West of the Moon
>
Moving, Day Two: Barstow to Holbrook
Tuesday morning started with breakfast in the Holiday Inn Express in Barstow, eating instant oatmeal and watching television coverage of the first same-sex marriages in California. Then we had to figure out what to do with the plants.
The Plants
Oh, the plants. I haven’t really talked about the plants and the move. I had a lot of houseplants in California, and they couldn’t all make the trip. The logistics were too much–it’s not like I could put them in the shipping pods, and if we tried to take them all in the car, we wouldn’t have been able to take anything else. Clearly I was going to have to limit myself to one or two, and small ones at that. (Finding good homes for the ones left behind was more difficult than I would have expected–for a month or two before the move, I offered free houseplants to just about everyone I talked to, and just about everyone looked at me with a kind of muted horror and said “oh, no, they’ll just die if I take them.” In the end, Heather took most of them, and even though I think some of them have already met untimely deaths on her balcony, it’s better than my having left them at the curb.)
All the plants I took were begonias, because they were my first houseplants, and I liked the sense of continuity. I took two small plants with healthy bushy leaves, and a set of plant clippings that I wrapped in wet paper towels and aluminum foil. I put them in a little shoebox and wedged it in between some suitcases in the backseat when we left Berkeley, and then promptly forgot about them until we arrived in Barstow. At that point, I learned what happens when you take happy leafy green plants and stick them in direct sunlight in a hot car for six or seven hours–the leaves turn brown and fall off, leaving you with sad sticks in pots.
Packing the car in Barstown the next morning, I put my sad potted sticks back in the backseat, made sure they had damp soil, and covered them with a pillowcase to shield them from further direct sunlight. Closing the barn door a bit late, as it were, but I’ve seen sad potted sticks sprout back into healthy plants before. It never hurts to try.
Tuesday’s drive was mostly through desert country, which is some of my favorite driving. We chose this route for the trip partly because it would take us through so much of Arizona and New Mexico.
Seligman
We stopped for lunch in Seligman, Arizona (”birthplace of historic Route 66″), skipping (mainly for reasons of time, not caution) the star local attraction Road Kill Cafe in favor of an A&W. The weather was crazy–it had been eighty-five degrees out when we left the hotel at eight in the morning, and most of the day we were seeing temperatures over ninety-five, but it was also really really windy. Walking from the car to the restaurant, I nearly got knocked over by the hot dry wind that didn’t relieve the heat at all. While we were eating, another guy in the dining area told us about the problems he was having with the wind. He’d been hired to repaint a motel down the road, and he uses those spray-painters, but the wind was so strong that half of the paint he’s using is just blowing away. As he left the restaurant, he announced to the room that they should avoid driving near that particular motel in the next day or so, unless they wanted their cars to be accidentally spray-painted.
Tuesday’s Radio Epiphany
Wherever you are in the country, as long as you’re getting some radio reception, you will almost certainly be able to find some Led Zeppelin. You will almost more certainly be able to find some Rush Limbaugh.
Tuesday’s Winery
I didn’t write much about Monday’s winery for two reasons: first, Monday was a big sleep-deprived blur, and second, there just wasn’t that much to say about it. The wineries are more interesting from here on out.
Somewhere around Flagstaff, after crossing the Arizona Divide (elevation 7335 feet), we left I-40 and headed south. About an hour later, we arrived at the Page Springs Cellars in Cornville, Arizona. The place was surprisingly crowded, given that it was mid-afternoon on a Tuesday, but judging from the conversations around us it seemed like Page Springs does a pretty steady business with people who are on vacation in Sedona. In any event, it was a lovely place, and the wines were good. A lot of them are sourced from Arizona–some of their grapes come from California, but they’re shifting more and more of their production to Arizona grapes. (A lot of the wineries we visited source from local vineyards, which was nice.) The two men working in the tasting room (one a long-time local with a grey ponytail and a lot of silver-and-turquoise jewelry, one a younger guy who’d just left a computer job in order to pursue a career as a sommelier) were friendly and knew a lot about the wine, and all around it was a great stop. If it hadn’t been eight billion degrees out, we might have stayed a little longer, sat out on their porch for a while.
Holbrook, Arizona
Nine hours and 560 miles after leaving Barstow, we arrived in Holbrook, Arizona. You can’t drive on I-40 and avoid Route 66, so we gave in to the kitsch and went out for dinner at the Butterfield Stage Company Steakhouse, which hosts one of the two known Longest Maps of Route 66. The restaurant is decorated entirely in dark wood, wagon wheels, and Old West memorabilia. The photograph over our table told the story of a frontier judge who operated out of his saloon, pausing trials in order to sell liquor to all of the participants.
And then back to the hotel, and to bed, and to start all over again the next day.
Posted Thursday, August 21st, 2008 at 1:02 pm. Filed under: personal.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
You know, I was about to say that there is a whole long stretch of 101 in central California that consistently fails to provide me with Led Zeppelin — but then I realized that I’ve never tried the AM band through there. I’m sure that’s where I’m going wrong.
You do realize that you have to update your about me section, right? :)
Ugh. Arizona in the summer. I can not think of a worse place to drive through. :)