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