Traveling back to see my mom. She is in treatment for pancreatic cancer and her birthday is this week. Kind of a huge deal to be making this road trip with my husband and daughter. We were caught in a winter weather traffic snarl coming over the Sierras on I-80. Truckee to Auburn took 5 1/2 hours. For those of you that don’t know, that drive should take about 1 1/2 hours. Welcome to California! This face pretty much says it all after that drive.
Going West this time.
We traveled to California on the Fourth of July, driving. Imagine three generations of women from eighty-five years old to eight years old, all with the same strong-willed genetics coursing through their veins stuck in a car on Highway 50 (Loneliest Highway In America). I think I was the most difficult to deal with. There is something about traveling with my mother that can bring out the four-year old in me. I did my very best to curb this unreasonable person that would rise up in me from time to time. We arrived late in the afternoon in a small Utah town ready to get to the motel and go swimming. The pickings are slim in rural Utah for accommodations but at the end of a hot day in the car anything looks okay. There was a small gathering around the pool of what I assume were very non-Mormon locals. Their body types were uniformly Jack Sprat and His Wife; the women were round and pendulous with spindly legs and the men were underfed with too many Sad Clown/Skull tattoos. They all were enjoying a day off to drink beer and scold their children. I don’t know very much about the Mormon religion, but I was pretty sure beer drinking in swimsuits is not allowed. They were nice enough in that “keep away from me” kind of way. My daughter and I swam until the heat of the day and the long car ride was rinsed from our bodies, staying at our end of the pool, sheltered from the occasional F-bomb. It was very un-Utah like in a Utah kind of way. Then it was dinner time. If you have been in rural Utah you might understand the difficulty in finding anything edible to eat. The complete dearth of food that is not canned or fried is astounding. I usually end up eating apples and cheese from the cooler that I pack in the car. This time we found veggie-burgers. It is hard to do anything bad to a veggie burger because you expect it to be bad to start with. We survived it all and ended up watching a pretty good fireworks display. Turns out the motel was mostly occupied with guys recuperating from fighting wildfires; hot shots, fire jumpers, helicopter pilots, etc. There was a certain irony in seeing these men watching fireworks being shot off in a dry Utah field while the grime from weeks of fighting fires still clung to the hems of their pants. They were young, freshly showered, far from home. They were uniformly handsome in the way that heroes are. Between the poolside party, the firefighters, the Indian-American hotel owners, the teenage Mormon girls poaching the pool and my three generations of family it was a good slice of apple pie on the Fourth watching fireworks and being free. Highway 50 represented well.
miscmamado 