I made it here, safe and sound. I’ve been slacking in the blogging department, but I’m going to blame it on the fact that I just moved 1,300 miles and haven’t really unpacked yet, let alone found housing or a job. But regardless, here are a few stories from the trip:

Day One, AKA The Day of Treacherous Driving and Nowhere to Sleep

Due to a navagational error on behalf of my Geo Tracker’s high-tech GPS system—okay, let’s be honest here: on behalf of my poor map-reading skills—I ended up on a 13-mile stretch of gravel road through a mountain pass. I know what you’re thinking—”13 miles, schmiles, what’s the big freaking deal?—but please understand that when your 2-wheel drive Geo Crapper is fish-tailing around on a 5-foot wide road that is so steep it warrants the sign “THIS ROAD IS IMPASSABLE IN WINTER MONTHS,” things start to get a little scary. Plus, since I was averaging a solid 15 miles per hour, it took me almost an hour to see pavement again.

My breathing got heavy and all I could think about was what would happen if I got a flat tire. Nobody will find me for days, I thought to myself. I’ll finish that jar of peanut butter in the back seat and that will be the end of me. I freaked out. I started crying and screaming at the road: “F%#! you for not being paved! F@#$ you! This has gone on LONG ENOUGH! I WANT PAVEMENT!”

Then my body started to get tingly. My hands clenched into fists that I couldn’t undo. I could barely control the steering wheel with my wobbly hands. I’ve never had a panic attack before, so I could be wrong—I am no MD, that’s for sure—but if I had to diagnose myself with something, it would be a panic attack and bad case of not reading my road atlas’ legend.

Had I read the legend, I would have known that a road impassable in winter months is a road that no Geo Tracker should ever attempt to tread. It is a road unfinished.

Anyway, due to my navigational error, I made it to Cuba, NM, a mere 100 miles northwest of Santa Fe, in a record three hours. Obviously, since I had gotten a late start (duh… actually, I was supposed to leave on Wednesday but I didn’t end up going until Thursday, go figure) and had proceeded to make completely ineffecient use of my time on the road, I was never going to make it to my goal of Provo, UT by nightfall. I ended up making it to Moab, three hours short of Provo, when I realized I couldn’t drive anymore.

Asa had done me the favor of researching Moab hotels that allow dogs—I had no camping gear with me, mind you—and so I called the numbers he gave me to find a place with vacancy. Well, as it turned out, not a single motel in all of Moab had vacancies at all. (I started crying again). I could always sleep on the side of the road, I rationed, but with a car whose main protection from intruders is a plastic window that unzips, the thought of sleeping in the car less than warmed my heart. Not to mention that being in the same position I had just spent the last 10 hours did not sound appealing in the slightest.

It was past 9 pm when I finally stumbled across an outdoor gear store that was still open. At first I thought it was a mirage of sorts—a locally-owned ma-and-pa outdoor gear store that’s still open after 9 pm on a Thursday? It couldn’t be! But it was: it was really open. I walked inside with a tear-streaked face and announced that I needed to buy a tent.

The woman looked at me strangely. She knew something was wrong. I started wailing again. Between sobs I explained to her that there was nowhere for me to sleep and that I didn’t want to sleep in my car so I needed to buy a tent.

“Well, I can sell you one, but I don’t have any cheap two-man tents right now. They’re all really top of the line. You probably don’t really want to spend that much.” She was right—heck, the gas alone from Santa Fe to Portland was going to drain my funds significantly.

She pulled out a phonebook. “What about a campsite that has cabins?” She made a phone call and before I knew it, I had a cabin reserved in my name with a bed, heat AND electricity. I have never been so happy to go to bed in my life. And this is what my view looked like when I woke up:

Days Two and Three, AKA The Days That Aren’t Worth Blogging About

The rest of the trip was comparatively uneventful, so I won’t bore you with details like, “And then I drove. And then I drove some more,” but general highlights include:

- I have an incredible bruise on my right shin due to walking into a coffee table in the lobby of a hotel that didn’t have vacancy. Asa says it looks like a tattoo, and I’m proud.
- A truck stop in Idaho advertised having cheap diesel and riblets.
- The very eastern edge of Oregon is marked by brown rolling hills that can best be described as the Sound of Music meets severe drought.
- The northern border of Oregon, along the Columbia River, is the prettiest drive I’ve ever made.
- I listened to almost all of Dude, Where’s My Country? book-on-CD.
- Chelsea farted a few times but did not vomit.
- The Crapper’s timing belt did not explode, nor did other mechanical problems arise.
- The roof started to come off in the back left corner, and against all efforts to make it lock back into place, the stupid thing kept coming off. The good thing was that nothing fell out. Once, when I was driving to Vermont several years ago, one of my Birkenstocks flew out of the opening in the roof onto Interstate 84. I can’t believe I just typed the word “Vermont” and “Birkenstock” in the same sentence.
- The ultimate highlight: The drive is OVER and I am HERE. It is quite lovely here. More on that for another day.

Yours,
Mydogischelsea

I’m still sick—battling a nasty upper respiratory infection—but that’s not what this post is about. This post is about my car. My beloved (ha) Geo Tracker. I went to the mechanic today, and it turns out she’s a little sick, too, and needs some fixin’.

Let me give you a little background on the ol’ Geo:

- the roof leaks
- the air vents leak
- the brakes squeak
- it’s rear wheel drive (or front wheel? My car has whichever one is crappier)
- there are at least two (2) pieces of plastic in the trunk that broke off of unidentified locations somewhere in the car
- the floor rug is peeling away
- Chelsea has vomited on the back seat twice
- my Geo is evidently the Number One target for people trying to get into accidents with parked cars
- it’s ugly
- once, someone stole the back window by unzipping it
- it says “TRACKER” on the side… because that’s cool
- when I am driving faster than 40 mph with the windows shut and talking to my mother on my cell phone (with a hands-free headset, of course), she invariably says, “Where are you? It sounds like you’re in a wind tunnel.” I always respond: “I am. I’m in the Tracker.”

Anyway, all of that I already knew. In fact, I? finally decided to put it up for sale on Craigslist. No one responded, due either to an unreasonably high asking price (hey, you can always go down) or to a sarcasm that I’m not sure everyone appreciates. I was going to try to sell the car before leaving for Portland, but finding my dream car (a used VW Golf TDI…diesel!!) at a reasonable price around here is like finding a needle in a haystack.

I actually found something pretty close to the dream car—a 2002 Jetta TDI with 77,000 miles—at a dealership down the road, but when I asked the dealer how much they were asking for it,? he went off to make a long phone call and came back shaking his head.

“You don’t want this car,” he said. “It’s out of your price range. By a lot.”

“But…!” I protested. I tried talking him down a bit, noting that the tires needed replacement, the windshield was cracked, and the body had dents and scratches all over it. “They must be kidding to think they’ll get something anywhere close to that for this car!” I argued.

But the man did not want to sell me that car. He showed me a crappy old Buick instead.

Determined, I went onto a TDI-obsessed website where you can get free Carfax reports for used TDIs, and discovered that when the dealer said you don’t want this car, he didn’t simply mean that it was out of my price range.

He meant: “Actually, this car may say it only has 77,000 miles on it, but what you don’t know is that this car has a Not Actual Mileage title. In fact, only last May, the car clocked in at 125,000 miles. We bought it at an auction in June and it miraculously only had 77,000 on it. Trust me, you do not want this car.”

So I’m stuck with the Geo until further notice. The Portland area appears to be abounding with diesel Volkswagens, and so I will wait until I get there to sell my leaky squeaky car (it’ll be a total hit in a town where it rains all of the time!) and buy a new one. And this brings me to the point of this particular post:

I just got back from the mechanic. He said I need new brake pads ($150). They’re worn down to the nubbins and they’re dangerous, he said. And then he asked me if I would like to have something done to the rotators ($25) and he said it’s about time to change the timing belt ($300), whatever that is.

He said I can make it to Portland without changing the timing belt, but I should probably do it before the winter. However, he noted, while most manufacturers recommend that you replace it after 60,000 miles, he’s never seen one snap until 80,000, but a snapped timing belt means $1,800, a whopping price just a couple hundred under the Kelley Blue Book value of my car. Still, $300 seems like a lot of dollars for a car with a leaky roof.

I’m heading back to the dealer in about half an hour, and I’ll have to tell him if I want that new timing belt or not. Evaluating whether or not it’s worth it reminds me of a conversation I had a few weeks ago, when I was at the Chevy dealership on a quest to buy a tiny $70 piece of plastic to fix my back window. I was telling the parts salesman about my car’s problems, and the buying/selling/moving dilemma.

“Maybe I should just sell that freaking car,” I said.

“You know what I would do if I were you? I would get far, far away from that piece of crap. I bet one of these guys back here would be willing to buy it off you for $300 just for the parts.”

$300?? I hope they’re not looking for a new timing belt.

Since I’ll be Portland-bound in a few days, it’s time to get an expert to look at the ol’ Geo Crapper and tell me that she still has a few miles in her before needing a complete overhaul. I’m fairly confident that Le Traquer is ready for the drive, despite the squeaky brakes and leaky air vents (and when I say “leaky air vents,” I do not mean that air is the only substance that manages to squeeze through—precipitation does, too. This means that while I’m living in Portland, my car’s floor will be home to the lesser-known sixth Great Lake). But even if the car is fine, it’s probably time for an oil change, at the very least, and when I think of oil changes, I think of the time I brought my car to Jiffy Lube in Colorado Springs:

The man who changed my car’s oil was somewhat greasy. Not just greasy in the mechanic sense of the word, but greasy in the “dirty old man with gold teeth” sense—you know, slimy. Blatantly looking every woman in the place up and down. Creepy.

“Hey, girl, whatcha doing around here with these New York plates?” he asked me.

“Oh, you know, I live here, just haven’t bothered to change them.”

“You live here, eh?” Crap. Shouldn’t have said that. “So what do you do for fun around here?”

“Oh, lots of things.” Short. Sweet. No information whatsoever.

“Maybe we could do something fun together sometime,” he responded.

In situations like these, I never know what to say. I don’t take well to being hit on by total strangers, particularly when they’re creepy. But I also don’t like being rude, so I have trouble saying, “No thanks.” I always end up in an awkward lie—something like this: “Actually, I’m extremely busy at the moment—I’m packing up my whole house and moving back to New York—I barely have time to sleep let alone do fun things.” I don’t know why it’s so hard for me to just say no.

“Eh… maybe. I’m really busy right now—getting ready to move across the country,” I said, very predictably. “Thanks for the oil change.”

I got in my car. Undeterred by my response, the man flashed me a blinding golden smile and asked, “So—when will I see you again?”

Heh. This is my moment of glory. The time when I actually said something good at exactly the right moment:

“In another three to five thousand miles.”

And off I went.