Which means I'm going to tell you about my most complicated move.
Last year I basically blew up my life and moved back home to Chicago from LA. This is the fourth time I've gone up and back like that, and this time I had the most stuff. So Nick, aka the world's best brother no seriously, took some time off work and flew out to help me. Thanks to U-Haul being the god damn worst, we ended up leaving way later than planned and that meant we were going to have to take an extra day on the drive right from the start. But my friend Michelle made part of the drive all the time, and Sarah's family had just done the same drive we were going to do and had been giving warnings about things, so we figured it shouldn't be that big a problem.
The above was taken at a rest stop somewhere in the middle of California. We'd heard that for long stretches of the drive we'd be going without anywhere to stop, so if we had an opportunity to stretch our legs or stop for gas and snacks, we took it. This rest stop was notable mostly because a) I got to pet a puppy, and b) when we found the vending machines there was a lady taking out the trash who warned us, "You're not getting the coffee from there, are you?" Of course not, for as much as I adore coffee (and this trip kicked my addiction into hardcore overdrive), there's always been something creepy to me about those machines that just spit coffee into your cup. She then proceeded to say, "Because one time I was cleaning that and I saw these little black things crawling all over it. My bosses tried to tell me they were coffee grounds. I've been around a long time, I know what ants look like!"
Vindicated on the coffee machines.
We decided to hit up Vegas, which we've both been to, but we stopped there for one specific reason. Years ago on another cross-country road trip, Sarah introduced me to a restaurant chain called Islands that I love, and the Vegas location is as far east as they go. There wasn't really time to hit up anything else, and considering driving on the Strip is one of the scarier experiences of my life there was no way I was taking a trailer up there. The trailer unfortunately became a very big reason for why not to do certain things.
We weren't able to get through Arizona by nightfall. You're in Arizona for maybe half an hour, but it felt pretty harrowing as the driver, going around mountains in the dark through construction zones with a trailer I was still learning how to drive with, and I'd barely slept the night before so that made it worse. But we got to St. George, UT for the night, and set out the next morning around 6 am, just in time for the sunrise.
We thought Utah would be the hardest state. We were warned about the mountains and the steep grades, and I was still getting the hang of driving with a trailer on my car. I had to learn about shifting gears, and we kept pulling over at the many, many, many rest stops so the car wouldn't overheat, though it was really, really, really gorgeous and worth every stop. Utah was also where we ran into some of the more mundane problems. We stopped at a gas station, which was set a couple miles off the exit, and to get there and back we had to avoid the baby kamikaze bunnies that kept darting out into the road. I'm very proud to say that I didn't hit a single one, but I don't want to ever play Frogger with tiny adorable fuzzy creatures ever again. That may have also been the stop where we tried to find the gas station in the middle of a huge state park and took a wrong turn, ending in me having to do a three point turn on a dirt road while hauling a trailer that wouldn't let me back up without it creating a 45 degree angle with my car. After I managed that, I could do anything on this trip.
Which was good, because then the trailer lost a wheel. See the above linked post! It really could have been a lot worse, and we were only fifteen minutes away from the hotel we'd booked at dinner. Nick and I tend to wait till later in the day when we have an idea of how far we might be able to get/how tired we are/what the timing's like and then find something on Priceline. This trip included calls to every hotel we checked out, asking "Can we park a trailer there?" Some places didn't have the space for it. Some hotels would let you park across two spaces so we could just pull out and drive the next morning. We had the new, empty trailer hooked onto my car already, so this particular hotel in Rifle, CO had us pull around to park on the side of the building, which was new. Still, they were happy to accommodate us and that's the important part.
I proudly proclaimed that California was the prettiest of all the states, and then I drove through the postcard that is Colorado. It's gorgeous. When we left, we had to drive through a mountain or two, and while there was construction going on, that just meant we could go slower to see the gorgeous scenery! Since we had to drive in the right lane the whole trip, we were driving right next to the Colorado River, where you could see fish jumping up out of the water, or see people bringing kayaks in. As for what we did in Colorado, well, there wasn't much we could do. We'd wanted to stop in Denver, but a stop for gas taught us that the city is rife with traffic circles, which suck to do with a trailer, so we had to skip that. We did stop in Eagle, Co for breakfast at the Eagle Diner and it was so good. I like stopping at roadside diners on long trips, and this was by far the best I've been to. Sarah had also told us that there were rest stops where you could stop and dip your toes in the river or stop and watch mountain goats, and we couldn't really do that.
If we thought Utah was the difficult state, Colorado blew it out of the water. We'd been warned about mountains, but not how high they are. Vail is 11,000 feet up. I drive a Nissan Versa. We had a trailer carrying my whole life on the back of us. It was a stressful day, because my car did not want to go up those mountains and it was a challenge to get it up to 25 miles an hour. I had to put my car in a lower gear and put the hazard lights on as a slow moving vehicle while cars whizzed past us doing 80. At one point when I could smell gas we pulled off to the side of the highway because I was worried about the engine, but there's really nowhere to stop. We were on a mountain, with nothing but a guard rail between us and the tops of the trees below, and my extremely light car would shake every time someone passed us. We were only there for a few minutes before I got scared enough to say screw it and keep going. We did that all the way up through Vail, where we finally hit a rest stop.
There was an honest to god babbling brook next to us. There was some kind of biking event going on, too, so there were a ton of people on bicycles stopping for a break, and I'm pretty sure they'd been going faster than us. That's right, if my car was having problems getting up to that elevation, people did that on bicycles. Bicyclists are badass.
I really wanted to stop and see mountain goats. And when Nick and I go back to Denver to do it right (date TBA) we'll absolutely do that. But the car ride was a mostly tense silence, where I think we were both worried that the car might give up. (Though the trip so far had been so stellar and problem-free!) At one point I started telling the highway "Just go down. JUST GO DOWN." And when we did start on the downgrade, it was still steep, so we still had to be careful. It was a huge relief to get to Nebraska.
The warnings about Nebraska had been (I'm paraphrasing) "It's the most boring drive you will ever do," and "don't have a gun in the car because you will want to turn it on yourself." We didn't have a tough time, though, partly because Colorado was so fraught with car terror, and because we hit a storm. There was a lightning storm in the distance where we thought we might be able to pass it up without getting hit with it, but then we started seeing lightning on the other side of us. It was raining pretty good, and at one point we hit construction and went down to one lane. Sorry, everyone driving behind us! I was not gonna speed in a storm with a trailer on my car! Deal with it! Our choices were to sit on the side of the road and wait out the storm that didn't want to seem to end, or keep on going and try to pass it up. So we tried to pass it up.
We did it, and after stopping for dinner at a roadside hotel somewhere in the middle of Nebraska where when I asked if they could make something vegetarian they acted like they'd never been asked that question before, we continued on. When we got back on the road it was dark. So that helped with the whole boring drive thing. We stayed at the Ramada in Kearney, NE and I honestly love this place. The decor is completely 70's, and while the place was a maze (we had to go back at least once to ask the front desk "We're going where?" and we had a map), we also got to pass up a pool and bar in the middle of the place. I'm not sure this is a good thing; it was really humid and smelled of chlorine, and there was carpeting all around, but my god was it wonderful. There was also a tiki bar type thing. Check out the pictures on the website, it's there.
When we left in the morning, it was straight on to Iowa. That was the drive that killed us. We weren't in Nebraska too much longer, but there's really nothing in western Iowa. There's very little to look at except the occasional farm, and we had to wait something like two hours once we said we were hungry to find an actual place to eat. There was a little farm to table place somewhere along the way but they had a very set menu and we didn't need nearly as much food as they would have to give us, so unfortunately we kept on till we found a Perkins'. And then we got to see Sarah! Much like we started my move to LA with an overnight at her house, we ended my move back with the same. Her dad told us that since Sarah and her mom had been telling him about our adventures, he'd tried to keep track of us in case he had to come rescue us. Oops.
This was our shortest day on the road because we actually had a person to hang out with, and we had to leave early the next day for the very last leg of the trip, and the one that bugged me the most. I've driven to Cedar Falls a lot. I can make the trip in four hours. And it was killing me that because of the trailer it was taking six. It made the trip feel even longer than it was, and all I wanted to do was get home. But even when we got to Illinois, we had to move the stuff out of the trailer and into the new U-Haul storage unit, which was differently shaped than I thought. The trailer was 5x8, the unit was 8x5, meaning it went upwards instead of back. This meant that once again I had to decide to ditch things like my desk because they wouldn't fit, which was really annoying when we'd had to move that stuff three times already in a matter of days. But we did it, and that's it.
For as many problems as there were though, it was a good trip. I really love traveling with Nick, and this was the most time we'd gotten to spend together just us in a long time, and we got to see some really great states and come up with at least one place I definitely want to see again. Plus I'm the sort of person who sees a challenge and feels accomplished when she gets through it, and this trip had A LOT OF CHALLENGES. Besides, anything's worth it if you get a good story out of it.
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