This diary is presented as a part of Global Expats.
About this Travelblog
This is a chronicle of our relocation from Austin, TX to Oakland, CA in 2003. Just wanted to share it with friends and fans of Global Expats.
On July 17, my wife and I closed on the sale of our Austin, TX condo, collected our payment, and, after weeks of preparation, packing, and the managing of thousands of details, loaded our cats and some travel gear into our car to begin a long, winding, not-even-loosely-scheduled trek toward the Bay Area, where our lease on our new place begins August 1.
Who am I? I'm Jonathan, a small-time author and erstwhile Web/multimedia guy. Why are we doing this? We're relocating so that I may pursue my dream of an MFA in writing at what will be known until August 1 as CCAC - the California College of Arts and Crafts in San Francisco. Thereafter, it becomes The California College of the Arts. Thanks to a very generous fellowship, nearly the entire cost of the degree is covered. My wife, a Ph.D. candidate in Asian Studies, will be working on her dissertation and looking to land a position in one of the Bay Area's academic institutions.
I have decided to put together a travelblog of our unscheduled travels; web + log, as many of you already know, is weblog. Travel + web + log yields, as far as I'm concerned, travelblog. If you're looking in on this and want to drop us a line, we've already discovered that the best way will be via e-mail, as Verizon's wireless coverage is quite spotty here in the Southwest, especially outside major population centers. All typos are solely the responsibility of the author.
July 17: Our journey begins | Odometer: 26,135
We finally collected the check from the sale of the condo; collected the cats from a few hours of kenneling at Dr. McLeod's office; and hit the road at about 2:30. We've lived in Austin since the summer of 1997, when we came for my wife's degree, with the exception of a year in Bombay, India, in 2001-2002 while she did field research.
The sensation is incredible: We are no longer Austinites; no longer Texans, really; no longer home owners. For these two weeks, we live on the road, itinerants with cats. Our car, loaded with a cooler, two bikes on its new bike rack, two cat carriers, clothes, and a cooler, is our home for the time being.
On the road, as we drive into West Texas, one thing becomes apparent immediately: There is no NPR out here.
We find paint-by-numbers commercial-music radio; right-wing talk/hate radio on AM (Michael Savage, a brash, howling, anger-management-challenged extremist who was recently fired from his commentator spot on MSNBC after wishing death by AIDS upon a gay caller flourishes out here, polluting the airwaves every day); and a lot of fundamentalist Christian radio.
But we have no luck pulling in All Things Considered.
Small details indicate to us how the sociopolitical climate has shifted to the right as we've traveled West: More aluminum-sided warehouse churches; more red, white, and blue signs proclaiming support for President Bush and the troops (as though both must be supported to honor the troops); and "Jesus Loves Y'all" bathroom graffiti, among other things, tip us off.
Our first stop is Abilene, TX, where with surprising ease we find our way to a pet-friendly Comfort Suites — a new one with Internet access included in the fee. The cats have adjusted surprisingly well to their shift from companion animals to travel-companion animals.
A vegan dinner is surprisingly easy at Johnny Carino's! The waitress is prompt, courteous, thoughtful, and absolutely accurate. We've had a week of loading containers to be shipped to our new north-Oakland address, and days of cleaning and recycling and throwing things out; after a couple of Flat Tire ales, we are more than ready to head back to the hotel and call it a night.
For me, it finally sinks in: We are off the clock in a very big way now, and on vacation, with time to spare. We were thinking of stopping in El Paso, but a wild urge strikes me, and we decide to go check out Roswell, NM. We'll head that direction in the a.m.
July 18 | West Texas
We get an early start, hitting a coffee shop drive-through — West Texas is very big on drive-throughs — find our way onto Hwy 83 and make for its junction with 380, then onward to Roswell. An attempt at a pleasant little roadside leg-stretching and picnic flops, as every fly in town descends upon our chow and one of the two cats — Ganges, named after the river — has a reaction bordering on panic when confronted with the small flock of ducks who've taken up residence at the roadside park's pond.
The ducks are actually quite a lot larger than the cats — but I doubt the travel-cats have suffered any permanent psychological trauma :)
The cats are — surprisingly — quite happy to climb back into their pet carriers in our back seats. (And excited to explore each new hotel room and seek out all the good spots to hang out!)
West Texas is a graveyard for the dreams of earlier booms and busts, of earlier rushes, of eras that now reside in the region's dusty, sandy past. All along the way, we encounter towns well on the path to ghost-townhood. And a few completely shuttered and abandoned towns — failed attempts to capture that great American dream of starting something entirely of one's own and seeing it flourish.
The dry, red, sandy soil here provides the tool, the winds provide the force that drives it, and a constant weathering machine chews at the browned, sun-faded buildings in varying states of disrepair appear, structures beaten relentlessly by the West Texas sun.
Some of these little burgs still have a gas station, perhaps a shop or two that serve farmers from the region. Aluminum-sided Baptist churches seem to be the only growth industry out here, in the West Texas boondocks.
A few years ago, when my old friend Adam was teaching English in Poland, he told me about a time when he and other instructors were traveling in the former East Bloc.
It seems their course took them near the site of some form of nuclear contamination; a sign advised them: "Radiation: Roll up you windows and driver very rapidly."
We've been in no hurry as we cruise along 380, and have been driving (uncharacteristically) right at the speed limit. That changes as we pass a sign that reads, simply, "RADIUM."
Immediately after the sign is some sort of depot, but we have no idea what it's all about. Our windows already up, we drive very rapidly.
We can't help but wonder about the soybean fields that surround the depot and spread on for miles.
A bit of Web research later reveals that West texas does, in fact, have a bit of a problem with radium: It seems that some of the region's supplies of fresh water are contaminated with naturally occurring radium. Perhaps that has something to do with the stunning sign. Makes you wonder again, though, about the crops grown out here.
We join Hwy 380, which treats us well; since leaving the weird cowboy-kamikaze-splice drivers who seem hell-bent on death by spectacular, fiery pile-up, and which type saturates Austin's roadways, the driving experience in the rest of Texas isn't death-defying at all.
There really are roadrunners out here. A native Iowan, I'd never seen them before — except for those incidents involving Wile E. Coyote, of course.
The soil out here reddens as we proceed West.
The terrain goes hilly; then rock-strewn; then sparsely populated by scrub brush and dust devils made up of dry, blowing, sandy earth; then, as we proceed into New Mexico, much, much flatter.
We stop to take a photo of a plaque proclaiming our arrival at Roswell. Finding a pet-friendly hotel that doesn't want to stuff us into a reeky smoking room takes several tries; there are doubtless more options available here somewhere, but the Days Inn works out first, so we take a room there, right on Roswell's Main Street, location of the UFO Museum and other related kitsch.
July 18-20 | Roswell, NM
Roswell, NM, is an entirely unique place. To put things mildly.
This sleepy little desert town is an intersection of varied and disparate influences whose synergy works to create an atmosphere the likes of which you simply will not encounter elsewhere:
* A heavy Christian influence;
* a military academy;
* a strong area Libertarian presence; and, of course:
* the UFO thing;
Something crashed out here in July of 1947, and whatever it was, it changed Roswell forever.
The official U.S. Government story billed the crashed craft as a weather balloon — and, indeed, there was a great deal of some sort of foil at the crash site. But according to one of the military officers who first encountered it, this particular foil held its shape fiercely, resisting attempts to burn it and to reshape it with a sledgehammer; and, at the same time, could easily be shaped by hand, even folded — though it consistently unfolded itself and laid itself out flat once set down.
The aforementioned influences commingle out here, in this New Mexico desert town of about 49,000 (elevation: 3649 ft), to produce something — well — weird.
Overnight paranormal-phenomena talk-radio host Art Bell broadcasts his syndicated show from his home somewhere around here. Local beliefs tend to include both Jesus and aliens. A hybrid of both.
Christian rock blares from used-car dealerships and filters more quietly through Main Street's only coffee shop. A punk-fundamentalist works there. At the UFO Museum, a man who is convinced that, as he puts it, there are no angels, no devil, and no demons — only aliens, helps keep people informed about the Roswell incident.
There is an observance one might almost call fear of authority here. At age 35, I was ID'd at a local grocery by a very worried woman, as was my wife, who wasn't purchasing anything at all. Local police have placed billboards all over town warning of random stops which they say are meant to combat drunk driving. The signs warning of the use of deadly force against anyone who travels any further onto either super-secret military installation Area 51 or the crash site hang heavily upon the collective psyche.
The town more-or-less shutters its doors at 5 p.m.
There is no NPR station here in Roswell, either, but the local right-wing talk radio is popular enough to have its offices on Main Street.
The part of the visit we sought — plenty of alien-crash kitsch — abounded, but not quite as much as we had expected. You can buy Alien brand beer and wine in town; a local bicycle repair shop features an ancient bike on its roof with an inflated green alien astride it; many businesses make at least a nod to the crash, with some including the word alien in their names. Local Coca-Cola machines include alien references, as does the local Arby's (whose billboard proclaims: "Aliens Welcome!"). But to me, that fear seemed ever-present, in the background, always coursing just beneath the surface.
Perhaps if the military didn't work so hard to keep that fear in people out here; perhaps if it did not make the fact that it is hiding at least something at Area 51, the vibe of the place and its people might be a bit different.
But there's just not enough kitsch in the world to hide it.
Our next hop toward the West Coast, we've decided, will be Santa Fe.
July 20-22 | Santa Fe, NM
I should explain the date overlap in my entries: Due to the fact that, being in no rush, we do not need to put in long hours steaming toward our goal, we've decided to take the trip at a very easy pace. This includes, for us, the decision to drive during the day. So anytime you see any overlap in the dates of the entries, it is because we drove on the day or days you see overlapping.
We chose Santa Fe because of its reputation as an artistic and creative community. We were not disappointed.
I have never seen a city quite like it; nestled in the mountains (population: 58,000; elevation: 7,000 ft.), its sweeping, panoramic views are absolutely gorgeous. And a conscious collective effort to preserve the city's identity keeps the looks of adobe ever-present throughout the city's architecture. It is, in a word, beautiful.
We walk the streets of the city center for hours, eventually making our way to a rooftop pub to enjoy the sunset with a glass of merlot.
(Scanning the FM dial on the way into town, we find easily find an NPR station.)
There is more artwork and craftsmanship concentrated here than I have ever seen anywhere; on the recommendation of a friend who once lived here, we visit Canyon Street for a tour of the dozens of galleries that line the boulevard, walking until we are ready to drop.
Avoid the Garden Bar. Trust me.
We stay in the quaint, almost B&B-like Santa Fe Hotel. We arrived in their lobby to ask about room rates, pet policy, etc., just in time to find them putting out fresh-squeezed lemonade and cookies(!).
Our cats are still amazingly well-adapted to the transient life; Molly, our calico, finds the third pillow for her favorite spot at any new hotel; Ganges finds a new one in every room.
It is easily walking distance to the city center; we do not have to drive at all during our stay. Lots of good restaurants. A cool local weekly includes a cover story on the administration's use of Newspeak and George Orwell's insightful essay on the subject.
We could live here. Happily.
After two days' stay in beautiful Santa Fe, though, it is time for us to move on. We'd like to see the Grand Canyon on this leg of our trip, and choose Flagstaff for a number of reasons, including avoiding inflated hotel prices and limiting the amount of time we spend on the road. We'll stay at least two nights so I can catch up on the travelblog.
En route to Flagstaff, we detour to the Petrified Forest National Park, where we are treated to breathtaking panoramic desert views of the forest and of the Painted Desert. Many photos.
July 22-25 | Flagstaff, AR > The Grand Canyon
We decided to cool our heels for a few days in Flagstaff, a mountainside town neither of us knew very much about. But on the way into town, we stumbled across a good sign: KNAU, the NPR and classical station broadcasting from Northern Arizona University.
The town is on Historic Route 66, which we have, in a de facto sort of way, been following. It's a cool happenstance; Kerouac traveled Route 66 as he crisscrossed America in search of both its soul and his own — a dharma bum On The Road.
The mountainous scenes of Santa Fe are dwarfed by a mere glance in any direction; Flagstaff is surrounded by peaks. Our cats safely released into their new home — a room at a Comfort Inn — we decide to take a little time off, me for writing and K for her own academic work.
We head into the university area and are surprised to find ourselves in Flagstaff's small downtown area almost immediately. Restaurants that serve veg-friendly entrees abound.
We crisscross the little city center (it spans only a few blocks in any direction) and stop in for a beer at Mahoney's. It is summertime, and this college town is depopulated; its politics feel quite friendly, though there are plenty of tourists who seem to have accepted the challenge of seeing just how many American flags they can squeeze onto their SUVs. Just read a report that found that SUV rollover deaths are up 14% in the past year. Great gas mileage. Disproportionately polluting. The SUV is the symbol of American consumer arrogance; its disproportionate fuel consumption and polluting emissions were once declared by the Bush administration to be "the American way."
Sad.
Traveling with cats has its complications; we really have to have a hotel room to keep the cats safe when we venture out, and this extends our stay for a night when we decide to make a day trip to the relatively nearby Grand Canyon.
No one told me about what I'm going to term mountain sickness: A tendency to become nauseated when driving through areas of high elevation, particularly when the elevation keeps climbing and falling.
En route to the Canyon, I got downright barfy — though I did not quite barf.
When we reached a tourist center and gas station outside the Canyon, I noticed everyone we passed seemed pretty miserable, as well. That's when my wife, who has been in the mountains before, told me about mountain sickness.
I bought a pack of Tums and loaded up; by the time we reached the outskirts of the Canyon, my lungs and stomach had, thankfully, adjusted.
There is no way to describe the Grand Canyon without hyperbole. Here is what i can say about its galaxy-like, sweeping, incredible views: I think that now I have an honest use for the word sublime.
It's not as though you can really know something like this — not as though you can really grok it — without personally experiencing it. I mean: I knew that this was more than merely huge; but you simply have no concept of the vertiginous, terrifying vastness of the thing until you're actually there. No postcard, no photo, no Imax theater special on the Canyon, and no breathless description from me can even get you close to the profoundly dwarfing sensation of first-hand experience.
We park near Mather Point, put together a couple of sandwiches and load down my backpack with water, and decide to hike into the Canyon a bit, then, provided we have the energy, along the rim.
We head down as far as Ooh-Aah Point, astounded, and have our lunch and a break, take a few photos, and begin our ascent. It's intentionally slow-going; I strained my knee when we first visited San Francisco and put in 10 miles per day scouting the neighborhoods, and the higher elevation means thinner air to us lowlanders. A storm opens up on us as we make our return climb, leaving us soaked and, after a while, chilled.
But the Canyon is indescribably beautiful, and the hike into and climb out of the Canyon otherwise go smoothly. The hike along the rim, by comparison, is a cakewalk.
No mountain sickness on the drive back. Thank the gods.
We have a simple dinner at a nearby Olive garden and hit the sack early, exhausted. As I write this, we're about to hit the road once again, this time heading into our new home state: California.
July 25-26 | Barstow, CA - The Mohave Desert
I have never seen the desert — not really; not in person.
The desolation can be astounding. There is really nothing out here, to speak of, apart from an oasis of a gas station/convenience mart that sells expensive fuel and water. I hit Seek on FM, and the station reading cycles endlessly; there is nothing on the air here, save for occassional, crackling, distant Christian radio.
To paraphrase REM, we have had days between NPR stations on this trip.
The Mohave is hot. And bone-dry. And Barstow, CA, is right in the middle of it.
Roswell is such a strange and unique place at least partly because it doubles as the local supportburg for a military presence. Barstow, likewise, exists in that strange sociopsychological space.
We discover a Coco's restaurant, which, resembling the sort of meat-&-potatoes restaurants senior citizens frequent in droves on Sundays, does not look promising. But we decide to check the menu and are pleasantly surprised to find ice-cold Samuel Adams and vegan Boca Burgers on the menu.
We are both carded for the Sam Adams, and my ID is thoroughly checked over when I pay our bill with a debit card — probably nothing but extra-cautionary measures, but they are the sorts of things we run into in these military supportburgs.
Cruising about town for a bit, we find that it identifies itself as part of historic Route 66 and the town where many rail lines meet; and indeed, we have noticed a surprising number of rail lines angling toward Barstow as we foraged on across the Mohave. If Jack Kerouac followed Route 66 (he did) and rode the rails (he did), he almost had to have wound up here.
Barstow also has a sort of little-brother complex about Las Vegas; plenty of the people who stop in Barstow are en route to Las Vegas, and at Coco's, it shows: Wildly overly make-upped sexagenarians in fairly gaudy party gear make the rounds and order drinks in the frosty-cold oasis. Outside it temperatures are well into the triple digits, but Barstow's denizens know the value of keeping things sub-arctic indoors.
We find a Holiday Inn Express with a huge 15' X 10' map of the continental U.S. and Route 66. I pause to snap a photo.
The hotel boasts in-room DSL, but the woman at the front desk has no idea why our room's connection doesn't work, and has no interest in addressing the problem; when introduced to the fact that my laptop is a Mac Powerbook, it touches off something straight out of "The Exorcist": Her heads does a full 720-degree counterclockwise spin and dozens of gallons of greenish, caustic, gelatinous vomit hose down the map,dissolving away large swaths, merely unalterably staining other patches.
It is, I reflect, a very good thing that I collected my photo before she found out I had a Mac.
She looks at me as though I've spoken in tongues — other guests, she tells me, use "regular," plain-old computers. "'Cause, you know, they got to do business and run those programs."
I begin to tell her that there are Mac versions of all of those, but she thinks I have some sort of highly specialized monster in my G3. We let Barstow be Barstow, quietly making our way back down frosty hallways to our frosty room in the middle of the Mohave for an early night.
In the morning we decide to head over to California Hwy 1 for what we hope will be a scenic drive along the Pacific Coast.
Thank the gods there are two of us; we plot a course through LA's dizzying web of highways and interchanges, which require us to constantly shift to lanes to the left as the lanes we travel in suddenly and repeatedly become exit lanes. The wife shouts out directions as we spot the signs directing us along our chosen course, and we weather the storm.
The road winds along through the Santa Monica Mountains, along twists and turns so tight that they sometimes require speeds of no more than 25 mph. After a long trek along the mountains, suddenly, there is the Pacific.
The road ends, and Hwy 1 extends north-south before us.
We head north. Traffic this close to LA and what we come to term the thong beaches (such as Malibu) is nearly as cutthroat as that in LA itself, quashing our hopes of stopping at some roadside park to for lunch; we decide, eventually, to pull off the road, onto the shoulder, for that.
As we hurdle along Hwy 1, traffic doesn't seem to thin much, and very high, dense growth of trees and other plants alongside the highways leaves us sighting signs for potential candidate hotels just as we pass the exits that allow access to them.
We wind up on Hwy 101, which doesn't interfere with our plans, necessarily, so we follow it for a while; striving to compensate for the poor hotel-sign visibility, we pull off immediately upon spotting signs for Motel 6 and another hotel, and wind up, to our surprise, in the beachside community of Carpenteria. It rests right alongside the ocean, and is exactly the sort of place we were hoping to find.
July 26-28 | Carpenteria, CA - Along Hwy 1 & the Coast
Carpenteria is veg-friendly, its beaches are not thong beaches, frequented instead by families, retirees, and vacationers. After half a dozen failures, we squeeze into the last room available at the Motel 6.
We're a short walk to the beach, so once we set the cats loose in the room and post our Do Not Disturb sign, we head out to stretch our legs.
Whereas the Texas Gulf Coast waters are warm and temperate, the waters of the Pacific are chilly. We walk along the beach barefoot, letting the surf wash over our feet, and begin to relax. Scanning the menus of restaurants as we walk along Linden, Carpenteria's Main Street, we find a few places we'd like to try for our next few meals. A cold beer at a local beach-themed cantina that reminds me quite a lot of similarly beach-themed clubs along the Jersey shore.
Back at the motel, we have some trouble with the quality of reception of HBO, which is premiering John Leguizamo's "Undefeated" tonight. But we have lived in and traveled in India. After checking the connections, my wife deftly suggests that the power switch controlling the AC might be to blame. Sure, this is America, but you never know — and we encountered similar issues traveling across the subcontinent, so we turn off the AC.
Miraculously, and a bit frighteningly, the picture clears. We fear for our wiring.
We spend the next late morning and early afternoon at the beach, reading the Sunday LA Times. A Starbuck's here that set up shop across from a smaller local coffee house called The Shoppe has successfully squashed the local business; as we stop in, we find out that today is The Shoppe's final day of business.
We find a great tofu & veggies scramble breakfast at Esau's, a place whose story my undergrad mentor, Brooks Landon, would appreciate: Esau's was inspired, in part, by a visit by one of its founders to the 1939 San Francisco World's Fair; at the University of Iowa, Prof. Landon teaches a course titled Literature and Culture of Late 20th Century America, which focuses on the role that the World's Fairs and their almost science-fictional visions looking to humankind's future played in shaping America as the 20th century wore on.
We spend a second night in Carpenteria, surprised to find that we missed a few spots with our sunscreen, and now each have small patches of sunburn. Fairly mild, fortunately.
In the morning, with The Shoppe being the only local alternative providing Internet access, we grudgingly (and with a bit of guilty conscience) head over to the very Starbuck's that killed The Shoppe, log onto their T-Mobile wireless access service, and do our banking, e-mail, and this travelblog.
After a trip to the supermarket for supplies, we load up the cats and our gear and find our way out to Hwy 101 and plot a course back to Hwy 1.
To find exactly the beautiful oceanside views we'd hoped to discover; Hwy 1 runs right alongside the ocean, with rocky, seaweed-strewn shorelines and breathtaking views. We travel through the mountains and hair-raising turns as people hurtling along in the opposite direction casually cross the center line at us.
The NPR station we managed to pick up in Carpenteria fades to noise in the mountains, but it doesn't matter — the views are exquisite. We pull off frequently to take it all in, passing through Gorda, whose $250/night fees chase us off, and Big Sur; at one such roadside vista point, we watch as something huge breaks the surface out there, in the surf, then vanishes.
Then Molly barfs.
We spend the next little while cleaning out her travel caddy and her fur.
July 27-29 | Monterey, CA
We wind up settling on Monterey for our next stop, then spend what seems like hours trying to find a pet-friendly hotel. After a dozen hotels refuse our pets, we eventually find another, recently remodeled Motel 6 and, again, get one of their last rooms for the night.
A couple of biggish guys who take their personal fashion cues from pro wrestlers are staying here tonight, but they seem harmless enough. A couple of kids are splashing around in the pool.
You see, it's cool out here, along the coast. Not at all what I expected. Texas is hot, the Mohave was hot, and the California Coast is cool enough for us to don long sleeves for our walk to a sort of pop-Italian pizza & pasta place on the corner. The kids in the pool surprise me a bit. Then again, growing up in Iowa, I recall people donning shorts after the long, frigid, dark winters once the thermometers managed to climb to 50 degrees Fahrenheit.
Exhausted from our drive, we hit the sack early.
In the morning, we are greeted with the sight of a white pickup with professional lettering proclaiming it part of a Crime Scene Clean-Up Service. The service covers, according to the doorside advertisement, homicides, suicides, and a few other suggested nasties.
There are mysteriously blood-spattered mattresses tied down in the bed of the truck.
What the hell happened here? How do you wind up in that line of work?
As we load our car with stuff and cats, someone is walking around the bungied-down mattresses, applying duct tape to hide the blood spatters.
That stuff works for any job.
(My wife jokingly suggests we demand a suicide discount, but I don't touch that idea when I drop off our room keys.)
Over crappy coffee at a local pastry shop, and over latino love songs supersaturated with emotion, we plot our course to our new home city of Oakland. 101/1 to 880 to Oakland. Shooby-dooby-do-wop.
July 29 | Oakland, CA
Once in the Bay Area, we drive past our new apartment, but cannot tell much from the outside; drive around our North Oakland neighborhood a bit; and, with some difficulty, find our way to the Oakland Best Western, which is pet-friendly and, fortunately, has rooms available.
[Molly's doing much better today.]
We'll get into our new place a day early, so it looks like a two-night stay here in the Best Western. We'll have a walk around the neighborhood here tonight, after we meet with our new property manager to do our lease paperwork.
I left one teeny Easter egg in a Flash application I developed for statesman.com before I left. That app was code-named ShopZilla, and it is the most complicated software I have ever designed. I called it something innocuous, but the method of triggering it escapes me.
I wonder if they'll find it :)
July 31: Our journey ends | Odometer: 28,556
The four of us had some time to kill.
Property manager Steve managed to get us into the property about 10 hours early — a good thing, as we could only delay our check-out from the Best Western at Jack London Square for a limited time, and we wanted to avoid paying for another entire night's stay.
We delayed check-out from 11 a.m. 'til noon; Steve phoned to let us know that they were in the process of waxing the floors in the apartment, and that with the humid weather, he thought the floors should be dried by 2:30 or so. We killed time by finding our local Berkeley Whole Foods — a solar-powered, certified organic store! — and getting a sort of picnic lunch to eat there, in their parking lot.
We tooled around town, alternately lost and then finding our location on our map of the Bay Area. We found cool stretches of shops and restaurants along Piedmont Avenue and Broadway.
The floors were still drying when we arrived, so we unloaded the kitty caddies and killed more time at our new patio.
And then, unceremoniously, we realized that our journey was over. The floors seemed to have dried enough to allow us to set foot in our new digs. we freed the cats, oohed and ahhed at the newly waxed hardwoord floors, sweeping bay windows, and open spaces of our new abode. As we unloaded the car, I noted the mileage for the travelblog. 2,500 miles and two weeks later, an inflatable mattress filling itself on the livingroom floor, and happy, excited cats exploring the most open expanse they'd seen in some time, we were home.
For the next couple of years, anyway.
A diary of our relocation from Austin to Oakland in the summer of 2003, as I went to grad school and my wife finished her dissertation. We graduated a week apart, and now both teach at a small, private liberal-arts university.