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One of the best ways I have found to pull myself out of the mess that is life online, and for me, that’s 30 years and counting, is to pack up my stuff and hit the road. I try to do it twice a year. It helps that my daughter lives across the country, and unless she flies home for a visit, I go see her, which means I drive.
That’s the excuse anyway. The truth is I love being on the road. I’ve always had a nomadic spirit. When I was a kid, and my mom took us on long drives, I loved sleeping in the car. I loved the in-between of leaving a place and not getting to a place yet - of not being anywhere.
It was one of the few times I felt fully safe. I never felt scared sleeping in the car, probably without seatbelts, piling into the back of our VW bug. But I love going anywhere - on a bus, on a plane, on a train, on a ship. In a car most of all.
I love the highways in any country. One time, when I went to France to work the Cannes Film Festival, I rented one of their tiny cars with a stick shift. I got a cheaper hotel outside the expensive areas of Cannes, in a little neighborhood called Juan-Les-Pins.
I’d drive my little car—still remembering the stick from the old days of the 1970s, when most cars had stick shifts—out of Juan-Les-Pins and into Cannes proper. I felt like a real townie, not an American import. Then I’d grab a baguette, some strawberries and cheese and head back in my little car.
It’s eerie, and kind of sad, as you get older, to know those memories now sit like books on a shelf. You can go back and relive them exactly, but you can try to hold onto them. They pile up behind you and will mostly disappear when you disappear. I try to count the minutes, the hours, the days, the weeks, knowing everything I’m living through now will one day be another chapter on a shelf.
I took too long to get ready this time, despite my best efforts to pre-pack and plan. I usually cook all of my meals in advance and keep them in a fridge of sorts. I had never solved the problem of keeping the fridge charged overnight in my car.
I tried many different combinations of things —small power stations that plugged into each other. At some point, I gave up and resigned myself to dragging the cooler into the hotel each night, unpacking the food into the tiny fridge, then repacking it.
This time, however, I cracked the code. I got a fridge/freezer with a battery that lasts 12 hours. So when the car is off, it runs off the battery. This is all to say I should have had more time, not less, but somehow it didn’t work out that way.
On the first day, I didn’t leave until 4 pm California time, so I could only drive a short way to Barstow before deciding interstate would be better, or safer. Three hours doesn’t seem like much, but the Pearblossom Highway at night in light rain can get a little rough.
