I guess a Forward is what comes before a Prologue but I don’t know nor really care. So let me explain the journey I am about to describe and you may elect or not to take. First, it’s already happened. Jo and I drove across the United States using a northern route during the summer of 2010 when we left Studio City, California and moved to Camden, Maine. It was a great trip and we both recommend that everyone do a coast to coast drive at least once to have your own experience and make your own discoveries crossing our truly magnificent country. I kept a running diary that I emailed to friends as we traveled and what I’ll post here are the observations and commentary I saved from six years ago that I’m sure I’ll tweak a bit… I hope you’ll want to travel along.
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Prologue
It’s 3,201 miles from Studio City, CA to Camden, ME and according to my favorite directions giver website (http://drivingtimebetweencities.com/) the trip could have taken us just two days and four hours by car if we had worn adult diapers and did that other type of speeding. Instead, my wife Jo and I took three weeks and used bathrooms in 14 American states and one Canadian province and slept normally.
It was a journey home for Jo who was born and grew up in Maine and had lived in Los Angeles for 24 years, feeling for most of that time like she was in exile. I had been in California even longer and after a career that had been mutually dissolved by my employer and me in the spring of 2010 was ready and able to get back closer to where I once belonged myself which is Pennsylvania.
Jo and I had dreamed of making our cross-country trip for a while. We’d bought our Maine house in the fall of 2009 and had moved most of our things there right away with the intention of moving ourselves there permanently in 2011 at the end of my contract with ABC News. My buyout from Disney/ABC moved up our timetable. The plan for our route was simple. Jo had never been to Oregon nor Montana and had never seen Mt. Rushmore nor Niagara Falls. We both wanted to explore Michigan’s two peninsulas. The dots were not going to be difficult to connect and I had a list of golf courses I hoped to play and some offbeat attractions I wanted us to visit along the way.
A good friend of ours threw us a wonderful going away party and since there was a substantial gap between it and our actual departure date we kept saying goodbye to the same people who had been there until we felt embarrassed we were still around.
In the meantime I had our 2004 Volvo S40 serviced, printed out maps for daily driving plans and addresses and phone numbers for cheap motels and local non-chain restaurants. We began packing clothes into suitcases and tote bags that would go in the trunk along with my golf clubs that already lived there. We made lists and then gathered or bought the supplies we thought we’d need. Our picnic basket filled up quickly with things for lunches by the side of the road and we made a trip to REI for a serious cooler. There were low-tech no brainers like a first aid kit, flashlights, and a Swiss army knife and hi-tech necessities like our cameras, laptop, GPS and iPod. We even took our two foam pillows we cannot sleep without. The back seat began to disappear. It would prove a challenge to make it all fit but hey, that’s why cars have rear view mirrors.
The Day before Day 1
Thursday, July 29, 2010
We still had a lot of things left in our apartment to ship to Maine and were worried about the whereabouts of our mover. A friend had recommended him to us and our departure date had already been pushed back because he told us his pet cat had gotten sick. He was actually coming from Maine, delivering art objects on the way and it had been tough getting a hold of him for updates about his progress. It was mid afternoon on the day he said he’d arrive and we were waiting with our packed boxes and getting nervous.
I’ve never been very good about getting rid of stuff and so I had clothes I’d packed that I’ll admittedly never manage to wedge into again and Jo had plenty of her own that did still fit her. Along with other boxes filled with books, kitchen items, office supplies, our desktop computer, widescreen TV and memorabilia such as my ashtray collection from imploded Las Vegas casinos there wasn’t much room to move around in the front of our apartment.
We’d lived in this apartment for seven years and called it an Ikea showroom since nearly all of our furniture was purchased there in flat boxes with their wordless but surprisingly adequate assembly instructions. All of it had served its purpose admirably but we weren’t taking any of our “popup” furnishings to Maine. I had placed ads on Craigslist but nibblers hadn’t taken the bait and when I called the National Council of Jewish Women and asked them to come take everything away for free they scheduled a pick up but didn’t show up. My son had wanted the bureaus, a lamp and one of the chairs that required our unscrewing each of them to fit it all in his car. With reassembly on the other end Gil and I spent a nice day together and also learned that stuff from Ikea is not really made to be taken apart and put back together a second time.
So now I made a last minute deal with the two Latino guys who were fixing up a vacated apartment in the building. They could have the rest of our Swedish interior collection (dining room and coffee tables, futon, sofa chair, bookcases plus the refrigerator) in exchange for helping me load everything else with the mover if and when he showed up.
When he finally did and I saw his panel truck towing its small trailer outside on our street I had a panic attack. There was no way in hell we were going to get all our things in there. I had damn near lost faith in this guy’s sense of time and now I enlarged that continuum to include both time and space. Fortunately, spatial relations have never been one of my stronger abilities. In fact in 10th grade biology I screwed up the dissection of a fish so badly that my teacher told me to take out some other homework and forget about medical school. After I calmed down and the mover assured me he could make everything fit I shifted from crisis mode to blind faith.
Almost four hours later his truck and trailer looked like the sides of a Rubick’s cube. The man was a master packer if there is such a designation. That evening we had the final of our multiple farewell dinners with a good humored good friend and then went back to our empty apartment to spend our last night in Los Angeles.
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Day 1
Friday, July 30, 2010
Everything fit in the car this morning and although there would be no room for passengers or even small reptiles in the back seat, at least it was still possible to see around our gear through the rear view mirror. Jo and I met my son at Mel’s Diner in Sherman Oaks for a farewell breakfast. Neither of Jo’s kids still lived in L.A. but Gil does and leaving him was obviously the most bittersweet aspect of our move to Maine for me.
After breakfast we had one final stop to make on our way out of the San Fernando Valley. I thought it would be a simple drop off but when I walked in the door at the cable company in Van Nuys it was take a number like a bagel store on a Sunday morning. You can do a lot of things at home through the Internet that you used to have to show up at places to do just a few years ago but returning your modem and DVR when you’re leaving town isn’t one of them apparently. I waited nearly an hour to do it.
We headed for the freeway, the 405, which is one of Los Angeles’s coronary arteries in need of a quadruple bypass, and after it rejoined the I-5 heading north near Magic Mountain we slowed to a halt. In LA it’s easy to find a traffic report on the radio and as soon as we did we heard the dreaded words “Sig Alert”. In LA this means a bad accident and/or a serious traffic jam and we were stuck in one. And since we’re not moving forward so quickly in our narrative, I’ll take a moment to tell you what most Angelinos don’t know. The “Sig Alert” is actually named after a man named Loyd Sigmon who came up with the way to automatically transmit a radio signal from the police department to Los Angeles radio stations whenever there was a need to. Now, he’s immortalized and unrecognized at the same time.
Another hour went by before we passed the scene of a nasty accident involving two semitrailers and twice as many passenger cars. But our escape from Los Angeles was still not complete. After getting around the highway wreckage we saw a huge smoke plume in the direction of Palmdale before turning west to go up the coast— “Sig Alert” and wildfire in the rearview mirror we had completed our escape from LA.
Lunch was at La Super-Rica in Santa Barbra (pictured here), Julia Child’s and our favorite taco stand, and then another 300+ miles on the 101 to San Francisco to visit Jo’s daughter Drew and her husband Aaron. Our GPS mysteriously lost its voice just when it came time to really want to rely on it as we hit the city and then just as mysteriously regained it as we parked the car. What’s that about? Drew made an incredible dinner. Aaron introduced me to some new music and it’s about 50 degrees in San Francisco in July.
So, we’re off. After thirty-one years in Los Angeles it will take a while for it to sink in.
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