I’ve always been a big fan of road trips. My new car can testify, since it will celebrate its first birthday at the end of this April, and it currently sits in my driveway with a little over 31,000 miles on it. That’s an average of 2,818 miles per month, and I still have one month to go! Why do I feel like I’m an expert on road trips? Because I’ve dedicated more than one month a year for every year since 1999 to taking road trips, and over this period of my life, I’ve ruined two cars, I’ve collected 8 speeding tickets in 8 states (CA, PA, NY, NJ, IA, OH, ID, & MA), and I’ve used a public restroom in 44 of our 50 fine states. I’ve seen racist hick graffiti in both Mississippi and Wyoming, and I really think these two states should meet, and shake hands – because they’ve got a lot in common.
This past week I took an 800-mile (round trip) road trip with an old friend to the not so sunny coast of Northern California. The funny thing about traveling between Portland, OR and Arcata, CA is that you are leaving one west coast hippie Mecca for another one, and so only a few things change as you travel, besides the botany, of course. I noticed that as you leave Portland for Arcata, the price of gas goes up, the price of avocados goes down, and once you leave Oregon, Big Brother actually lets you pump your own gas.
The other notable changes on this particular trip are that for the first two hours of the trip, you get cut off by Al Gore and John Kerry supporters in Subaru’s, for the middle three hours you get cut off by Hemi-powered trucks and SUV’s who have pledged their undying loyalty to King Bush II and his historic election campaigns of 2000 and 2004, and then, as you finally enter Humboldt County, you don’t get cut off by anyone, because pro-choice, anti-war, organic-farming-vegetarian hippies in VW buses don’t have the torque or road rage to cut anyone off. If I’ve learned anything from spending most of my life in Berkeley, CA, Ithaca, NY, and now Portland, OR, (A.K.A. “The Hippie Triangle” of North America) it is that hippies are seriously harmless, and they’re not to be feared or locked away– they’re just easy to make fun of.
I used to be quite the chain-smoker on road trips, often using cigarettes to reward myself for every thirty miles of travel. But what creeped me out on this last trip was that I noticed that most federal highways use a similar reward system for the bladder-challenged and attention-span-impaired men and women of America. Almost every public rest stop on every major highway is located exactly 32 miles apart, which means that if the average driver travels at about 65mph, then the government must believe that the average attention span of the average American is about half an hour – which is also the same length as the average TV show. All this just goes to prove that there is an obvious connection between our government, the media, and a plot to sabotage the American attention span to help fuel hyper-consumerism – see, you won’t find any unfounded conspiracy theories in my column, I’ve carefully laid out and connected all the insane, completely unrelated, and non-existent dots so you can make up your own mind!
And while we’re on the subject of insanity, it is time for “This Week’s Irrational Fear:” My intense fear of highway patrol officers. When driving, I fear cop cars and radar guns more than I fear a car accident, major car malfunction, and bad weather. But I really think that my fear is justified, because cops have the power to not only ticket you, and thereby force you to relinquish your hard earned road trip booze fund, but this seemingly ‘one time ticket’ can actually result in your auto insurance rates going up, which will cost you lots of money for a long time. I mean, if you really think about it, cops have the power to lower your quality of life, by lowering the spending power of your overall income by hiking up one of your monthly fixed costs: auto insurance.
This summer I was in a pretty bad car accident, leaving my car totaled in the deepest depths of hell (York, Pennsylvania), and I still don’t fear having another bad accident nearly as much as I fear another speeding ticket. I’ve been ticketed and fined for driving with a license that didn’t match my car plates, and then threatened with arrest for said crime. I was once stopped and fined for “driving in the passing only lane for two consecutive miles” at four in the morning on a remote highway in upstate NY. I was the only car on the road, aside from the cop who ‘caught me’ in the act of, um, driving in the left lane of the highway. I swear to the god that I don’t really believe in and haven’t ever met that state troopers have too much power over our lives and budgets, and I think that it’s high time we took the power back!
One way to take the power back is for us to finally re-organize and agree on how to flash our brights to signal that a cop lies in wait on the road ahead. The problem with our current warning system is two-fold; one, some people don’t bother to warn other drivers about cops because they are a) selfish, b) brain-washed by authority and think that they’re still in middle school and must follow all the rules set before them, c) lazy or not paying good attention, or d) self-righteous law abiding vigilantes who take pleasure in the misery and demise of others (see Schadenfreude the German word for taking pleasure in the misery of others). Personally, I don’t care if these drivers voted for Kerry or for Bush; when they drive too slow, cut me off, or take five minutes to turn off a road, they anger me, and I think they should have their licenses revoked.
But the other reason that our brights flashing system doesn’t work is that anytime someone flashes their brights at me, my mind runs through a gauntlet of possible meanings for said flash, and by the time I’ve determined that maybe I am being warned about a cop up ahead, it’s too late, and some lazy quota-filling trooper has already captured my speed on his radar gun. The problem is that when brights are flashed at us, we can’t help but first assume that our own brights are on, and if they are not, then it is natural to assume that perhaps the other driver has accidentally hit their own light toggle and didn’t mean to flash their brights at you. I know this because I live every day of my life with “chronic accidental toggle knock syndrome” – and science still can’t find a cure. So what I propose is the following: Anytime you see a cop on the road, it is your duty to inform every oncoming car of said cop for the next half of a mile of travel. The warning will be five distinct flashes of your brights, with even intervals in between the flashes, similar to the SOS of Morse code. This way there will be no confusion. We can only do this if we act together, people!
I think that maintenance lights are the least helpful technology used in modern automobiles. A random bright orange maintenance light went on at the 360-mile marker on my last trip, and it resembled a cross between a fire hydrant and a bloated bumble bee, so of course I freaked out and immediately pulled over to look up this ominous omen in my car manual (which is about as easy to navigate and fun to read as the King James Bible, by the way). The manual explained, “Something is wrong with the engine. Seek service or maintenance whenever possible.” So I sat puzzled in my car for a bit, trying to decipher the manual’s vague language, to figure out what, if anything was wrong with my car, and how urgent the problem was. Finally, I gave up, feeling like I had just failed a really hard SAT question. I turned my car back on, and the light did not come back on, and still has not returned. All this leaves me to wonder if the same idiot who invented our color-coded homeland security warning system invented this ever-so-helpful maintenance light system? And did I pay extra for this completely useless feature?
I hate California license plates that use shapes instead of numbers or letters. Whoever legalized the heart shape in California license plates should be removed from office and replaced by an Austrian weightlifter-turned movie actor, since that seems to be California’s only answer to any and all problems: electing a movie star to office!
I think one of the ways I constantly find myself accidentally flashing my brights is that I suffer from a rare road trip related disorder called “I-can’t-open-a-bottle-of-water-while-driving-without-swerving-into-oncoming-traffic-and-hitting-my-bright-toggle-and-nearly-killing-myself-itis.” This disorder sucks, and if anyone else suffers from it, perhaps we should start a support group, but maybe we should walk to the location.
The final part of the road trip that I wish to discuss is the gas station road trip meal. When you have to travel 800 miles or so in one day, you really don’t have time to stop and eat on the road, so you have to combine all three of your traveling needs into one super gas station stop where you refuel your car, use the bathroom, and restock on water, coffee, and food. Now, for about five years, I was a strict vegetarian (that means no meat, and yes, fish is a meat, so if you eat fish, by definition, you are not a vegetarian.) Being a vegetarian, and poor, made gas station meals pretty difficult for me, because there are not a whole lot of vegetarian snack options that are actually healthy and nourishing, and cigarettes are really expensive! So I used to travel all day on a stomach full of nine cups of gas station “coffee” (read: brown water with caffeine), twenty cigarettes, water, and a bag of BBQ flavored David Sunflower Seeds.
But now that I have chosen to eat meat again, and quit smoking cigarettes, my options have considerably improved. Instead of my appetizer consisting of a swig of “coffee,” followed by the main course of sunflower seeds, and a tasty cigarette or six for dessert, I can finally compose a delicious, nutritionally balanced four-course meal! On my latest trip, for example, I began my four star dining experience with a bag of Funjuns (salad), followed by a few swigs of coffee (soup), and then I mixed wasabi flavored almonds (side dish) with several tender hunks of Pemmican beef jerky (main course). And for dessert, I treated myself to a Snickers bar, you know, for the hunger inside me. And all of this cost me less than a pack of cigarettes! And the best part of the gas station meal is that when you have finished eating, you can always continue to have more soup (coffee) until you reach the perfect point of road trip equilibrium – when you have to take a leak every 32 miles, which is exactly how often you will find a public rest stop.