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 Travel & Outdoors | March 2008 
Road Trippin'
 Anton Savage - independent.ie
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| | It's an opportunity to re-enact all those cool road movies - just don't drive across the USA in a car with vinyl seats. (Christa Aenee) | | |
Driving across the US in shiny convertibles packed with glamorous blondes. It's the wind in your hair and Lynard Skynard on the stereo. It's freedom and pleasure and adventure. Or it's a week in a cramped automotive relic with men who smell slightly of feet.
That was my experience. Four of us decided it'd be exciting to drive from Florida to San Francisco. We began by buying a car because it was cheaper than renting one. That was our first mistake. Rental cars are new. Shiny. Well maintained. The car we bought was on its second engine (it should have been on its third) and cost less than most people pay for their phones.
Nonetheless, we headed north, filled with optimism. Then we discovered our second mistake. If you intend to travel long distances across Florida, Louisiana, and Arizona, buy a car with air conditioning. If you can't get air conditioning, you make sure the car doesn't have vinyl seats.
Our car had large brown vinyl bench seats. In the humidity of the Southern states, the interaction of hot plastic and overheated buttock creates a moistness that is at first uncomfortable, then dangerous. It's like travelling in a huge plastic nappy. Except that if you turn too sharply, everyone in the car slides across the seats like a knob of butter in a pan, before piling up against the door.
This seems to be a bad situation until you reach the desert states. In them, the air is too dry for a moist buttock/seat interaction, and the evaporation causes your thighs to glue themselves to the vinyl. It gives a certain reassuring security while cornering, but causes discomfort at petrol stations when you have to take turns peeling each other out of the car.
On the first day of our trip, our sense of adventure motivated us to drive for 16 straight hours until we got to Murray County, Georgia. We were there for the only active part of our trip -- white-water rafting. At 1am we spotted a Comfort Inn off the Interstate.
I crossed all four lanes to get to the off-ramp, instantly sliding a sweaty pile of passengers onto the right side of the car. They were still un-picking themselves when we saw blue flashing lights.
Being pulled over in the US is bad. Being pulled over at night in Georgia is worse. Being pulled over by a man willing to use a gun but reluctant to use consonants is worse still.
"Driier. Thoww da kays own da ruf."
This created a flurry of attempted translation.
"He wants to see your licence." "He doesn't want you to pull over here." "He wants you to get out." "Are we going to get shot?"
I started to get out to talk to the cop. Huge mistake.
I got my head out the door and saw three squad cars in a semi- circle behind me. Each had a spotlight on the roof pointing at us. Visible in front of each spotlight was a pair of forearms, pointing a handgun at me. Like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, except the aliens were heavily armed and clearly pissed-off.
"Driieer ge bag in da ca!! Thow da kays own da ruf! Han on da steein whee!!!"
I did the brave thing; I jumped back in the car, went pale and pretended it wasn't happening.
"He definitely wants to see your licence." "I'm telling you, you can't park here." "We're going to get shot."
They say that in times of extreme stress, people develop abilities they didn't know they had. Super strength, unbelievable stamina, stunning reflexes. The body finds untapped resources to escape danger. My body found a prev- iously unknown capacity to infer consonants into other people's speech. "DriiVer, thRoww da kays own da ruf".
Once I grasped that throwing my keys onto the roof would placate the man with the 9mm, I attacked the task with such brio that I threw the keys over the roof into the ditch beside us.
"Oh brilliant, you're a genius, aren't you? Now he thinks we're on crack." "Nice one, moron." "We're definitely getting shot."
My new translation ability allowed me to calm the large angry man enough that he decided to check things like drivers' licences and passports before commencing the summary execution. Event- ually, through sign-language and inference, we deduced that a car like ours had been in a felony hit-and-run an hour before, and he figured he might have to shoot us, but he'd given up on that plan. He seemed disappointed.
We drove to the motel in silence and on arrival asked for directions to the bar. Turns out Murray County, Georgia, is a dry county. No booze. Not a drop. Kind of explains how tense the cop was.
The next morning found us in an inflatable raft on the Chattooga river (we didn't just wake up there, but I'll spare you the boring logistics). Each raft held four passengers, a picnic basket and a hippy provided by the rafting company.
The hippy sat at the back and claimed to be steering. We came to the view that he was there as a form of subtle bullying; every time we went over a rapid, the passengers and picnic basket ended up in the river, being looked at by a sanguine (if condescending) hippy, still firmly seated on the back of the raft.
His other job was to point out the local sights. The Chattooga valley is one of the most breath-taking places in the world. Think the Glen of the Downs, but sunny and with a beautiful river instead of the N11. It has only two sights, though. One is a bridge. Not the biggest, or tallest, or prettiest bridge. Just a bridge.
The hippy began announcing the bridge 20 minutes before we got to it, and entered a near-coital state of bliss when he was able to actually point at it. His bliss at the bridge, however, was nothing compared to his encomiastic joy at the arrival of the other local sight.
At his instruction, all the rafts stopped at a bend in the river. All passengers and picnic baskets were deposited (deliberately this time) and the hippy told us we would have lunch here, as, wait for it, this was where they filmed that scene from Deliverance.
There are locations from movies you dream of visiting: the viewing platform on the Empire State where Tom Hanks hooks up with Meg Ryan; the beach in From Here to Eternity. But having lunch in a spot internationally associated with the most brutal rape scene ever put on film was not one of my all-time goals.
We ate pastrami sandwiches in silence while men with names like Hank told women with names like Doris: "Look honey, there's the tree they strapped Jon Voight to. And there's where the guy told Ned Beatty to squeal like a pig."
Despite Hank and Doris, rafting the Chattooga should be on everyone's to-do. It is one of the most alternately beautiful, scary, peaceful and exciting things you can do.
As is driving across the US. Our trip took us from Georgia, to pre-Katrina New Orleans where we ate jambalaya and listened to ragtime jazz. (We also got the keys to the wrong hotel room, causing us to walk in on what we thought was a training session for the US Olympic wrestling team, before we recognised that it was a young couple expressing mutual affection with an astonishing degree of abandon and commitment. The experience unsettled the jambalaya.)
The rest of the trip was made up of the unexpected and the unending. The unexpected being cities like San Antonio. Slap bang in the middle of the town is The Alamo. Not a museum dedicated to The Alamo. Not the location where it once stood. The Alamo itself. They even have Davy Crockett's hat in a glass case (it looks like a dead beleaguered beaver).
Around the Alamo district flows a river called XXX. It's 10 feet below street level and banked with little shops and cafes. It's a total surprise. You enter San Antonio expecting fast food chains and chewing tobacco and you find a little Paris hidden in the vastness of Texas.
And Texas is vast. You drive for nearly 24 hours to cross the state. Hundreds of miles of the most featureless, unending prairie known to man. Until you attempt to cross it you don't fathom that, not only is it as big as France, it's almost entirely empty. And dull.
The monotony is broken solely by a huge lone star painted on a hill overlooking the Rio Grande. Its purpose must be to entice Mexican's to wade the river so that unfriendly men in uniforms and sunglasses can round 'em up and send 'em back.
It's the Texas version of painting the Forth Bridge. Every day the same thing, in an unending waltz: find a tired wet Mexican yearning to breathe free, intimdate him, send him home. Lather, rinse, repeat.
If the Mexicans knew how boring Texas was, they'd do what we did and keep going until they found a sign saying: "Welcome to New Mexico." Because that's where it gets interesting again. Searing deserts dotted with skeletons that look as if the authorities placed them there to make the whole thing feel more authentic.
Then, as New Mexico blends into Arizona, the climb into the foothills of the Rockies begins. We had driven all night to get out of the heat, so we began our climb into the mountains as dawn broke over the desert behind us. Few sights can make four exhausted guys who've been glued to a hot vinyl bench for 10 hours forget their miseries. Dawn in the desert is one of them.
And then civilisation returns in the form of Los Angeles. Actually, population returns in the form of Los Angeles. Civilisation has to wait until you get to San Francisco. LA is what would happen if Hector was allowed to plan cities. It's like someone emptied the lion enclosure in Dublin Zoo into Brown Thomas; you're surrounded by loud women with imported hair and implanted breasts and you have the feeling that at any moment you'll get dismembered and killed -- rampant consumerism juxtaposed with horrifying poverty and violence. LA is best avoided.
San Francisco not only brought civilisation, it brought an end to our journey. They tell you that such a trip is a bonding experience. Other than the unhealthy attachment I developed with the vinyl, I would have to disagree. Lock four guys in a hot uncomfortable box for a week and if they all come out alive, see how soon it is before they want to hang out together once more.
I'm looking forward to seeing them all again. In around 2014. |
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