This story starts on a Sunday morning at 10 AM.
The night before, I shot Melissa's cousin's wedding. When I got home after the wedding around ten thirty that evening, I started packing and going over the checklist. How does one pack 3 weeks' worth of clothing? I had one suitcase. I'd be recycling clothes. A lot. My dad had packed half of my trunk with a full-sized spare tire and a box full of road supplies like coolant and a plug-in tire inflator. On my end, I had a tent and lantern to camp out in state parks (and a gunmetal machete/sword) and my cousin Vincent let me borrow his ultra-efficient down sleeping bag along with a variety of random things including the following:
- A set of throwing knives
- A book on how to throw said knifes, and
- A slingshot.
Along with my harmonica, all these were ingredients for a fantastic camping experience and would provide peace of mind on the 3 different times I planned to camp out on the road. That was my trunk. In my backseat, there was a styrofoam cooler, a case of 20 ounce water bottles, and a huge bag filled with a snack-sized assortment of potato chips. And yes, the beef jerky from the Beijing trip. Tramanh had lent me her 7 year old iPod mini with car adapter filled with music for the trip. Donny lent me a few cds.
I was leaving my parents' subdivision that Sunday morning to take off into the great unknown when I suddenly realized I had forgotten my Surefire flashlight. I headed back to my place and after the delay, I was finally on my way. There would be no turning back now.
635 miles to destination.
It was raining that morning, an ominous start to the trip. I would later find out that this rain chased me all through the west coast all the way to Canada. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
The first day, I thought I would start off light. A 9 hour drive from Houston to Fort Davis. Maybe check out the McDonald's observatory. Definitely visit the Prada store outside of Valentine, Texas. Stay the night in the Davis Mountains State Park near Marfa, Texas. 9 hours would be a warmup.
Driving through west Texas, there's really nothing out here. It's miles and miles of flat emptiness. They know this out in west Texas too, and know everyone's eager to get out of west Texas so they bump up the speed limit to 80. When you're going 80, you're really going 90. And when you see an even faster car, you're going 100. In fact, west Texas was where I did the fastest driving the entire trip. A lot of people asked me, how did you stand driving all those hours on the road? It's simple, really. When you know you have to drive for hours a day, there's nothing else to do but sit down and do it. It's really not that bad when you're doing it at 90 miles an hour. You turn up the radio, you watch as your fuel gauge slowly drops, and you look forward to those gas station stops to stretch your legs. For a late afternoon lunch, I stop off at a Church's chicken. This one is connected to a gas station.
I make it to Marfa, Texas near sunset. I am determined to check out the Prada store out here at dusk, because I had seen pictures of the store interior being lit up. Out on the road, a car's lights flashed me as it was going in the opposite direction, which, for those who have never taken long trips on the road, indicates "hey, police up ahead. slow down." For you city folk in urban areas, when a car's lights flash you, it usually indicates that you have been marked for death in a gang initiation. But I like the car camaraderie- or should it be termed "caraderie"- but then would be like a karateria, where they dispense heaping bowls of roundhouses to the face. And sometimes you start to feel a connection with a fellow car when you've been traveling next to each other for hours of miles. This is also how people get restraining orders.
I hit Marfa, Texas towards sunset. A football field's length from the highway, I spot this enormous docked blimp. It's nearing dusk, but the terrain is so flat, it juts out from the landscape and commands your attention.
I finally reach the famed Prada store, out on the way to Valentine, Texas as the sun is setting. It's actually half an hour away from Marfa, Texas on US 90. The art piece was set up back in fall of 2005 and left to die, so the interior lighting that turns on at sunset seemed to be no longer functioning, but it still stands well for being 4 years old. I'm there for half an hour or so, making the most of this first stop in my journey around the U.S.
My noble steed.
It gets really dark, really fast. I'm driving back to Marfa, Texas in search of dinner. It's some 30 miles back. The rain starts pouring down. And then all of a sudden, the rain is horizontal. Some 10 miles away on each side of the road, lightning storms angrily slam the countryside. There are no lights of any sort on these highways in the middle of nowhere and I can barely see 10 feet in front of me. My car slows to thirty miles an hour. Maybe less. Then, in the midst of this terrifying weather, I start thinking things.
Like what if there were ghosts by the side of the road? What if my car broke down in the middle of this horrible storm and there was a large, seemingly abandoned house conveniently nearby? If that happened, I would probably be in need of an immediate change of undergarments. And Marfa is one of those small towns were people disappear like in that John Cusack movie Identity. The setup is exactly the same. But I can't die. I've had nothing worth writing about for the first day of this trip. All I will have when they find my blood-covered body will be messy trip notes scribbled on the back of receipts. My last meal would have been that Church's chicken I had for lunch. Ok, so maybe that's not the worst last meal to have. It looked greasy when I got it, but it had surprisingly crispy skin, now that I think about it. But I digress.
I get to Marfa safely and head on further to Fort Davis (which, if it's anything like the forts of my childhood, would be made entirely of bedsheets and couch cushions)- about half an hour away- and the rain relents for a bit. It was 9 PM and I parked outside my dinner destination- Hotel Limpia (which means "clean hotel" in Spanish). The menu looked pretty good online and I walked up to the entrance, only to find that they had closed the kitchen 10 minutes ago. This would be the first of many failed destinations for this trip. My plans to sleep in Davis mountains state park also fell through on account of the rain again. I asked the people at Hotel Limpia where a fellah could sleep for cheap, and they pointed me out to a motel a few miles down.
I check into the motel, tired.
Off in the distance, the torrential downpour still rages on, with lightning bringing the clouds to a spectacular light show.
My motel room looks cozy enough.
With nothing open past 9 PM on a Sunday in these small towns, my first dinner on this road trip was in my motel room, dining on a small bag of doritos and munching on some beef jerky and water, a quiet, modest end to the first day of this journey.
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