Like a Band of Gypsies We Go Down the Highway

Here's a recycled picture of me trying to hide from the camera when I lived in Leggett, Ca. in 1985.

Well, I'm this close to being done with planning my California roadtrip. I also had me a little meltdown tonight and gave myself a timeout before I got my ass up and moving again. I've never planned a trip of this magnitude without other adults before, and it's been a little draining.

If you'll recall, originally I was going to try and be all cool and groovy and not reserve rooms or tent spaces and just go where the wind took us and not be on any schedule. Then about a thousand dollars worth of car repairs and new tires made that dream impossible. We are now working on a shoestring budget and we can't really afford to be that fucking hippie about our trip. Man, I hate reality. At one point, I informed the girls of the fact that we wouldn't have the kind of money I thought we were going to have and asked them if they still wanted to go if we couldn't afford to do some of the things we thought we were going to be able to do. Coadster said she didn't care. She said after the tornado two years ago and the flood this year, she just wanted to get out of the Midwest for a while - even if that meant that we'd just be trading different natural disasters. Coadster just wants to see the Redwoods, wander around San Francisco and check out some hot surfer guys. Hey, that's all pretty much free and I wouldn't mind doing all the same stuff.

So, last week, I remapped our trip and reserved all our of sleeping places. We're going to skip Yosemite and just spend two nights and a day in The Sequoias. We're also staying at a relatively inexpensive motel in a suburb of San Francisco and we're just going to take BART or a bus into the city. That will solve the parking problem too. When I lived in San Francisco twenty years ago, I didn't have a car, so I wasn't able to really check out any of the cool coastal communities around the city. This time we're going to drive up the coast from Carmel and check things out. Since we're going to be in San Francisco for five days, we'll try to go back and spend a day or a couple of half days checking out beaches and maybe doing a little boogie boarding.

I've also been a little bit dependent upon the kindness of friends for this trip. Don't worry, I spread it out. I borrowed sleeping bags from my Hotz Street neighbors, a GPS device from my awesome friend D., and I took one of my ex-boyfriends up on his offer to lend me his portable DVD player thing so the girls can watch as many movies as they need to during our three day drive there and three more days back.

I'm almost all ready now. After work tomorrow, I have to grab a few more things from the store, drop off my post-dated rent check with the landlord, do the rest of my packing, fill up with gas and do a little more last minute cleaning. We're going to try not to eat crap on the road, so I'll make a bunch of sandwiches to go along with our drinks and fruit and crackers and chips. Even if I had a ton of money, I still would get tired of eating out all the time. Then on Friday morning, we're basically getting up and taking off down that long, hard, boring stretch of I-80. I'm going to try to drive at least 12 hours on our first day. If you've ever driven through Nebraska on I-80, you'd probably agree with me that you want to treat it like a band-aid and just rip it off all at once, as quickly as possible.

Okay, now I better go rest.