Road Trip!: July 2009 Archives

Dodger Goes East

By John Syme on July 29, 2009 10:55 AM | 4 Comments

Tank goodness Antonio, my new bes frend in Pomm Sprangs, fix us up a picnic for the rolly house, cuz it was very scorchy panty panty comin back acrost a dam California desert. We stop at the Colorado River so Him could cool off, but I stayed instinctive away from the warter. My foredogs was hunters, not swimmers. We let them dumb blond retrievers do that! (Hey, you know why blond retrievers can't tree a squirrel? The bark is all wrong. Ahahahaha!) So, anyway, after the desert and the river we clumb and clumb and clumb in the hot rolly house up a canyon by a big warter and come to a pavement city and stop in the only shady spot lef. It was still so hot I felt all squawsh down. Looka here:

Somehow the chilled fennel and steak filet salad and homemade polenta (upper left wit the fork in it) from the night before, chez Antonio, my new bes frend in Pomm Sprangs, tasted even better ina hot parking lot near the end of our epic desert trek. My Him was hot and tard, but shared Hims meaty niblets, and put ice coobs in my warter. I love my Him.

Continue reading Dodger Goes East.

Oak Ridge, Tennessee: Put Another Dime In the Jukebox, Baby!

By John Syme on July 28, 2009 10:13 AM | No Comments

Oof. By the time I had made it through all the storms of south central Missouri in my leaky old Comet ragtop ("Dodger, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore!"), I was very happy to have gotten two last Davidson invitations for lodging on my way homeward. Thanks to Curtis Bickers '93, for a redux of my westbound visit to his gracious Memphis home. And big thanks to my dear, fun and funny classmate Linda Cassens Laforest '85, who had called me up on a rainy, Motel 6 kind of a day earlier in the week to ask when I was coming through Oak Ridge. O, happiness! Dodger and I were plumb tired of Motel 6 by now: Kingman, Ariz., Gallup, N.M., Goodland, Kan., Lawrence, Kan., St. Robert, Missouri... Nice as it is to see that dog-friendly sign from the interstate, it's not home. For instance, I would never have such a thing as that bedspread in my home. Please. Come to think of it, I would never have that bed, either. Ah, well. Motel 6 is, like WalMart, what it is: When you need it, it's exactly what you need, but when you're done, you don't want to just hang out there. So anyway.

Dodger was excited to see Linda again, too, even if she is a vet. I mean, it's not like she's his vet, with all the shots and the pills and that dreadful back-end business and the inhalant bordatella vaccines sprayed all up in his everso delicate Pointer nostrils. No, today, good Linda was just a happy friend to man and beast, and especially to this man and this beast.

Linda and I kept ourselves so generally cracked up over nothing during our 24-hour visit that I, like, totally forgot to get out my camera. So here she is grinning studiously in E.H. Little Library back in the day. We loved rock and roll. Still do. So, in fact, does my Davidson colleague, campus news guy and photographer Bill Giduz '74, who took this picture when he was new on the job at alma mater in the early '80s.

Continue reading Oak Ridge, Tennessee: Put Another Dime In the Jukebox, Baby!.

My iPod: R.I.P.?

By John Syme on July 24, 2009 10:51 PM | No Comments

My iPod bit the dust. At a Motel 6 in Kansas, I went to update my hallowed Road Trip playlist in order to delete "Smokin' in the Boys Room." The nostalgic novelty of that song, I had found, turns out to be rather paltry. Grating, even. But when, in room 116, I connected my digital drives and mashed "sync," I received, OMG, a stop-sign, exclamation point, "Error 1429" pop-up warning that my device was "corrupt." Well!

Now, you might think that corruption would have happened to me sooner. Say, the week before, when southern California's Mojave desert temperatures in my glove box where the iPod lives surely topped 120 degrees. And what with southern California being, you know, pretty corrupt. But no, this musical corruption was visited upon me and my iPod in Goodland, Kansas. Who knew? Lord, Lord, Lord.

Was it the Mojave Desert or "Smokin' in the Boys' Room" that gave my iPod a fever? Or maybe it was Tina Turner's classic "Nutbush City Limits." Swine flu?...

Continue reading My iPod: R.I.P.?.

Lawrence, Kansas II: Faith and Reason

By John Syme on July 21, 2009 6:25 PM | 2 Comments

When I blast e-mailed Kansas and Missouri alumni before heading east from Colorado many miles ago, Davidsonians came through. My thanks to all who offered to meet for coffee or a meal or more. My only regret is the need to keep the miles rolling in this my last week on the road, so I won't get to visit with you all personally. So many alumni, so little time... One who responded to the call was Andrew Campbell '00. He opened the University of Kansas Museum of Natural History in Lawrence to me for a private tour on a Monday, when they are usually closed. Andrew is collection manager for herpetology, which made for an appetizing tour before lunch. Mmm, tastes like chicken! (Andrew avowed that he has probably heard every tastes-like-chicken joke there is, and with some 360,000 reptilian and amphibian specimens under his TLC, one of the five largest such collections in the nation, I believe him.)

Turtle soup, anyone?

Continue reading Lawrence, Kansas II: Faith and Reason.

A Peculiar Day

By John Syme on July 21, 2009 1:08 PM | No Comments

After I left Lawrence, Kansas, yesterday, I had no particular place to go---the winding-down icing on the cake of my six-week vacation/reportage/sabbatical/furlough. So, when a map showed me the town of Peculiar, Missouri more or less in my southeastern trajectory, I thought I'd go there. It is a wonderful word to me, "peculiar," moi having been blessed with a few quite peculiar friends and family of the Southern gothic variety. I do so hope they count me on their short lists of same.

Anyway, what was most peculiar about Peculiar was that no one seemed to know for sure exactly how it got its name. The vet tech was from "off," so she didn't know. Next door to the vet in the strip shopping mall, no sign of life in the magistrate clerk's office, only a mid-eaten lunch. The cops next to that had the blinds pulled. A peroxide laundromat chick walking around the block with her paperback opined that a train conductor back in the day announced this town with no name as "peculiar." A mechanic two blocks behind the laundromat moved two steps out into his driveway to respond "No clue," without moving his face at all. Peculiar, indeed.

Continue reading A Peculiar Day.

Lord, Lord, Lord

By John Syme on July 20, 2009 11:53 PM | No Comments

Kansas is a very, very long state, even at 75 mph steady, in a hefty crosswind. Happily, Jesus is everywhere. I missed my favorite shot of Him, plainly and exquisitely painted onto a billboard poking up out of the greening summer bounty of the earth with no verbal interpretation, just a very happy and welcoming, hippie-style Jesus holding a stalk (whatever) of wheat and smiling at me. I liked that Jesus. This more personalized Jesus, below, which I did manage to capture on pixels, runs a close second, even if the godsmack message and Photo-Shopped halo, not to mention the blood-red ray of---something?---shooting off of His---heart?---are a bit much for my tastes.

Kansan interstate landowners freely express their First Amendment rights.

Continue reading Lord, Lord, Lord.

Lawrence, Kansas: Home of the Jayhawks, blah blah blah

By John Syme on July 20, 2009 10:36 AM | No Comments

After miscalculating mileage in a big square state yet again, I had the beginnings of a massive tension headache by the time I hit Topeka from the far western reaches of Kansas, nearly 400 miles of gripping a 42-year-old steering wheel in high plains winds. So as I passed Topeka for the last 15 miles into Lawrence and saw the big, green, federally funded interstate reminder of the KU men's basketball Jayhawks' successful 2008 run, I gritted my teeth and resolved to dig my dirty Davidson T-shirt out of the trunk for my the duration of my stay here. That'll show 'em. It helped that George Thompson '84 had earlier said by phone that he proudly wore his Davidson shirt during that tournament, even tho' he is employed at KU. Anyway, a spritz of Drakaar Noir at my Motel 6 did a fair job of masking the gasoline and other fumes embedded in the wrinkled gray athletic T that I had found behind the spare tire, and off we went for a libation on Massachussetts St., the heart of Jayhawks territory.

Wildcat avatar on Massachussetts St., Lawrence, Kansas, 2009

Continue reading Lawrence, Kansas: Home of the Jayhawks, blah blah blah.

Sangre de Cristo Mountains, Colorado

By John Syme on July 18, 2009 11:14 PM | 1 Comment

Turns out my buddy Ricky has been up to a good deal since 10th grade, as have I, so we shared all about that and then some in Taos, relatively late into the evening, for a coupla guys approaching---only approaching, mind you---middle age. Our dogs kept us out of trouble on the town, and next morning, we headed up to the Sangre de Cristo mountains, the southernmost Rockies range, where Ricky knew a nature preserve with hot springs. Okay, it was a "naturist" preserve, and if you had ever told me in 10th grade that thirty years on I would be hiking up a mountain anywhere with anybody wearing nothing more than Nikes and a fresh goatee, I would have slapped you. But that I did, hike up that mountain to the bubbly mineral spring pool in my birthday suit. My congenital Southeastern orthodox Presbyterian upbringing makes it seem unseemly to share more, except to note that it was a family-oriented occasion.

Heading up the seven-mile dirt road to the preserve, with Ricky and Foxy the Australian Cattle Dog following in the dust, behind Dodger the Carolina Fool Pointer's head in the rearview. Unless you're the lead dog, the view never changes....

Continue reading Sangre de Cristo Mountains, Colorado.

Taos, New Mexico

By John Syme on July 16, 2009 7:56 PM | No Comments

Two nights in a row in a Motel 6 will bring you back down to earth from the rarified airs of Southern California, I have found, particularly if the first night is at the end of a 300-mile trek across the Mojave Desert. There's nothing much to write home about in Kingman, AZ, so I won't bore us all with the details of that. Next day, another 300-mile trek across Arizona wound me up in Gallup, NM this morning, after yesterday's delightful Thai lunch in cooling Flagstaff, followed by a romp at the dogpark, a nap in the backseat while parked in front of Starbucks, and a magical moment coming down off the Flagstaff mountain blasting Brooks & Dunn's "Rock My World." A guy on a Harley chopper was sole witness to said moment, in which all those greasy hours wrangling various and sundry engine gaskets and flex fans came to fruition: "It was worth it."

Ye olde 1967 Comet was manufactured with New Mexico speed limits in mind. (N.B.: The dash temp gauge, third from left, reading "cold," has been supplanted by a mechanical after-market gauge that pegged a robustly comfy 230 degrees here at a flat 80 mph.)

Continue reading Taos, New Mexico.

California Dog Daze

By John Syme on July 14, 2009 6:27 AM | 2 Comments

We getted to go to Dog Beach one mor time before we leaved San Doggio, so I seen all my girlfriends and boyfriends agin. Then we et lunch on a hot sidewalk and drived on the Dam Eye Five pass the big water toward the Lost Angels. The two-leggeds call it the "free" way, but it cost a lot---a lot of cussin and smellbad monster wheelies, and so me I just curl up and flap mears down. Then, when we leaved the Dam Eye Five to get close to the big water at the Lagoona Bitch, Him was sangin Beech Boys music. I poke up my head and all the peeples pointed, so I Pointed back. Ha! Then, we clumb a big hill in our wheely and Him stoppit at the top and pull out the clicky box and say looka here, boy, strike a pose.

I'm on the top of the world, lookin down on creation.

Continue reading California Dog Daze.

Palm Springs, California: Monday, Monday

By John Syme on July 13, 2009 6:20 PM | 1 Comment

Sadly this morning at 6 a.m., I bid adieu to the ACE Hotel and Swim Club on Palm Canyon Drive, and began loading up the car for the blistering 220 miles to the Needles, Calif. Motel 6. As is my custom, while approaching my 67 Mercury from a distance, I scanned the pavement under the ol' girl for unfamiliar puddles. Uh-oh. Driver's side gasoline hose leak on the firewall, rubber must have disintegrated in the heat. Not a thing you want to have to fix yourself in the 115-degree desert, so off to the Vista Chino Shell station I was, with John Gilmore '69 and my new best friend Antonio Romualdo to the rescue. Soon enough, I was comfily ensconced in Antonio's plumaria-scented garden, for a bonus day in Palm Springs.

The Palm Springs gods of Monday were good to me.

Continue reading Palm Springs, California: Monday, Monday.

Wish They All Could Be California Classical Radio Stations

By John Syme on July 12, 2009 12:36 AM | 3 Comments

It's 9:30 at night in Palm Springs, Calif., and I realize I have had the Southern California classical radio station, KPSC 88.5 FM, on the radio all day. OK, I set it for the dog, truth be told, since classical music on WDAV 89.9 FM is what they play for him at Camp Wagging Tails back home, and what I play for him at my condo while I am at work, on account of his mild (now) separation anxiety. Dulcet tones soothe the savage beast. Seems to work. And besides, who does not want to awaken from their afternoon nap to the sound of applause, hello? Especially now for him, in Dodger's desert dog-days of summer 2009: too many hard, loud, freaky hours of SoCal freeways in an un-air-conditioned, 42-year-old Comet, with no roof to speak of? Who signed him up for this? OK, I did, against my better judgment. But all is well.

photo by Jennifer Foster, WDAV

Continue reading Wish They All Could Be California Classical Radio Stations.

Palm Springs, California: Another Saturday Night?

By John Syme on July 11, 2009 10:12 PM | 2 Comments

We ended our San Diego stay, a petite week, by one more festive visit to Dog Beach before heading up the coast. Sure enough, exiting the accursed I-5 to the Pacific Coast Highway, we saw signs to Doheny Park and Laguna Beach, and the Beach Boys started belting out "Surfin' Safari." I did not plan it, honest, my playlist did it on its own. I kept the volume a tad down for fear of being considered uncool by California standards, but beefed it back up when I saw a restored woody with a rehabbed surfer at the wheel headed back down PCH to Doheny. What are North Carolina license plates in Orange County, Calif. worth if you can't play your tourist music as loud as you want, hmm? Anyway, I put some 20-year-old ghosts to rest in Laguna, then got caught in Pageant of the Masters traffic, thence sucked up toward L.A. before deciding to barrel east on the 10, to the welcoming hospitality of John Gilmore, M.D. '69 & Cie in Palm Springs.

John Gilmore, M.D. '69 and Dodger's new best friend Antonio pose with the ripe grapes at the ACE, my everso charmingly retro Palm Springs home.

Continue reading Palm Springs, California: Another Saturday Night?.

Dodger in San Diego

By John Syme on July 9, 2009 11:32 AM | 5 Comments

Yestiddy we wunt to a place call Dog Beach. It is on the Big Water and all for dogs and everbody two-legged don't mind flyin sand. I tink dey have it here because San Diego is Spanielish for "Saint Doggie." I runned and runned and runned and they was some blonde Retrievers going all the way up to they necks in the warter after sawggy bawls, but I jus Pointed and laffed and played in it up to my knees and elbows. I got firfty but it was salty, so Him pored me some fresh in my lil bowl. Today the rolly house is up on a liff in Mission Hills to git a new axle bearing, so I hope Him will leech me back to Balboa Park afoot to the doggie yard wit no leeches. I like it sep for the errplanes that is too low.

On the lookout at Dog Beach

Blythe and Beyond

By John Syme on July 6, 2009 12:42 AM | No Comments

I thought I had already been as hot as I had ever been in my life. Not so. My most recent 48 hours in the desert were it. In Blythe, Calif., 20 years after my first summer evening there, recounted in "The Comet" entry, it was still triple digits at bedtime two nights ago. Next morning, a cut shaving latened my departure til after 10, so by the time we got to the part about climbing from desert sea level to 4,000+ feet in eastern San Diego County, it was the hottest part of the desert day.

If you look closely, you can see my hands on the wheel at the top of this one.

Continue reading Blythe and Beyond.

Dodger Leaving Las Vegas

By John Syme on July 5, 2009 12:56 AM | 4 Comments

Me and Him leaveded Richid's house in Las Vegas with sun up. Him unpack and re-allpack evertang. Looka here at Him's tangs, all spreaded out.

Richid a good man, he pat me fine. After we leaveded, on rolly sandy parts it was so doddam hot I getted in the front seat to try to find a shade, but they wont none. So I tuffed it panty panty til Him put the top up in Needles. I look for Snoopy's brudda, like it sayed in the papers, but he wont there. I tink it made up. So we getted to a motel in a town wit nuthin but air condition and stay here to sleep until "the Pacific Ocean" termorra. Here is me in Needles, snooping for Snoopy's brudda. He ain't in there.

The Comet

By John Syme on July 3, 2009 4:13 PM | No Comments

I just got back from the Vegas driveway garage of a great mechanic, name of Don. Linda at AutoZone said he was the best. When I found his house on Casa Linda Lane, he jacked up the ol' girl's back end and said that rattle/squeak I'd been hearing since Cud'n Maria's dirt road in Santa Fe was an axle bearing going out. I said hmm, then asked him what he would do. He said he didn't give advice. I said that wasn't what I asked, I asked him what he would do. He said he'd drive the s--- out of it and that I would know if it went out altogether, because the axle would poke through the wheel and "the ass end of the car will end up on the pavement." I figured that was clear enough a diagnostic, so I gave him $20 and drove off. You really can't hear that rattle/squeak much if you turn the music up, and and you can't hear it atall on the highway, which is good. I think.

The Squeaky Wheel

Continue reading The Comet.

The Las Vegas Strip

By John Syme on July 3, 2009 1:12 PM | 2 Comments

Last night, my brother Richard and I drove his Solara convertible with the tinted windows, top back and AC blasting, to the Las Vegas Strip. We parked at the Bellagio. Later, we came home.

End of post.

The Hoover Damn

By John Syme on July 2, 2009 8:50 PM | 6 Comments

We left the Grand Canyon for Vegas---300 miles at temps up to 114 at the Hoover Dam and no AC in my dam (sic) car. The prospect of enlivening music was a salve, for distraction if nothing else, the icey bandana on my neck long dessicated. I cued my iPod roadtrip playlist, and finally, finally, on the third rendition of the Eagles, "Already Gone," it dawned on me that I had somehow mashed a button that played the same friggin' song over and over, and I did not know which button. I was booking it down the macadam trying to beat the heat (ha!), and my Pioneer instruction manual was in the trunk. So I reverted once again to my aforementioned and simple-minded "Caliente/F.M." vintage 1989 compilation cassette, since there was no radio I could find out in the tumbleweeds and dust devils. By the time I got off I-40 at Seligman, Ariz., for an 85-mile detour on old Route 66, I was tired of even that personal favorite playlist.

Happily, Seligma is a comfy, kitschy little 66 town with vintage 50s and 60s melodies---even some 30s and 40s Depression-era folk music---wafting from the kind-hearted ticky-tack "cafés" and auto garages-cum-souvenir stores.

Continue reading The Hoover Damn.

The Grand Canyon!

By John Syme on July 1, 2009 8:50 PM | 9 Comments

By Flagstaff, I was jonesing for me some cheap consumer goods from the global supply chain, so I could not leave that town without visiting their Wal*Mart. I got some Fruit of the Loom sweats (it had not occurred to me while packing at 90 degrees that parts of my summer might be chilly), some detergent and Clorox (I had it in my head that I had to do laundry at Grand Canyon Village, even though I was not yet out of clean underthings), two cans of Beanee Weenees, a Butterfingers kingsize, and a shrink-wrapped, spunbond car cover, the cheapest they make. I had decided that, for the four weeks remaining of my busted ragtop odyssey (see previous entry), I'd be better off throwing a cover on it at night or when it rained than trying to find someone to help me repair a top that, in fact, needs to be replaced.

So, we made it to the Grand Canyon! For the Bright Angel Trailhead photo op, I let brother Richard wear the Davidson shirt, for while we (of course) still had clean underthings, our overthings had taken the brunt of a dusty campsite and an unprovoked attack by ravens (more on that later), by the time this picture was taken:

Continue reading The Grand Canyon!.

Amarillo, Tex.

By John Syme on July 1, 2009 3:25 AM | No Comments

Three states ago, we camped in Palo Duro (Hard Wood) Canyon south of Amarillo. It was sere and searing, a good warm-up, so to speak, for the Grand Canyon. We could drive to the bottom to our campsite, which included a picnic table on a slab with a shade shelter, butterflies

The butterfly (moth?) before the storm

and some rocks to pitch our tent on. Thank you REI for the 3.5" mattress! After we met the neighbors (few and taciturn) and gave up on a random and very fast green lizard, what were once faraway skies, now close, threatened our serenity.

My tent was up, but not the rain fly, and in the 20 seconds it would have taken to rig that, the winds whistled and the heavens opened. Good God. Canyon storms are impressive, turning dust to mud in moments.

Continue reading Amarillo, Tex..

July 2009 Archives