That’s what driving 12 hours a day make you feel, like you’re being driven crazy. You gain a whole new respect for truck-drivers, who are usually only appreciated by me for the shade their huge trucks provide when the sun is beating right into my left eye. Anyhow, we went and we came, and I’ll entertain you with pictures in a few days time. In the meantime, I’d like to know how it’s possible to be so fatigued from all that driving that I’m no longer an insomniac. I go to bed these days promptly at 11pm, and certainly no later than 11:30, and sleep a full eight or nine hours and still feel drained by about 5pm, at which time I can go for a 3 hour nap. Except that sleeping for three hours is hardly a nap, is it?
Well, as many of you are probably well aware, much happens when you’re in travel, as you’re whizzing by scenery that could make your heart stop. And then the lines on the road disappear just as darkness falls, and your heart speeds up like a drum at a rock concert. You come across crazy drivers, and compassionate ones. Your car, or was it the pavement, makes funny sounds while you’re surrounded by wheat fields without a Toyota dealer in sight, and God Alone Knows how long it would take for AAA to get to you. You drive through cities that confuse the hell out of your GPS, cities that were surely designed by mad geniuses men. You navigate through freeway loop-de-loops that certainly were dreamed up by one of the 50 roller-coaster engineers in the nation (well, that’s what it felt like, anyway!) You see clouds in the distant sky that look like illustrations out of a children’s book, fantasy clouds I call them. And you see clouds that are nothing short of nightmare clouds. Of course, the nightmare clouds are the most, what’s the word?, eventful. You drive through country that’s most bleak and drips of desolation, and you wonder, am I in the USA? And yet, that country, with all it’s desolation, feels like the perfect place to live and forget about the world, perhaps because the world has forgotten about those places. And then you drive back into California, with it’s crazy speeding and traffic and over-crowding and the concrete canyons and say, “Thank Allah I live here!”
And that, in a nutshell, is the story of our trip. Not enough, you say? Well, I’ll tell you about the more interesting bits of the above summary in a little bit.