And 10,000 miles later ....WE ARE HOME

The Westy aka Van Gogh

Dear Friends,

10,000 miles, eight weeks and a day, and 30 states later, Britt, myself and our patient Swiss Shepherd Elsa are home.

We had a fine time touring the USA, and the 1990 VW Westfalia we bought in March did great - super fun to drive, burnt NO oil, and other than a pesky electric window problem, a trouble-free trip. 

Look out for a blog in the near future that will describe our travels in a little more depth, but here is a brief sketch.

First the Westy. 1990 and 70,000 miles on it when we bought it. Previously owned by an elderly couple, it is now owned by another elderly couple. It has a two-burner stove, a sink with an on-board water tank, both of which work wonderfully well. It has a fridge which is totally useless, lots of storage, a bed for two, and when the top is up, another two-person bed. A 2.1 motor which chugs up the hills and sails down them, and an automatic tranny. And it is, as I previously said, a gas to drive. 

We call it Van Gogh.

We left California on May 21st, sleeping in the van most every night, mainly in state parks. Driving through Arizona, New Mexico, Texas - the last night in Texas was spent at the Sea Rim State Park, which is the main breeding ground for mosquitoes in the Western Hemisphere, and to get to this appalling destination, one has to, most approriately, drive through Port Arthur, which is possibly, in an industrial way, as equally abhorent as Sea Rim’s mosquito armies. Port Arthur is a petro-chemical complex of staggering enormity, horrendous ugliness and scary as hell: so much so, that it too should be designated a State Park, lest in the far future, the populace should forget the misbegotten policies that determined their present.

In Austin we stayed with old music biz buddies Susan Piver and Duncan Browne, whose collective history includes Rounder Records, Newbury Comics and Antone’s great club in Austin. 

New Orleans’ temptations were, as usual, impossible to resist and we stayed five glorious days at The Creole Gardens, a super hip and deliciously funky hotel in the Garden District, just a fifteen-minute walk from the Quarter. Owned and run by Steve Howard and his wife Kari, the place has a history stretching way back before the Civil War, and indeed, as Steve will tell you, its previous denizens played a part in instigating that awful but just conflict.  The foyer and dining room walls are plastered with photos and posters of New Orleans music legends such as Professor Longhair and Earl King, and I spent several hours talking to one of Steve’s cohorts, musician Joseph Darensbourg, whose uncle, Joe Darensbourg, with His Mighty Flyers, had a late fifties hit with ‘Yellow Dog Blues’, a record that has been in my collection for many years. 

The Creole Gardens, New Orleans

Louis Armstrong Park, New Orleans

If you are going to New Orleans, be sure to check out The Creole Gardens. And they welcome dogs. Steve and Kari also have a place on Dauphin Island, Alabama, a long skinny barrier island a mile or two off the mainland - we spent a couple of nights there, digging the Gulf of Mexico, the beach, the sunset, a joint and a glass of wine.

And then a long winding sojourn up through the south, along small roads which were our preferred modes of travel for entire trip, through Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland and so on, until encountering the major conurbations of Philly, DC and so on, we succumbed to the neccessity of ‘getting there’ and took the New Jersey Turnpike, and then Interste 95, finally hitting Providence, Rhode Island about four weeks after our start in California. 

And what were the impressions of the south? 

Somewhere out west

It seemed to us, as we trundled along country roads, that the main occupation was mowing. Just about every house, be it humble abode or gilted mansion, had a vast expanse of greensward that had to be scrupulously maintained. Intricate checkerboard mower impressions, some diamond-shaped, others simply square, abounded, as serious-faced men and women, in checked shirts and denim overalls, rode their John Deere lawn tractors - of varying vintages to be sure - keeping the encroaching forest, and the all-enveloping kudzu at bay. After spending years in the brown summer California months, it was a mad festival of green fecundity, and simultaneously a testament to the limitless and prodigious lawn-care industry. And the strange and immeasurable satisfaction, and let’s say it, fun, of simply mowing the lawn.

Rhode Island was, and is great. Our two sons and their families live there. I lived there for twenty-two years before moving to California, and as always it is a gas to return and be with family again. Providence is for my money, the best city in the USA. A great arts scene, fine dining, and simply a great city, tastefully developed, and fun to walk around. 

And see old friends … listened to Rob Nelson at Nick-a-Nees - Rob is one of Rhode Island’s great guitarists. Spent a lot of time with Doug James and heard him play with both Rob and then with Greg Piccolo at Chan’s in Woonsocket. The two of us spent a superb night at Duke Robillard’s house as Duke entertained us for four hours playing 78s. And Britt and I drove up to Jaffrey, New Hampshire and spent the night with Carl Querfurth and Tory at the home they built for themselves on the top of a mountain. 

Doug James and Britt

The journey home was more State Parks, more miles and huge helpings of scenic grandeur. It had been very hot in Providence, and we had hoped to escape the so-called heat dome by driving west. ’Twas not to be. New heat domes developed, getting hotter and more domier each day. Dunno if that really is a word, but it is now. 

Through New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, where we saw primly bonnetted Mennonite ladies with their flannel-shirted husbands, with bearded chins and shaven upper lips, Amish aboard horse-powered buckboards, stopped at a vintage agricultural show, complete with steam tractors, old threshing machines and rows of early tractors, and then on through Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin and Minnesota and it got hotter and hotter and hotter. The electrically powered passenger window began to play tricks. Sometimes it opened. Sometimes it shut. Sometimes it did neither. Ultimately it stayed open. The AC in the Westy really works, but it does require the windows be shut. And so by the time we made Sioux Falls in North Dakota, we had to buy some plastic and tape it to the window. The upside was that we could run the ac, but the downside was that the noise created by the flapping plastic eliminated all possibility of conversation.

One of the main reasons for making this trip initially was for Britt to see Montana, nad the rest of it just kinda morphed into this big huge ramble around the entirety of the continent. And now we were in Montana, and the weather was very very hot, and the plastic window very very noisy. We did the obligatory check out of Mount Rushmore, Yellowstone, Jackson etc, and then decided it was time to head home to those cooling Mediterranean-style Bay Area breezes. 

Apart from the window, the journey was mechanically trouble-free, which was wonderful because so much of our travels were on deserted minor roads where should we have broken down, it could have been hours or even days before help came. Just thinking of those possibilities makes me shudder. So you can imagine my simultaneous feelings of horror and thankfulness when the morning after our arrival home, I checked the van and beheld a huge puddle of coolant under it. The hose from the radiator to the motor had failed.

But we had made it home. 

Good ol’ Van Gogh!

Elsa in Van Gogh

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