Thursday, February 28, 2008

home again.

Safe and sound, six thousand miles later. This wouldn't be remarkable, except that the last time I tried to cross the country by car I ended up in the emergency room in Gallup, New Mexico, with a totaled VW Jetta and a dead cat. So all in all this was a better trip.

Low points: hitting a blizzard Wednesday night in the pass before Winslow, Arizona, and crawling along, white-knuckled, for four hours; hitting pea-soup fog Friday night before Knoxville, Tennessee, and crawling along, white-knuckled, for around an hour before realizing that all the cars flying past me in the fast lane could at least see each other's brake lights. So I got in the fast lane and hoped that no one ahead of me got surprised. (There was, in the not-so-distant past, a 100-car pileup from fog in California, which sounds absolutely ridiculous but became completely reasonable on Friday night.)

High points: the breathtaking scenery in the southwest; meeting the Rummel-Hudson family (go read his book right now); hanging out with my parents, collecting treasures like my grandmother Edith's china and my dried wedding bouquet; all the wait-wait-don't-tell-mes and this-american-lifes on my iPod.

The weather here in Santa Cruz is 70 degrees and sunny, and it's so great to be home. Tonight on HBO (which I don't get, but I'm hoping to find it after it airs) is a documentary of the creation of Cristo's New York City Gates, which should be really interesting. I was in the city for the opening, which was exciting. And cold. I took piles of pictures, and they look a lot like everyone else's pictures but I still enjoy them very much.