A summary of my cross-country road trip:
We ended up leaving on the fourteenth. We left around eight thirty and stopped in Gainesville to hear Jakob's friend Joe preach at the MCC church there. It was an outstanding sermon, one I really enjoyed hearing. The message was about a time that Jesus screwed up in not being accepting enough of outsiders, and how he realized his error and fixed it. Rev. Joe bought us lunch, and it was very good spending time with him and the other folks from church.
That evening we arrived at Jakob's grandparents' house in Lilian, Alabama. His grandparents are great old southern folk. They are both very famous bikers. Hero lost his leg when a drunk driver hit him on his bike. Nickie was also injured in a wreck that same week. They haven't been able to ride for years, but Hero still goes out and does yard work, hauling great big logs on chains with his truck up and down the rutted and winding drive to smooth it out.
We stayed a day with them, doing yard work so Kie can get around with her walker better. We visited Jakob's great-aunt Dot as well. This branch of Jakob's family are real characters. A whole book could be written about them, and I won't try to do them justice here.
The following day we drove all the way from there into Austin, with a stop in New Orleans for lunch with Jakob's Aunt Sunday. We got into Austin very late, and had difficulty finding our next stop in the dark. Eventually we got to Josh's house. Josh is a very interesting fellow, an ex-Marine who is very supportive of queer folk like me and Jakob. He took us out to a shooting range and taught us to shoot, then we went to Neo-Soul, a poetry reading which is mostly Black folks. Josh is the only white guy who reads, and he seems welcomed by most everyone there. The MC made fun of me and Jakob for looking like scared bunnies in the corner. He said "Shout out to Kerrick and Jakob, they're on a road trip from Florida all the way to San Francisco. They're gonna be writing about tonight in their travel journals later, saying 'I went to a poetry reading and it was DARK, and I don't mean the room but the PEOPLE! I mean EVERYONE was Black, and this one fellow got up onstage and said the N word and I was SKEERED! They all seemed real cool though.'" He had us pegged. Anyone in that room could have schooled me, and not just in poetry, either. I have a new respect for slam poets— good ones, anyway.
After Austin we drove to Newton, Kansas, just north of Wichita. On the way we stopped for lunch at a little enclave of Czech culture in a town called West, Texas (which is actually in central Texas). There was a little Czech import shop with a lot of glass things, a Russian doll set of American politicians, a Bacchus meerschaum pipe (I so wanted to get that for John Moore), and an awesome vase which was cobalt glass on the outside and ruby on the inside, and would have looked fan-fucking-tastic with a candle inside. I bought none of this of course because the prices were outrageous. Instead we ate lunch at a Czech restaurant, which tasted just like you would expect a hodgepodge of Czech, German, Southern US, and Texan food to taste. I showed Jakob some chainmail and eventually he and Patrick will teach me leatherworking.
After our fun-filled night in Newton, Kansas, home of the Kansas Sampler Festival, we drove on to Denver. Driving through Kansas was a nightmare of monotony. It was difficult to remain sane enough to drive and I didn't always quite manage it. There were also NO fuel stations for which I had a card. But we did eventually get somewhere which had more of a sense of place, and then we arrived in Denver, so that was all right.
Denver is a really cool city. Jakob's friend Joshua took us to bookstores, a Thai restaurant, and to dessert at a posh restaurant where the servers seemed to be DYING for someone fun to talk to, and Joshua was quite good at providing that. Joshua's boyfriend Jesse is an expert in zombies, so we spent a lot of time talking about Dawn of the Dead.
After Denver is where the big push started. Along the way Jakob and Patrick had renegotiated where he was going to put his stuff, so he had ordered a storage unit. that meant he had to arrive in San Francisco before 5:30 pm on Monday. So from Denver we drove as far as we could. We took the route around the Rockies because it was faster than going through, especially with a storm on the way over the mountains. This meant dipping into the edge of Wyoming for a while. We made it to Salt Lake City around three or four, and just kept driving until we were in Nevada, finally settling down around ten at night. The place we found to lodge was a Best Western with a casino inside, which looked really sketchy but turned out relatively okay. Then we left astonishingly early in the morning and pushed straight through Nevada. I thought the country was beautiful, but we didn't have time to take pictures at all. I will probably have to make a photo trip out there one day. We were in Reno around noon, despite frequently encountering wide-load vehicles traveling at about ten miles an hour on the winding mountain freeways. From Reno we pushed straight through Sacramento and then took 80 into the Bay Area, getting into the city at rush hour of course. We arrived at the storage place at 5:15.
Then Jakob and Patrick helped me unload my stuff at my place in Berkeley, and shortly after that I gave myself my shot and collapsed from exhaustion.
So that is the story of my trip. More on the place I'm living coming soon.
