RoBoTNiK

Originally published at Route 96. You can comment here or there.

In 1542, the Spanish explorer Francisco Coronado crossed the Rio Grande northwards in search of the fabled El Dorado, city of gold. He didn’t find it, but he and his men became the first Europeans to lay eyes on the lands that are now Colorado, Oklahoma and Kansas. By the time they got to Kansas, legend has it, a good portion of Coronado’s party had begun to go mad, completely incapable of coping with the endless, monotonous size and flatness of the country they were discovering.

I’m not sure if I buy it: after all, Spain has some pretty big flat parts too. But it is a good story, and I like to picture the Spanish conquistadors in their pointed silver helmets and puffy shorts, flopping around on the great prairie like fish in the bottom of the boat, their brains blown out by the sheer vastness of it all, while a couple of bemused Indians stnad off to the side, saying, “So who are these jokers?”

Anyway, Gove, Kansas is the sort of place that makes you think it might just be true.

[2007 Edit: I was too “cool” to mention it back in 1996, but the reason we actually went to Gove, Kansas was that it was the setting for a 1980s-era Call of Cthulhu adventure called “The Killer Out Of Space” (from the Cthulhu Now supplement) that scared the underoos off me and my buddies when we played it back in high school. Decades later, I would revise/update the Coronado legend for gaming purposes, as seen here.]

Originally published at Route 96. You can comment here or there.

BUSTED. Leaving Diamondville, Wyoming after refuelling at Shufflin’ Chappie’s World’s Slowest Service Station, Jenkin was clocked at a neck-snapping 48 mph by patrolman Curtis something or other. $76 cash and a brief lecture by a guy in leather pants later, our heroes were back on the road, but Derek, who had been at the wheel (and who is probably the most conservative driver of the three of us), nursed a bitter grudge against all Wyoming for the rest of the day. Dinner at a vile little Hardee’s squatting off the interstate–the only thing open in Cheyenne on a Sunday night–gave Pete and I good reason to join him.

Originally published at Route 96. You can comment here or there.

More hard driving brought us back into the USA, once again stiffing plain Jane Washington as we made a beeline for glamorous, seductive Idaho.

You Had To Be There Moment #77

(as seen on Entertainment Tonight)
“Pssst! Onytay! Ixnay on the abybay!”
–Tony Danza’s agent

Originally published at Route 96. You can comment here or there.

We’re back! And now we’re all Web 2.0 in the hizzle. Check out the first half of the journey here: (Actually, the full-screen version at Google Maps works a little better.)

And watch for the second half of the journey, blogged a mere eleven years after the fact.

Originally published at Route 96. You can comment here or there.

Six Road Movies to Inspire and Delight–and not one involving a Trucker and a Chimp!

Raising Arizona
Fargo, while fun, was redundant. Hilarious and hyper-kinetic, Raising Arizona is the only film the Coen brothers, or anyone else for that matter, ever need to make. If I start recounting my favorite parts, we’ll be here all night, so I’ll just say, “Boy, you got a panty on your head,” and leave it at that. Oh, and Nicholas Cage has never been better, and that’s saying a lot. [Well, it was in 1996! Remember, all this was written 10 years ago.]

( Read the rest of this entry » )

Originally published at Route 96. You can comment here or there.

On the morning of my actual birthday, Pete and Derek bought me admission to the granddaddy of all mystery spots, the Oregon Vortex. First discovered by the white man in 1864, the “natural, historical, educational, scientific, authentic” Oregon Vortex is, we were told, the oldest and “most respected” gravitational vortex in America. The science behind this authentic natural wonder is a little too educational and historical to get into here, but suffice to say the vortex is a “famous” circular area with “unique” phenomena: balls roll up hill, squirrels fear to tread, and the harsh mistress of gravity takes a nap on the job.

Originally published at Route 96. You can comment here or there.

The last and perhaps best named attraction in this cavalcade of rather hurting tourist traps were the Trees of Mystery. I’m sorry to report that the Trees of Mystery were just closing by the time we got there, so just what was so special about them remains… a mystery. In the Trees of Mystery parking lot, however, was a giant statue of Paul Bunyan and his blue ox, Babe. We sauntered over for some photos, amused by the family of Euro-children talking to the statues (and also by the fact that Babe the giant ox was anatomically correct), when suddenly, the giant lumber jack answered the children in a big booming voice.

There must have been a guy inside Paul Bunyan somewhere peeking out, whose job was to banter with the visitors to the Trees of Mystery. “HELLOOO DOWN THERE!” he’d say. “YOU IN THE MOTOR HOME! HAVE YOU VISITED MY GIFT SHOP? WHY NOT MAKE YOURSELF A SOUVENIR PENNY OR TRY SOME TREES OF MYSTERY FUDGE?” Paul wasn’t having much luck chatting with the German kids, however. They kept shouting up questions like “Are you made ov metal or ov vood?” And he’d mishear them, booming back, “AM I BETTER OR AM I GOOD?” Good times.

You-Had-To-Be-There Moment #66

“Well, it looks like there’s space for a handicapped motorcyclist.”

Originally published at Route 96. You can comment here or there.

After the Drive-Thru Tree, the roadside attractions grew increasingly stupid. Not that that bothered us, of course.

“The Legend of Bigfoot” had a promising name, but just turned out to be a store that sold such lawn decorating essentials as plaster gnomes and all-weather Elvis busts. Their true specialties were big wooden sculptures of bears. Talk about false advertising: we learned nothing about the legend of Bigfoot. They had a couple of wooden Bigfoots, but their feet were barely bigger than mine.

Originally published at Route 96. You can comment here or there.

San Franciskey? How did you came? Did you drove or did you flew?

In San Francisco we stayed with Isa, one of my corky Harvard chums, and her equally cool friend Anisa, also visiting from the East. They didn’t ask us, “did you drove or did you flew?” [2006 Edit: An old Eugene Levy catchphrase from SCTV, long before he was America’s favorite dorky honky. Was this a reference to anything, does anyone know? I’ve been wondering about that for about twenty years.] but they were Grade A queens o’ hospitality nonetheless, and we had a great time. Isa was doing research this summer for a big White House egghead task force designed to get more Americans bowling again for some reason. Her boyfriend Noah was down in Argentina bringing Nazis to justice. (To quote Ray Stevens, and why the hell not: “That kind of superficiality can wear pretty thin.”)

I’d been told that Frisco (Isa: “We don’t call it that.”) is one of those cities that can be a lot of fun or very depressing, depending on which side of the tracks you’re on and ho much money you have in your pocket. We didn’t have much money, but Isa and Anisa (I know, it’s too cute isn’t it? Just wait until we meet up with Lisa and order a pizza.) must have steered us well clear of those prodigal tracks, because we thought San Francisco was boss to the Nth degree. We ended up spending a couple of days there, eschewing our usual hit-and-run guerrilla tourism to spend at least a little time in a few of SF’s funkier neighborhoods.

Originally published at Route 96. You can comment here or there.

When you’re in the dark and you want to see,
You need uh… electricity, eee-lectricity!

Have I mentioned yet that it was a trifle warm the day we crossed the desert? It seems that one too many fans and air conditioners and soothing ocean sound generators were plugged in that day–a little fuse blew out somewhere and cut off power to six entire states! [2006 Edit: The West Coast blackout of August 11, 1996 actually affected four million customers in nine western states, plus Mexico–the largest power outage in North America until the Northeast birthday blackout (my birthday, that is) of 2003. Apparently it was triggered by a transmission line sagging into a tree branch and shorting out. I’d like to blame it on utility deregulation and corporate malfeasance (hello, Enron), but apparently deregulation took effect in California after the summer of 1996.]

We were driving across the desert between Joshua Tree and Yucca Flats looking for Desert Christ, the Mojave’s mellow SoCal answer to Christ of the Ozarks. “I wanna see concrete biblical people!” Pete lamented, but Desert Jesus was nowhere to be found… and pretty soon we needed to get gas. Heh heh heh. Gas pumps are powered by electricity. Which meant that, unless Brown Jenkin had enough juice to get us back to Texas or up to Seattle, we weren’t going nowhere for a while.

Jenkin did have just enough juice to get us across the Mojave–we puttered along on fumes as far as Palm Springs, and there it went kaput, leaving us marooned until Enus and cletus at Central Services could find a new 10,000,000 amp fuse to turn the western half of the continent back on again. If you don’t dig Lawrence Welk and Seniors Bingo, an afternoon in Palm Springs could probably be a dicey prospect any day, but with the power out, it was like being in a shopping mall with every store front locked: there was less than nothing to do.

Well, there was one place open, a little restaurant called the Hamburger Hamlet, where they wheeled a tub of beer onto the patio and started selling it for exorbitant sums. I’m not sure whether the prices included a special blackout markup or were just everyday gouging. Palm Springs has the look of a city where even the Hamburger Hamlet might charge $2.50 for a lemonade. The people of Palm Springs were quite impressed by the restauranteur’s Yankee ingenuity. Everyone who walked by said something like, “Oh, look at that! They put ice on the beer! To keep it cold! How clever!” Hardy frontiersmen all.

Derek and I sat on the Hammy Hamlet patio and tried to drink our $5 beers very slowly, since no power meant no bank machines and no credit cards and nowhere else for us to go. Pete was beat by the heat and wandered off to find somewhere he could sleep, vagrant style. But when the power finally did come on, late that night, Pete was nowhere to be found. Derek and I wandered around for ages, looking for him in dumpsters and back alleys, but never found him. Eventually we had to drive on without him, and he’s never been seen again to this day.*

*No, no, that’s not right. We found Pete. It was his mix tape of Arrested Development and King Crimson and Schoolhouse Rock that we never found.