So driving across the country was simply brilliant, I must say. Highly recommended, given the right circumstances. What I enjoyed about cruising along, alone, behind a steering wheel for six or seven hours a day for seven days, I couldn't tell you. Maybe I shoulda been a truck driver. Maybe not.

I hated Texas. Texas just goes on and on and feels like it will never end. And I missed Austin. No, I didn't go there, loved it, leaved it, wherefore I missed it, but I was driving on a road towards Austin, and the next thing I know I check the map and I'm on a road awaaaay from Austin. I have never missed an entire city before, much less a state capital city. I blame Texas. I reluctantly backtracked through some pretty horrendous traffic just so I could get a gist of Austin, and once I was walking around, I remembered that this was where Stevie Ray Vaughn made his name, and all was forgiven.

Speaking of traffic, if you reach L.A. any time after around 3 p.m., welcome to traffic hell. How and why Los Angelinos put up with that, I may live a thousand years and never understand.

Speaking of LA, Louisiana this time, I was happy to drive into this Southern state which just elected a woman governor in a race that pitted her against a conservative Republican Indian American! It doesn't make it a progressive state per se, but it's a start. And boy howdy the severe weather I hit in Louisiana was exciting. Squalls that slowed traffic to 45 mph and tornado warnings, well, they crapped on what was supposed to be my "break day", but I'm easy. Wandering along Bourbon Street in the French Quarter was pretty much Fisherman's Wharf, New Orleans style. The rainy gloom probably made it bearable. The rain stopped just long enough for me to walk around and not get soaked.

Tucson made me giddy all over again. Driving in from the direction of Organ Pipe National Monument just had me romantically thinking of Tucson as the jewel of the Sonoran Desert. Of course having been there in April, and now in November, I completely missed the sweltering Summer heat. I went to Saguaro National Park East on my National Parks Pass, and I communed with the saguaro, singing 10,000 Maniacs' "The Painted Desert". How I'd like to be reborn as a saguaro in solemn meditation on the sun rising in the east and setting in the west, and the stars in the sky, "the stars were so many there, they seemed to overlap".

That morning before Tucson found me hiking in solitude in Organ Pipe National Monument. It abuts Mexico, so it's not on the way to anything. You have to go out of your way to go to Organ Pipe. I hiked an hour in a canyon and didn't see a soul and sang Peter Gabriel's "Washing the Water" to myself with abandon.

I met up with Kristin at Carlsbad Cavern. OK, I met Kristin at Carsbad Cavern. Either way. For someone whose name I wouldn't know for another 45 minutes, we hit it off pretty well. She was a wandering soul with a 45 day Greyhound Bus pass, trying to keep her channels open. She was 10 years younger than me, and 10 years ago, I was doing my best to keep my channels to the universe open, too. It's a good way to be. A good way to try to get back to, even if, in the end, you don't find the answer to the universe or true love or happiness.

The purpose of taking the far southern route was to stay warm as long as possible, but as a cold front pushed through even to Florida, I decided to head north through Alabama, finally succumbing to the allure of "Waffle House". I was disappointed by the meager selection for waffle options, but I made the best of it. I once had a gerbil named "Waffle".

Beelining up the East Coast was appropriate, as there is not much to stop for this side of the Mississippi. Very brief (and cold) stop in Montgomery for the Civil Rights Monument (they really didn't put much effort into that thing, the MLK monument at Yerba Buena Gardens in San Francisco is much better), and then it was Georgia on my mind, South Carolina which might not have been there at all, and then North Carolina, which I wanted to give more credit for spawning Archers of Loaf and Superchunk. Virginia found me stuck in traffic in the Fredricksburg regional shopping district (I think all urban landscapes should be re-designated into regional shopping districts, it's the American way!), and finally at Meghan's, the end of the motels and the beginning of the end of the roadtrip. The end of my run with my cute Isuzu Rodeo. When I got it, it was cute, SUV's weren't being vilified yet, they hadn't become a yuppie symbol. It's still cute. It still runs great. It will hate me for giving it to my brother.