Excuse me.... Where is the bathroom? My trip from Albuquerque to Florida Pt. 2

We leave Jackson, Mississippi for Hattiesburg. It continues to rain and then eases up slightly. The cd’s my friend gave me before I left are playing one after another. Carly and I ask each other periodically. “Has this cd started over?” It has been overcast and gloomy all day and now it is getting dark. We cancel our hotel reservation in Tallahassee and decide on our new destination of Pensacola. Carly has mentioned the beautiful beaches there and the fort where Geronimo was held captive. Additionally, it is a safety precaution in securing our sanity in preventing another brutal day of driving.

We pull up to the hotel in Pensacola after being diverted by the GPS after a less than mediocre meal at the cracker barrel. Eyes peeled, Carly and I are looking for the Holiday Inn that is located somewhere off of the I-10. The GPS tells us to take an exit where there is nothing but an on ramp and of course this first blip in our steady success with the GPS unit that was so kindly loaned to me happens at the end of the day after ten hours of driving when all we want to do is get to bed. We are rerouted and finally we can see our destination. Instead of taking the south Dixie highway an additional two miles to make a proper left and turn around, I flip a u-turn at the first opportunity and pull into the parking lot. I get out of the car to check in and a man smoking a cigarette, dressed like a cook is staring at my license plate.

“Ya’ll come all the way from New Mexico?”

“Yeah”, I reply.

“Dang man, that’s a long way, like forty eight hours or something right?”

“Yeah, something like that.” And I go inside. I check in, return to the car with one of those big luggage racks that always has one rogue wheel just like the grocery cart I always happen to choose for myself. It soon fills up with our belongings. Cooler, suitcase, duffel, backpack, meanwhile our newfound friend is telling us all about our new accommodations.

“Breakfast is real good here, dinner is better but that’s because I make it.”

This man eyes me throw something away in the trash can and seizes another opportunity.

“There’s a dumpster around back man if you need to get rid of stuff. It’s got a gate around it but it opens on the left side and you can pull right up to it.”

“Thanks” I say, trying my best to sound appreciative but I really am not. I am happy to have fulfilled the conversation this man has been searching for while waiting for a ride at the end of his shift but I am tired, concerned about the well being of my fiancée and myself. I wave politely to the man as his ride pulls up and he puts flame to another cigarette. He mumbles something about being in Colorado a long time ago and I start my car and park as far away from that dumpster as I can.

I think about what he said about New Mexico being so far away and of course I know he is right. Maybe I found it comforting that he at least knew where New Mexico is. In my trips to Florida before moving here I have received many a reaction regarding my origins. My favorite was offered by a woman on the beach who invited us to a celebration of Jesus that sounded increasingly suspicious when there was mention of kool aid.

“Where are you from?” she said

“New Mexico”

“Wow, you speak English very well.”

We get to our room after some degree of difficulty in steering the luggage carrier out of the elevator and down the hall. Carly swipes the room key and it does not work, I return to the lobby where a young man tells me it should work so I try again but it doesn’t. Thirty minutes later we end up in another room. We are exhausted but happy to be settled for the night. My patient, tolerant fiancée and I collapse onto the bed with our clothes on.

Our trip from Shreveport, Louisiana to Pensacola had been enjoyable although the intensity of rain had required extra vigilance and a great deal of concentration. When you are driving in sheets of blinding rain you concentrate in a Zen like state. I listen to Carly and we have wonderful conversations the entire way but I seldom take my eyes off the road.

It is dark by the time we travel from Hattiesburg to Mobile. Somehow it really feels like we are headed south, the pull of gravity as we near the coast. We reach Mobile, Alabama and try to take in as much of the city as we can although it is dark and we are merely passing through. We see a battleship in the distance like a ghost in the night and soon we are headed east. Again, rhythm comes into play. I love to drive, especially when there is a goal in sight. With an hour to go our spirits are high and we arrive in Pensacola with music playing and we are laughing about something, together.

What Carly and I have come to love most about the GPS is that it makes the assumption that you will drive ten miles under the speed limit. So when you are actually driving five to seven miles over the speed limit, you arrive hours earlier than it had predicted when you first punched in your intended destination in Shreveport ten hours ago. We are hungry and close to our hotel and the bright sign ahead that indicates the three hundredth Cracker Barrel location we have passed today is calling our name. The food is bad, Carly’s grits have butter and she can’t have butter because of her Crohn’s. We have been in a car for ten odd hours, we are tired, our eyes are bloodshot and we are on the verge of being really silly because we have been on the road for so long. We are not only the two most attractive people in this establishment. We are the only two who are not overweight and not in need of an entirely new wardrobe. No, we don’t want any candy or games or junk that they sell in the Cracker Barrel. We just want to pay for our bad food and get out of here. We pay the god fearing, pimple faced boy at the counter and split. We walk to the car and I see my bumper sticker that says YNP. I wish we were in Yellowstone.

We wake up in Pensacola and I call the lobby to ask for a late checkout. We leave the hotel and Carly is driving towards Pensacola beach. We have tortured ourselves the last two days so that we can finally have some fun. We feel accomplished and a reward is in order. I send a message to Carly’s brother Adam, telling him that we are in Pensacola. “Dang” is his reply. Dang is right. We reach Pensacola beach and although it is overcast, it is a beautiful day. I see what Carly meant about the beautiful sandy beaches in Pensacola. We drive to Fort Pickens and with great pride I remove my parks pass from my wallet and we get in for free.

Excuse me.... Where is the bathroom? My trip from Albuquerque to Florida Pt. 1

I love to drive, almost as much as I love to write. Pondering a two thousand mile trip from my hometown of Albuquerque to South Florida was an exciting thought. It reminded me of the several thousand miles I had driven the previous summer from Albuquerque to Yellowstone.

There is great comfort in having an automobile. Of course it is a great luxury to have a vehicle, something many people in the United States take for granted. The freedom of owning a car and being able to drive from one place to another is something we identify with strongly in the west. Having a vehicle since I was roughly sixteen has always enabled me to have the freedom to visit places that interest me. My summer trip to Yellowstone was as free as I had been up to that point. Camping gear in the trunk, books in the backseat and a map by my side was all I needed. I remember leaving Albuquerque that first day knowing that the road was mine and that I had the freedom to take any route I pleased. Although I was determined to be in Yellowstone by the fourth day, I could get there any way that my heart desired. The first night I spent by the Colorado River outside of Moab, Utah. The second I spent next to the Provo River north of Kamas, Utah alongside the Mirror Lake Scenic Byway. I could hear my fire from the middle of the Provo where I was fly fishing for trout. Life was pretty damn near perfect. Catching fish, reading and being by myself was a luxury I enjoyed for four weeks.

Six months later and I am a resident of South Florida. That fly fisherman of yonder summer seems a lifetime away. That trip by myself on the way to Yellowstone taught me many things. The most important was that I am the keeper of my own destiny, that there will be fish caught, and released, and it is up to me when to catch them, and when to release. The weeks that followed my return from Yellowstone were focused on my love for fishing and my desire to retain at least a bit of the freedom I had so eagerly enjoyed during the summer. I fished on my days off, went backpacking alone in the Jemez Mountains and had my first close hand experience with a bear. Then on a day in September, I went fly-fishing with a young woman and fell in love.

Things have changed since my trip to Yellowstone. I am engaged, I am older and I am in Florida. That’s right, Florida, the one state I was pretty sure I would never visit because Florida is the one state in the United States where you cannot fish for trout.

The trip to Florida from Albuquerque was different in many ways. On my trip to Yellowstone my passenger seat was occupied with fly rods and fly boxes, waders and boots. This time my passenger was my beautiful fiancée, and the fly rods were staying home. I had been to Montana, Wyoming, and every other state in between Albuquerque and Yellowstone when I left this summer. Although I have been to Florida four times since September, I was completely unfamiliar with the route from Albuquerque to Florida. Equipped with a gps unit that I borrowed from a friend (thanks Ted) my fiancée and I hit the road.

What I love most about driving from one place to another is the journey. There are so many obstacles and detours along the way that it takes a great deal of concentration to reach your destination at all.

We leave Albuquerque at 9 am in the morning, about an hour later than we had planned on but hey, you are always on time when you don’t have a plan. But…. we did have a plan, sort of. That plan was to make it across Texas and into Louisiana in a day of driving.

“Crazy” they said.

“That will be a long day” they chimed.

And believe me it was.

Not long after entering Texas we stopped at the Cadillac graveyard. Not long after that we gasped at a roadside billboard plastered with George W’s face that said, “Miss me yet? “

My best friend is from Texas, I consider myself a good friend because I don’t hold it against him. When you drive long distance you develop a rhythm. A rhythm that can be forever altered by bad gas, the wrong music or a bad cup of coffee. Rhythm is important when you know you wont get to Shreveport until after midnight and maybe everyone that said you were “crazy” was right. The Cadillac Graveyard was our favorite part of Texas. It only takes a dozen cars buried nose first in a field to make Texas interesting. The cow shit wasn’t doing it for me the rest of the time. It’s dark by the time we get to Wichita Falls on our way to Dallas. Texas looks better at night. Driving across Texas is a pain in the ass to put it kindly. The ache of your rear in the same seat is enough to make you want to get out of Texas. We did make it out of Texas, but not before we stopped at a Texas Wal-Mart. Not many things are more sickeningly American than Texas and Wal-Mart and the pregnant woman in line with three kids and a husband who is wearing a faded shirt that says, “These colors don’t run.”

We stopped at Wal-Mart for wet wipes. Wet wipes. When you are driving for thirteen hours straight there is a point where stopping at Wal-Mart in Texas for wet wipes has its appeal. You could smell the desperation and the farts in this car.

My fiancée Carly and I are lucky in that we are both comfortable with each other, and with one another’s gas. Most importantly we love being together and we always have fun in one another’s company. That’s not to say that a lot can’t happen in thirty hours of driving. I remember what my friend Ted said before we left.

“You are sure to learn things about one another after thirty hours together in a four door compact car.” Learn we did, and not just about each other. We learned about the worst restrooms in Louisiana and the worst coffee in Alabama. We learned that a four pack of red bull is cheaper in Amarillo than in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. We learned a lot.

Leaving Texas was worth the wait. We arrive in Shreveport at half capacity in the middle of the night. My fiancée is sound asleep in the passenger seat. The gps unit that has been loaned to me delivers me to a shell station, then down into a residential neighborhood to a dead end before telling me to turn around and eventually delivering us to the Marriot where we will spend the rest of the morning before continuing on. We are in our room by twelve thirty in the morning and in bed by one. We both sleep well after a day that was longer than we could have imagined. Twelve hours later we are back on the road and it is raining hard. So hard on the way to Jacksonville, Mississippi from Shreveport that we hydroplane three times and slow to thirty miles per hour half a dozen times as sheets of heavy southern rain block the road from view.

Carly has Crohns disease. In order to avoid explanation I will ask you to do your own research. My parents always had the same answer when I was growing up and I asked them what a word meant. They would say, “the dictionary is on the shelf”, which might have also been a better response than saying "I don't know". Crohns has many complexities that impact the immune system and the bowels. That is to say that farts and talking about bowel movements are normal occurrences in our life together. This level of comfort is important to the balance we must maintain as a couple and the positive attitude we must keep when dealing with a disease as severe and as potentially destructive as Crohns.

Carly has Crohns and sometimes having Crohns means you stop at every gas station and McDonalds you see along the way because your fiancée has to go to the bathroom. Diet and rest and nutrition all play a part in dealing with a Crohn’s diagnosis. It is less than four months since Carly has been diagnosed and here we are driving two thousand miles in three days. If she gets worse during this trip, if a flair up occurs, I may be held accountable and not just by her. I am pretty sure I will be prosecutable in forty-eight of the fifty states.

So we stop at each gas station in Louisiana, a couple in Mississippi and make it to Jackson, Mississippi. It is still raining and we are making lunch in the car while parked in front of a shell station. There are two men standing outside of a car next to us talking, the rain jackets they are wearing read “fugitive recovery agent”. We are not wanted. We leave Mississippi late afternoon on our way from Jackson to Hattiesburg and then on to Mobile, Alabama and finally Pensacola, Florida where we will spend the night. To Be Continued