Another Day in the Country
Something for nothing
© Another Day in the Country
An older friend of ours decided it was time to stop driving. She bequeathed her car to my sister in her will and said, “There’s no sense in the car just sitting around, not being used, so why don’t you come to Oregon and get it now?”
When I flew to California for my grandson’s graduation from high school, my sister flew to Portland to pick up the car.
Jess drove down to Napa Valley for Dagfinnr’s graduation, and I said to my grandson, “How would you like to take a road trip with us back to Kansas?”
He said, “Yes,” and I was ecstatic.
How many more summers will we be able to do this kind of thing? Going to college is a big shift in life — the launch pad into the future. Times they are a-changing in my family.
It seems to me that well-planned road trips usually start with, “Early in the morning, we began our journey. The car was already loaded.”
None of that was true for us. We fiddled around over breakfast and loaded up the suitcases while Dagfinnr read the owner’s manual to see how this newfangled automobile actually worked.
There were so many bells and whistles, apps and programs, features and fiddle-fiddle to get used to that it was mind boggling.
“What’s that sound now?” Jess would ask in despair as she tooled down the highway.
She had her co-pilot, Dagfinnr, working the car’s computer system, turning off unnecessary gadgets left and right.
“It’s like playing Whack-a-Mole,” she grumbled as another bell chimed.
Not only were we navigating a new car. We also were navigating a new route from West to Midwest. We wanted to see somewhere we’d never been before, and we checked that off our to-do list as we headed for Mono Lake, a salt-water lake in the Sierra foothills.
“There must be something exciting to see like old, abandoned mining towns around here,” Jess said.
No sooner said than done, I Googled it and found just such a spot within 20 miles of where we were driving.
We rerouted our trusty map guide with a sultry voice and turned off the main road on a real adventure in really unknown territory as we climbed our way, like a four-wheeler, toward what used to be Bodie, California, a ghost town that had housed more than 8,000 people during the Gold Rush.
“Auntie Jess, would you like me to drive?” Dagfinnr asked.
Did she ever! We were on dirt roads, and every few feet, it seemed, rocks had tumbled onto our path. Some we had to get out of the car and move off the road. Jess wondered whether oil pans in Toyotas were well protected.
Finally, we rounded a corner after 15 miles of dirt trails and saw what was left of the village on a hillside.
Thanks to the State Park Service, the absolute last of the town’s businesses have been preserved, pretty much as they were a hundred years ago. Current budget cuts from Washington, D.C., had not yet trickled down to hamper us visiting this treasure from the past. That was pretty much Day One.
On Day Two, we wondered whether we ever were going to get out of California as we wound around and down mountain roads.
On Day Three, we hit Las Vegas and couldn’t wait to get out.
On Day Four, we took Dagfinnr to tour the Grand Canyon.
Day Five found us in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where we went to the Meow Wolf Museum, which all of us voted as the highlight of the trip.
By then, the lot of us were weary. This road-tripping thing takes a toll. We were ready to head straight for home and finally, at one o’clock in the morning, drove down the familiar main street of Ramona. We were home!
We’ll never forget our adventure in Vegas. I’d booked in advance a show that had to do with Harry Potter, knowing my family enjoyed all the books and movies.
I had hoped this entertainment in Vegas would be good. It wasn’t. We walked in, sat down, they started, and after five minutes I thought, “This is awful,” and sneaked a peak at my sister, who had a pained expression on her face.
I waited a few more minutes and said to my grandson, “Are you enjoying this at all?” He shook his head, “Is it OK with you if we leave?” He nodded.
It seemed as if we walked forever to get back to Harrah’s, where we were booked to spend the night. After waiting endlessly in line, a clerk said, “You’ve been upgraded.”
There was a pause.
“I don’t understand why,” she said, followed by another pause as she double-checked with her superior. “Yes, you have an upgrade, and here is your keycard.”
Our bamboozled threesome, tired, hungry, and discouraged, pulled our overnight bags through a smoke-drenched lobby to the elevator, found our room number, opened the door, and walked into a penthouse suite on the top floor of a high-rise building for the first time in our collective lives.
For $98, we’d reserved one room with two beds and a roll-away and knew we’d never dare eat anything from the mini-bar since we couldn’t afford to pay $16 for a bottle of water or $22 for a bag of nuts.
Spacious windows overlooked the whole of Las Vegas. There were three huge beds, three living rooms, three bathrooms, three big television sets on the wall just for the three of us to enjoy after a very long day driving cross-country.