30 Years in a Housetruck

Page Twenty Nine: Road Trip

At some point in September, Paul's mother sent word that she would be making a trip from New York, where she lived, to Las Vegas, and convinced Paul to come visit, since she would be "so close". My own mother had lived in Las Vegas for some time, and I owed her a visit as well, so Paul and I formulated a road trip to meet our familial obligations.

We set out from the Schoolhouse in Paul's 1972 Toyota Celica GT with some food, bedding and my expired gasoline credit card, headed for the capital of sin.

The first day, we got almost as far as Reno before we pulled into a rest stop outside of Sparks, Nevada for a break. It was apparent that neither of us was any longer awake enough to do any more driving, so Paul ratcheted back the driver's seat into a reclining position and fell quickly to sleep.

I did the same and laid there for a while staring at the dark headliner (it was sometime well after midnight), without getting comfortable enough to doze off. After a while, I gave up and got my pad and sleeping bag from the back seat, intending to find a place to toss out somewhere outside. There wasn't really very much around aside from the restrooms and some low shrubbery near the offramp of the highway, so I unrolled by bag under the bushes and conked out for the duration, hoping that Paul didn't wake up and decide to drive off without me.

The L.V. visit was awful, not so much because of our mothers, but because L.V. is an awful place. I stayed with my mom in her studio apartment, and Paul lodged with his ma at her hotel. We got together for some meals, and our mothers spent some time hitting casinos together, and took in at least one show at The Showboat. That's about all I care to remember of L.V., other than I did find a nice plaid flannel shirt at a thrift store, which kind of blew my mother's mind, because she thought that it was rather frumpy and looked like it belonged on some old guy.

Our trip back to Oregon was more memorable, partly because I wrote some of it up in a letter to Mom afterwards. Heading north out of L.V., we took Route 95, which runs through Beatty and up to Tonopah. Wanting some scenic travels, we cut off at Route 3, a narrow, twisty road that winds through a deserted valley to a town named Oasis. There we picked up Route 168, which took us over the White Mountains, depositing us on Highway 395 at Big Pine, south of Bishop, California.

Once again, it was time to find a place to bed down, and we wanted to be a little more organized about it, so we followed some signs, ending up at Horton Creek campground at around 10 PM. The campground is located a little north of Bishop, and is directly east of Yosemite National Park, at an elevation of 4,700+ feet. The moon was full, and the early Fall night warm enough to not require even a light jacket. After heating some food on a camp stove and setting up the tent, we spent a couple of hours just sitting in the high desert, taking in a wide panorama of sky and mountains, all illuminated by lunar glow. Nearby Horton Creek provided bubbling water sound effects and frog and cricket music.

Here's a piccy of the view from the campground, courtesy of the Bureau of Land Management:

The next morning, we headed north, passing Mono Lake, and picking up Route 89 to skirt Lake Tahoe on the west side. Up and up, through the Northern California forests, staying on Rt 89 and it's equivalents until we came to Lassen Volcanic Park, a place where the rents and tears of the formation of the crust of the planet haven't yet healed over. We spent some time exploring the park visitor center, and looked at some of the presented displays of geysers, fumaroles, steaming mud pots and the like.

Back on the road, it was a reasonably short trip to join Interstate 5, south of Weed, CA, then a boring drive up the lower half of Oregon, eventually arriving home at the Schoolhouse after dark. Rosalie was just arrived home from travels of her own, and Woodley and Anne were there. Life returned to "normal", whatever that is defined to be, and I returned to preparing wood for the winter and working on the Housetruck.