night at 9:30.
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Saw this sign at the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles. Made me giggle. Also, that place is just like the movie!
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Los Angeles: Driving
To state the obvious: Los Angeles is a sprawling urban wasteland. We probably spent more time driving than doing anything else. To a certain extent as I actually enjoyed driving around, as long as it wasn't bumper to bumper. In ideal conditions it was a very engaging drive, trying to navigate the maze of highways at high speeds in a sea of metal.
It certainly would have been an entirely different story if I didn't have a smart phone with GPS. There were a couple of times that we just drove around checking out the city, and it was very easy to get lost. Los Angeles doesn't offer a lot in the way of visual landmarks, there are clusters of tall buildings here and there but that's about it. I imagine it takes quite a while to become even mildly familiar with the larger area.
It just keeps going.
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Los Angeles: Sleeping in the Car
A big part of this trip has been behaving like an imbecile and having things work out better than should probably be expected. We left Compound Joy without any clear idea where we would be sleeping the next night. We drove south to Los Angeles and made it into town around 10 at night. Our attempts at couch surfing in the city of angels had utterly failed and so we decided to just sleep in the car.
We drove around for a bit trying to find a nice neighborhood. We eventually settled on some random street in Burbank because all the cars parked there were considerably nicer than ours. We found a nice spot in between two houses, so as to disguise the fact that we belonged to neither. I crawled into the backseat and fell into as deep a sleep that the backseat of a Honda Civic provides. Which, just to be painfully clear, is not a very deep sleep.
In the morning it became obvious that we had parked in too nice of a neighborhood and were drawing quite a bit of attention. We even had a guy knock on our window and ask if we were okay. I was hoping to go unnoticed, but of all the possible outcomes this had to be one of the more pleasant ones. I have never been more thankful of my stupid cherubic face, I'm pretty sure if I had been any less innocent looking somebody would have called the cops.
Every night we spent in LA was spent sleeping in the car, which is probably why we only stayed three nights. The next two times went much more smoothly, if anybody noticed or cared they didn't mention it to us. In fact, one morning as I was standing outside the car brushing my teeth an elderly woman asked me for directions. I guess you might expect a person who lives in there car to know their way around, but I had no idea what she where she wanted to go. Or even where I really was, honestly without Google maps I would probably still be stuck in LA.
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Fairfield: Cabin Construction
As I mentioned a few posts ago most of the work we did at Compound Joy was helping in the construction of a cabin. One of those living at Compound Joy was living in a tent while we were there and this cabin was going to be her more permanent residence. The cabin is being built using straw-bale construction which, according to wikipedia, frequently means that straw-bales are used as a cheap and green source of insulation. In our case the walls themselves were entirely made of hay.
The cabin as we left it.
When we arrived the cabin looked largely as it does in the picture above, except it didn't have windows or a completed roof. We spent the first week finishing off the roof. We started by putting in the insulation and laying down sheets of plywood. We followed this up by laying down two kinds of roof... paper? There was lots of nails and dark goo involved. It was tedious, difficult, and satisfying. I'm glad I was able to work at a fairly relaxed pace and in nice weather.
Finished roof, courtesy of Cole. And at least half a dozen other people.
After the roof was finished we moved to the inside of the cabin. About half of the floor was unfinished, and so we finished it. We had to dig out a bunch of dirt to make sure none the wooden flooring was touching the dirt, because I guess that will cause bad things to happen in the future of the floor. Finished floor! You can't see the dirt anymore! I helped.
After the floor we started putting in the windows. Up until this point the fact that the walls were made of hay hadn't created many complications, other than the birds that were nesting in the walls. Once we started to put in the window frames and the windows themselves in the fact that the walls were liable to disintegrate fairly easily became a problem. It was such a hassle that we weren't able to finish before we left and the windows were only mostly in there. You can clearly see the gaps in the above photo.
Windows look pretty good from the outside though.
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After the exciting trip to the Jelly Belly factory we went for a walk in the area around Compound Joy. Some nice views here and there, but pretty underwhelming. This cow seemed to feel the same way as I did.
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