Date: Sat, 10 May 2003 13:28:47 -0600
Subject: Omni-Bus

Dear Friends,

Back by popular demand: It's the overly detailed, wryly ironic, parentheses-sodden, Cross-Country Trip Narrative!

There really was popular demand, you know. When folks heard we were planning another summer bus trip (for details of the '02 edition, we refer you here), they said, "Great! Are you going to send out those e-mails from the road again?" "Sure," we eagerly replied. Indulgent smile and nod from the questioner, then, wanly: "Oh."

Now THAT'S popular demand!

We departed last Sunday, May 4th. Those of you who followed the first trip know the drill: Enormous, block-long bus hoves into view on Woodhill Canyon Road on a bright spring morning. Spectators gape. Many possessions are loaded aboard, including more camera equipment than was used to cover the last presidential campaign (Jeff) and more provisions and medical supplies than were brought along on Shackelton's Antarctic expedition (Lisa). Slight change this time, though: It's a different bus, and a different driver. You thought we couldn't outgun last year's Britney Bus for sheer star-power? Well, this particular bronze behemoth belongs to... get ready... wait for it... it's very exciting... I'm not supposed to tell you. I can, however, reveal that this actress came to fame, coincidentally enough, in a film about a large Speed-ing bus, and that this Miss Congeniality required a bit more than Two Weeks' Notice before agreeing to lend it to us. I hope I didn't give anything away there. (Sandy, if you're reading this, you left your 2003 Cosmo Fun & Fearless Female Award in one of the closets.)

Our driver, again courtesy of the fine folks at Hemphill Brothers Coach Company (www.hemphillbrothers.com), is the fearless Damian Holton of Manassas, Virginia. Terrific guy. I swear, whatever charm school they send these guys to, sign me up.

The itinerary this year is far more ambitious than last year's relatively simple L.A.-Atlanta-L.A. jaunt. This time, in three and a half weeks, we're going all the way to Boston and back, hitting Chicago and New York City (among others) on the way out, and Washington, D.C. and Kansas City (among others) on the way back. Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame. Pro Football Hall of Fame. Hayden Planetarium. Smithsonian Air & Space. I assume Lisa'll get to do some stuff, too.

Total distance? The trip-planning program tells me it's around 7247 miles. Just to put that in perspective, the Earth's diameter at the Equator is 7967 miles. I just happened to have that fact right here in my head.

Day One took us to a traditional weekend getaway spot -- Berkeley, California. Well, it's traditional for us. Joining us for this leg of the journey were Lisa's mother and sister, which meant that our usual Berkeley routine of record store/bookstore/record store was traded for antique store/scented soap store/cooking supply store/Smith & Hawken outlet.

Fortunately, the boys were able to sneak away for a quick trip to Amoeba Records, where in spite of a power outage, we were able to satisfy Henry's intense need for rare Saint Etienne CDs (the boy himself, looking over my shoulder as I type this, has asked me to specify that they were the Australian import of Tiger Bay and the out-of-print, hard-to-find British CD single of "Boy Is Crying," featuring two rare remixes). When Henry excitedly explained this to Lisa as we emerged from the darkened store, the tattooed guy at the counter first gaped in astonishment, then offered Henry a job at the information desk.

Dining was similarly successful, and no trip to Berkeley would be complete without visits to its three temples of fine cuisine: Yogurt Park, where they are somehow able to offer a quart of yogurt, with mix-ins, for $1.75; Long Life Vegi House, where meat-eaters sigh while vegetarians salivate over textured soy protein pounded into chicken-nugget-like shapes; and Chez Panisse, where Henry gently sprinkled a pinch of sea salt over his crusty bread, nibbling olives and thinly sliced Parmesan cheese as we enjoyed a typically spectacular meal.

On the third day, Julie and Carol sped off in the rental car back toward home, and we pressed on to the next exciting destination on our fun-packed itinerary: Twin Falls, Idaho. Really, this was just a convenient place to stop and stagger bleary-eyed from the bus after a ten-hour overnight drive. Crummy pancakes at the IHOP, a quick look at the site of Evel Kneivel's failed attempt to jump the Snake River Canyon, and then it was on to Yellowstone.

Now, whatever superlatives you've heard about our nation's first national park (and still the largest one in the Lower 48), it is all that and more. You can still see the marks of the '88 fires everywhere -- every hillside, it seems, is littered with forty-foot dead trees, scattered like someone carelessly dropped a handful of gigantic toothpicks. Or, where there once was a dense forest of evergreens, there's now a field of stark upright sticks with little four-foot saplings just starting up alongside. Certainly it's no longer the postcard-like landscape it used to be, but there's a weird beauty to it nonetheless, one that's oddly fitting for a land dotted with burbling mud pits, boiling iridescent pools, and steaming geysers, where herds of buffalo snuffle and snorfle right up to your car.

I took five rolls of film in two days.

Getting out of the park proved quite a bit trickier. Random road closures and incorrect signage caused us to spend about four hours going just over a hundred miles, and on the long vertiginous climb out of the park's eastern edge, we ran into a raging snowstorm which turned the landscape into a spinning Currier & Ives print. Lisa retreated to the bus's back bedroom and buried her face in a pillow until we reached level ground; Henry worked on a new CD compilation entitled "Henry's road tracks" and watched a Speed Racer DVD in his bunk. Somewhere in there, right after sunset, we passed twenty miles south of Devil's Tower (the mountain from Close Encounters) -- I swear I saw it in the distance, out the bus's left window. Finally, eleven hours after we departed West Yellowstone, having driven across the entire state of Wyoming, we reached Rapid City, South Dakota and gratefully collapsed into our beds at the Radisson.

And that was last night. This morning, again in a furious blizzard, we did a quick drive-by of Mount Rushmore, where we were hassled not once, not twice, but THREE TIMES by South Dakota policemen, who have apparently 1) very little to do, 2) never seen a bus this big before, or 3) never seen a black person (Damian) before. And then a short visit to the anti-Rushmore, the still-unfinished-after fifty-years Crazy Horse monument, where the people were very friendly, and where work on the gigantic sculpture should be completed long about the year 2500. There's some sort of lesson here; I'm just not sure what it is.

Tonight... Sioux City, Iowa! Oh, the stories we'll have from there!

More to come...

-- Jeff
for Jeff, Lisa and Henry
somewhere eastbound on I-90 in South Dakota