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.
[I can't believe I haven't written these up yet! And I've hit that point where I feel like I can't write anything -else- until I get these done, so let's go.]
The first day of the trip was a very long day. As I’ve mentioned, we packed using self-pack shipping containers, and they were scheduled to be picked up on Monday morning. We’d tried to get everything essential into the pods on Sunday night, but there was still a lot to do–we had to somehow dispose of everything that wasn’t coming with us, we had to pack the car, we had to clean the apartment, so on and so forth. We didn’t get to bed until after midnight, and we woke up around five in the morning to get back to work.
Things got easier after seven a.m., when the coffeeshop down the street finally opened, but to be honest, I don’t remember much of the day. We moved a lot of things out of the apartment. We gave away a lot of furniture, and donated a lot of canned and boxed food to the local food bank, and moved even more things out of the apartment. Eventually, the car was packed, and the pods were picked up, and we ran out of things to move out of the apartment, so we started cleaning, and then eventually that was finished too.
Sometime that weekend, I had explained to a friend that I was having trouble really conceptualizing anything that happened after the move. There was packing, and more packing, and eventually we would leave the apartment, but that was as far ahead as I could see. I normally have a mental map of at least the next few weeks of my life, but as we moved towards the move, everything after the day of departure was essentially marked “Here Be Dragons”.
We set off into that unexplored territory just after 1pm, which was a good two hours later than I’d hoped, but more than an hour earlier than our drop-dead deadline. As it were. Matt drove the first shift, which left me free to wave madly out the window and shout farewells at local landmarks. “Goodbye, Fellini Coffeebar! Goodbye, Ikea! Goodbye, massive Ballardian overpass tangle!” (I didn’t actually shout that one out the window, but I thought it.)
Monday’s Winery
So. When you’re planning a huge cross-country drive like this, it’s important to find ways to keep it interesting. In the past, I’ve done this by just hitting as many weird landmarks as I could find, but that’s not a foolproof solution. Matt and I kicked around a few ideas for this trip (landmarks from Star Trek history, Civil War battlegrounds) but finally settled on checking out local wineries. He did some very impressive research work and found a winery for us to visit on each day of the trip. It was a great way to see a little more of the country and talk to people who actually lived in the places we were passing through. We also bought a bottle of wine at each winery, and we’ll have those at our (eventual) housewarming party.
The first of the wineries was Tamas Estates, in California’s scenic Livermore Valley. I admit, I was a little snobbish when I first heard the phrase “Livermore Valley Wine Country”, but it actually looks kind of lovely out there, and the wine was good. (We picked up a bottle of their Pinot Grigio; I think I might have like the Barbera better, but the Pinot Grigio seemed pretty representative of their offerings.)
The Drive
This was a long, long day. When we first plotted the route, I think I made some kind of joke about how it was a great idea to spend so much time on I-5, since that would make us happy to get the hell out of California. And, in fact, I-5 lived up to its reputation as the absolute most boring stretch of road in the whole world.
We had dinner at a Denny’s in Lost Hills and kept on going, finally arriving in Barstow around 9pm. I’m not sure that I’ve ever been that tired in my whole life. We made a good-faith effort to see the sights in downtown Barstow, but near our hotel “the sights” were limited to a few closed restaurants and a few sketchy liquor stores, so we called it a night pretty early. Not out of California yet, but a long way from our old home, and even further from our unknown new home.
1. Laundry day. (18 July 2008, 9 am.)
2. Convention hotel. (18 July 2008, 2 pm.)
3. View from the audience. (18 July 2008, 5 pm.)
4. Remains of the dinner. (18 July 2008, 7 pm.)
5. Hallway. (18 July 2008, 10 pm.)
(My Week in the Life photo postings got derailed by Readercon–first I couldn’t get internet at the hotel, to post the pictures from Friday, and then I got distracted by the convention and forgot to keep taking pictures, and then I couldn’t figure out where I’d packed the transfer cable for the camera. I have both internet and cable now, but am ending the week-in-pictures a day early and posting the last day almost a week late, alas. This was a great experiment, and one I’ll probably repeat at some point in the future, but it’s actually kind of exhausting, trying to remember to take six to eight pictures every single day.)
1. Crane. (17 July 2008, 11 am.)
2. Backyard. (17 July 2008, 11 am.)
3. Mid-afternoon. (17 July 2008, 3 pm)
4. Brooklyn. (17 July 2008, 10 pm)
5. Fire escape. (17 July 2008, 11 pm)
1. Subway art, 8th Avenue. (16 July 2008, 8 am.)
2. One-sixty-somethingth. (16 July 2008, 8:30 am.)
3. Van Cortland Park. (16 July 2008, 9 am.)
4. Office window. (16 July 2008, 10 am.)
5. Between Tillinghast and Pforzheimer. (16 July 2008, 4 pm.)
6. Art on the hillside.
7. Stairs down, KGB. (16 July 2008, 9 pm.)
1. Staircase. (15 July 2008, 9 am.)
2. Construction. (15 July 2008, 9:30 am.)
3. Bicycle forest. (15 July 2008, 10 am.)
4. What passes for a desk these days. (15 July 2008, noon.)
5. Ready to go running. (15 July 2008, 1 pm.)
6. Boxes, boxes, and then more boxes. (15 July 2008, 6 pm.)
7. Dinner’s end. (15 July 2008, 8 pm.)
(A Week in the Life. Rules: take between 6 and 8 pictures per day, every day for a week. Post the pictures the day you take them, with no explanation other than a time and a date.)
1. Hand-rolled, kettle-boiled, oven-baked. (14 July 2008, 8 am.)
2. Pretend this is a picture of the antique Hugos. (14 July 2008, noonish.)
3. Union Square Station. (14 July 2008, 3 pm.)
4. I haven’t -quite- forgotten how to cook. (14 July 2008, 5 pm.)
5. Approaching sunset. (14 July 2008, 8 pm.)
6. It’s going to take us a while to unpack. (14 July 2008, 10 pm.)
(A Week in the Life, as borrowed from Miss Julia. Rules: take between 6 and 8 pictures per day, every day for a week. Post the pictures the day you take them, with no explanation other than a time and a date.)
1. The view from the kitchen window. (Saturday, 12 July 2008, 7 am.)
2. Greenmarket lettuce. (12 July 2008, 10 am.)
3. Bedford Avenue hosts a marching band. (12 July 2008, 2 pm.)
4. My mother’s backyard. (12 July 2008, 6 pm.)
5. Sunday morning. (13 July 2008, 9 am.)
6. Even puppies like muffins. (13 July 2008, 10 am.)
7. The roof was full of grapes. (13 July 2008, 2 pm.)
(A Week in the Life, as borrowed from Miss Julia. Rules: take between 6 and 8 pictures per day, every day for a week. Post the pictures the day you take them, with no explanation other than a time and a date. Disclaimer: I didn’t take enough pictures either Saturday or Sunday, and didn’t have a chance to post them, so I’m cheating and combining the whole weekend into one day.)
I’ve been so remiss, I know. The internet comes to our house on Friday, after which point I’ll be around more (and posting more, including the backlogged half-written trip-log posts). I’m on borrowed neighborhood internet at the moment, which might disappear at any moment, so I’ll be quick.
We have an apartment! Which we are moved into, more or less. Everything is in boxes and we have nowhere to sit, but it’s a start. We’re in Brooklyn, about a block from the Bedford L station, in a slightly quirky but generally wonderful apartment. Our new home has many charms–a really stellar location, great character (and I mean that in the “oh, look, built-in cabinets” sense, not in the real-estate-euphemism sense), a good amount of space, etc. It’s also a fourth-floor walkup, which has the obvious drawbacks (three flights of stairs! each way!) but also some nice consequences. I just watched a rainstorm pass across the Manhattan skyline, for instance. I’ll be sending the new contact information later in the week, after we get the telephone and internet and whatnot hooked up.
More later. For now, though, I just wanted to say hi (hi!) and I’m fine and, you know. I miss everyone, but I’ll be coming back into the world of the living (as opposed to the world of the in-transit) soon.
You know what happens when you move cross-country in the middle of the Strange Horizons fund drive? You forget -entirely- to mention it on your blog. Horrors!
Strange Horizons has been publishing fabulous science fiction (and related nonfiction) every week since 2000. I think we do pretty good work, and we’ve helped introduce some of the best new writers in the field. We’re also doing it all with our own quirky funding model–we pay professional rates to our authors, but we present all of our content free to the public. No subscriptions, no login, no strings attached. Being free from corporate overlords means that we can take some chances and be a little offbeat when we want to be, but it also means we’re heavily dependent on reader donations.
This time around, we’re trying to raise $6000 in our annual fund drive, which currently represents about one-third of our annual budget. At the time I’m writing this, the fund drive thermometer reads $5245. We’ve had about two hundred dollars in donations come in since the thermometer was updated this afternoon, but that means that we still need to raise about $500. We’re so close! So close.
We’re extending the fund drive for another couple of days, in the hopes of making our goal. If you donate, you’ll be eligible for lovely gifts and prizes, all of which are explained on our fund drive pages. If you blog about the fund drive, you also might win a fabulous additional prize. Most importantly, though, donating to Strange Horizons helps keep us publishing. If you like what we do–whether it’s our critically-acclaimed fiction, our absolutely stellar reviews department, our range of columnists, our soon-to-resume-broadcasting podcast, our award-winning poetry, or any of the other exciting SF content that our staff of hard-working volunteers provides you with every week–consider kicking a few bucks our way. Help us wrap this thing up, yeah?
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