Three Times Across America In Two Months

The past several months have been engaged in work related stresses that derived from short to long range planning, occupying a large amount of my collective consciousness. But the incredibly long list of things to do has items that are being checked off and that is comforting in of itself, even if there are still some rather large issues still to deal with.

After Hilari died, dealing with the logistics of moving a lab, members of that lab, and our household became almost overwhelming. So filling every waking moment by keeping busy was a natural reaction.  Part of this business was making three trips across the United States moving things from the West Coast Bay Area and Salt Lake City to Pittsburgh, all via automobile. Two of the three trips were solo, one of the three trips was made with Alice Jones, our tortoiseshell cat.  So, effectively another solo trip, though Alice is one of the most vocal and opinionated cats I’ve ever known, and she had lots to say and see in the three days of our journey across the country together.

The thing about a solo roadtrip is that it forces you to focus upon the immediate, while at the same time the pacing of driving down a road allows for headspace to process feelings that can be difficult to parse in the everyday world consumed with the details and responsibilities of daily living and work.  Your only real duties are to drive safely and keep the car on the road headed ultimately to your intended destination, leaving lots of time to explore the feelings and thoughts in your own head.  You can’t work during that time, you can’t read other things. You can listen to books, or music, or the radio, but I choose to be quiet… To work through things in my head related to change, and loss, and grief.

Just like life, a roadtrip is a 3 act play. You begin the trip, you engage in the journey, and then you arrive at your destination.

A solo roadtrip is also a process that you participate fully within. But like life, that time in between birth and death is the collection of moments where you take in information, process it, and react. And for a journey through grief, this is where the nuance of emotion can trickle in at a measured pace, and even allow conversations with those who have left us without the awkwardness of having those conversations while other people are sharing our space/time.

 

The trips were largely successful in two of the three acts, as I rapidly and efficiently moved stuff and our cat across the country.  Where the trips failed was the middle act as we rushed through the cross country journey as I was very much on a schedule the first two trips, and the third trip was fighting a failing 46 year old car with no air conditioning through a record heat wave in the middle of America.  Ironically, that led to a certain feeling of adventure, but because the trips were rushed to get from one goal to another, I did not fully participate in the process, and savor traveling across the country, stopping often to make photographs or learn about the various points of interest.

 

The process of moving a home across the country is always one of chaos, no matter how well planned or timed because it is simply not the normal order of things. We are still in the process of moving parts of the lab including major equipment, so that job is not complete yet.  However, driving across the country three times in two months I’ve been able to get the house in a livable state for Alice and I.  The only things that remain to be done now are getting some appropriate guest furniture and selling the house in Salt Lake City.

I’ve already written about the first trip across the country, delivering servers from Salt Lake City, to Pittsburgh over the course of two days.  So there is not much more to say about that.

 

The second trip across the country was driving our cat Alice Jones across the country in an Airstream trailer that I will be putting up for sale here starting next week. Get in touch if you are interested.

 

Not having Hilari to help made everything more challenging, but I’ve been fortunate to have lots of friends and family that have made things so much more tolerable. Even little things like this gift, made just before leaving Salt Lake City just about brought me to tears.  Thank you Hollie.

 

We stayed in KOA campgrounds in the middle of America which was an education in of itself, and made the journey in 3 days as we were trying to meet the moving truck in time for a Saturday delivery to the new house. It turns out we could have taken a bit more time as we beat the moving truck by 3 days, so that was a bit of a disappointment. But the journey with Alice was fun.

 

 

The thing that did surprise me driving across the country was seeing how complete the transition to renewable energy has been with solar, geothermal, and wind power just about everywhere across the country through California, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania.  This is the future. The country has clearly made a transition, and it is more economically viable than non-renewables, and it’s better for the environment.  On top of that, those jobs pay better.  I simply don’t understand why the current administration is trying to sabotage all of this.

 

This was the last photo of a car in my parking spot in the Moran Eye Center, the night before the third trip across the country, completing the move of a janky 46 year old Porsche 911 with no air conditioning from California to Pittsburgh during a heat wave, with an extended stop in Salt Lake City where the Porsche dealership charged me huge dollars and managed to make things worse than they were when I brought the car in. Dangerously worse in a couple of cases.

They also charged me for items that they claimed they replaced. Dear reader, they did not. And the intermittent failure to start was not solved by their replacement of a crank position sensor to the tune of $300. I ended up having to push start the car, popping the clutch to get going again a couple of times.

 

 

The car has a tall cam and a stiff clutch with a shifter that was getting increasingly loose made Chicago traffic interesting as given the car would not start, I most definitely did not want to stall it out on a Chicago freeway. Getting it in or out of gears was getting harder, so stalling it out would have sucked and complicated push starting it and dropping the clutch to get going.

But also interesting was the stunting that was happening on the freeway, *at speed*.  This was right next to me at 70MPH.

Regardless, the trip from Salt Lake City to Pittsburgh was made in two days, and because of the car not starting, I was delayed by some troubleshooting the first time it happened. This caused me to drive after dark when I discovered the next thing the dealership made worse: Dangerously misaligning the headlights and failing to retain the headlights in the fender buckets. That really was unforgivable and as it started getting dark, I managed to find a BMW with really good headlights to follow about 100 miles outside of Pittsburgh.  I think they started getting a little weirded out by this little red Porsche tucked in behind them as they made a couple of quick blasts to extralegal speeds that I simply matched as there were very few other cars on the road and I did not want to lose their good headlights. They eventually got off on another exit while I was dealing with a rapidly declining shifter that almost stranded me as it was coming undone threatening to strand me in or out of a gear.

Thankfully, I managed to make it to the new house and park on a hill so I could easily push start it and got it to the Pittsburgh Porsche dealership where I hope they can fix everything the Salt Lake dealership could not.  It’s probably going to live there for a month or so while they fix everything.

But… Alice and I are now home, in Pittsburgh and on our way to becoming Yinzers.