We’ve been in San Mateo for less than a full day, but we have already taken care of important business. We met our downstairs neighbors, both of whom are flight attendants, and and chatted with them. Ed, our landlord, came up and fixed a faucet, did some paperwork with us, and gave me a cold beer. We sat on our second-story deck drinking beer and watching the neighbors go by, a mix of whites, Hispanics, and East Asians. We looked at rice cookers at the Japanese housewares store in downtown San Mateo, although we didn’t buy anything. Carol got invited to go to a writing group with Ms. M. And we watched a pair of hummingbirds fly by our apartment.
Across the mountain states
We left Salt Lake City at about 9 a.m. Mountain time, and arrived here in San Mateo at about 10:30 p.m. Pacific time. The landscapes we drove through were amazing, awe-inspiring, beautiful, stunning, sublime….
Carol on the Bonneville salt flats, Utah
When we arrived, we found that our new landlord had found an air mattress for us to sleep on, and he even helped us unload our car (thanks, Ed!).
And now it’s time for bed, so I can get up in time to spend my first day at the new church.
Wind power from Iowa to Utah
Over the past two days, we have seen a great number of wind turbines. In Iowa, the wind turbines were often in fields of corn or soybeans:
Near Walnut, Iowa
These wind turbines were far from the highway, and barely visible across the Great Plains:
Somewhere along I-80, Nebraska
In Wyoming, we saw several extensive fields of wind turbines, like this one:
Between Laramie and Rawlins, Wyoming
Elsewhere in Wyoming, we saw a wind turbine being erected: a slim white tower, and a crane nearby waiting to place the blades and hub on top of the tower. In another place, we saw wind turbines gracefully turning in the distance, while close to the road an oil derrick clumsily bumped up and down, up and down: two different sources of energy side by side.
And finally, these wind turbines were somewhere near the Wyoming – Utah border:
We arrived in Salt Lake City at about 7:30 this evening, and as we were pulling in to the motel parking lot, Carol said that it looked there are more wind turbines in the Great Plains now than in California.
So that’s where we are
We rolled across the rolling hills of Iowa and on into Nebraska. We drove alongside the Platte River, catching glimpses of the high and oddly-shaped bluffs that define the edges of the broad river plain. We passed into the Mountain Time Zone. Let’s stop in Sidney, Nebraska, I said to Carol. She said, Why not go a little farther, it’s only 7:30. I said, Because there isn’t much between Sidney and Cheyenne.
We pulled off the highway. The tall huge signs read: Comfort Inn; AmericaInn; WalMart Supercenter; Sapp Bros. Shell; Steakhouse and Bar; Mexican Food. We walked to WalMart to buy fresh fruit and cheese for tomorrow. Wanna go for a longer walk? I said to Carol. She wanted to walk to a building on the other side of the road that looked like a casino, or something. We walked over in the gathering dusk. We both realized what the building was at the same time. Cabela’s, said Carol; I said, I was just thinking that.
There were big statues of horned animals in contorted poses. The store was closed. It was right next to the interstate, and trucks whined by. There are very few trees in this part of the country, and the soil looks dry and sandy. We walked back to our motel and went to sleep.
States that begin with vowels
Most New Englanders have a poor sense of geography. We have always had difficulty distinguishing between the states west of the Connecticut River (technically, Vermont is a New England state, but it is inhabited chiefly by New Yorkers and people who pronounce the letter “r” oddly). We New Englanders know vaguely that there are Appalachian mountains, then a big flat place where they grow corn and soybeans and all the states have names that begin with vowels, and then west of that there are mountains and deserts and big square states. We pity those New Englanders who have to go live in California, because they will be so very far from the ocean.
Corn and soybeans along Interstate 80 in Illinois
Today, Carol and I drove through flat states whose names begin with vowels. We started driving this morning in Ohio, drove through northern Indiana, across midstate Illinois, and then across the Mississippi River into Iowa.
Crossing the Mississippi River along Interstate 80
The landscape was fairly flat in Ohio, sloping gently down towards Lake Erie; it was heavily developed south of Chicago, covered with industrial buildings, big box stores, and housing developments; it was fairly flat through midstate Illinois but even here it rolled gently; and here in Iowa, the landscape consists of low, rolling hills with winding creeks in the valleys between the hills. In short, the landscape is far more diverse than New Englanders think it is.
We are spending the night just south of the Amana Colonies in Iowa. We had some Schild Brau Amber lager beer at dinner, brewed locally by the Millstream Brewing Company. Carol comes from Iowa, and as we walked around, she said it felt somehow familiar: the cicadas, the fireflies, the silos half hidden behind the low hills, the fields of corn. And tomorrow we will continue driving across the flat states, getting farther and farther from the ocean.
Motel window, Milan, Ohio
View from our motel window, near Interstate 80 in Milan, Ohio. Our car is the one with the canoe on it.
Driving
We’re at a rest area somewhere in upstate New York. The landscape is flat. I just heard a train whistle. The traffic whines past on the nearby interstate.
A bright yellow Volkswagen an, dating from about 1970, just drove out of the rest area.Bicycles on the back, a man and a woman in the front. She had an expressive face, was wearing purple pants, and had frizzy hair. He was obvously the calm, conservative one in the relationship, and was wearing a ball cap, a dark t-shirt, and conservative shorts, like a lawyer on vacation. I’ll bet the Volkswagen van belongs to her. He was also the only black man in the rest area.
Carol guesses that they are from New York City, headed out of the city for some time off.
((augh))
We should be in Ohio right now, but we’re still in New Bedford. We ran into a little snag yesterday — there wasn’t enough room in our 8 x 8 x 16′ Pod. But the last time we moved, we didn’t even fill the Pod. How could we have accumulated so much stuff in four short years? Carol pointed out that she had a lot of stuff stored in her parents’ basement, and when her father moved into his new condo she had to take all that stuff.
We jammed all we could into the Pod, then we advertised on Craigslist, put stuff out for street shoppers (all gone now), mailed boxes to ourselves at the new address, donated some stuff the the local thrift shop. Carol moved books and merchandise to a friend’s store on Cape Cod, and her co-author’s house in Newton. It was incredibly muggy today, with relative humidity up around 100%, and warm enough that the slightest exertion left you drenched with sweat. I’m exhausted. But at last we’re done. Tomorrow, we’ll finish packing the car and start driving west….
Fireworks and egotism
The city of New Bedford didn’t have money for fireworks on Independence Day this year. Which they only announced a week before July 4. Within a week, mayor Scott Lang announced that some local people and businesses had donated money for a fireworks display, He put the money into a fund he named the Lang Community Fund, thus proving that politicians, like preachers, are prone to egotism.
By the time the Lang Community Fund had been established, July 4th had come and gone. So the city decided to have the fireworks tonight. Having no need to witness a display of egotism, I decided not to walk down to the waterfront so I could watch the fireworks display. I stayed in the apartment, doing some final cleaning.
But I couldn’t escape. With the first boom of the fireworks, the car alarm on the fancy-schmancy car parked right outside our apartment went off. The car alarm said, “Hear me, I’m important, this car is expensive!”. It continued to go off periodically during the forty minute fireworks display, a sort of egotistical echo.