Bakersfield is Shit

Ok, I feel the need to come out of blogging retirement for a public service announcement. I'll tell you, because no one told me: Bakersfield California is awful, and you should not go there. We stopped there for one night because we needed a place to break our journey between Las Vegas and San Luis Obispo. I pretty much thought: "Half way, we've done enough driving, the print size on the map suggests it's a big important place". It seemed as promising as all the other unexpected places we had spent the night at because that was simply where we had arrived. Then we got into town and spent an age driving through different neighbourhoods looking for a place to stay, each area being grotty according to its own individual style. We found a decent enough hotel, eventually, and hid. After a while it became necessary to eat, and we went to the most depressing Wendy's there has ever been. It was like purgatory, filled with benighted souls eating soggy fries with a blank, desperate look in their eyes. It is a testament to Kaia's good qualities that I didn't have a Bakersfield-induced nervous breakdown after one night.

The journey surrounding the Bakersfield black hole of human misery (I may be laying this on a bit thick), took us through the Mojave desert, Joshua trees, fantastic landscape. We bypassed Death Valley, because that didn't sound fun. I've actually been to Death Valley, a long time ago, but in April when the temperature wasn't so bad. I heard that in summer you can fry an egg on the hood of your car, it gets so freaking hot. The clue's in the name really.

Also we passed 'Zzyzx Rd', which has a pretty interesting history if you feel like looking it up on Wikepedia. Among other things, two movies are named after it, including the lowest grossing movie of all time (starring Katherine Heigl from Grey's Anatomy, it earned $30). Also the associated town of Zzyzx has alphabetically the last place name, umm, ever, I think. So that's a random street sign we passed in the Mojave desert.

Las Vegas

Hmm, so I created this post a while ago in draft form, and apparently all I had written about Las Vegas is: "It is shiny". This is certainly true, and indeed it's really the only thing about Vegas; the city is very light on substance and to the casual traveller seems nothing like a real city that people could live in. There must be areas of it with houses, schools, parks and businesses that aren't based around tourist entertainment, but we didn't see them. I've seen episodes of CSI where people get murdered in them. Apparently Las Vegas is the fastest growing city in the United States, which is just crazy, especially since they don't have any water. The place is in the middle of a desert, it's a big sprawling mess of city and casino, none of it feels very productive - I don't know why anybody would want to live there, I really don't. But what do I know about it, I only spent one night in the place.


We were staying at the Luxor, which is an enormous black shiny glass pyramid, with rooms all up the four sides of the pyramids and a casino in the middle. The rooms were all in rows up the slant, so to get to them you had to take a sideways elevator called an 'inclinator'. This reminded one of Charlie's Great Glass Elevator, and felt very weird in the stomach. Our room was pretty decent, and quite cheap ($80, whereas the night before it had been $300-odd for Memorial Day weekend). We arrived at our hotel in the afternoon, and pretty much hid in our room and by the pool until dark. Las Vegas felt a little intimidating during the day, too hot and big and a little sordid; the fact that this was our first big unfamiliar city after weeks of National Parks also freaked us out a little.


Once it got dark we went out to the strip, which was just so much fun. You could wander in and out of any casino you liked, and they were all just ridiculously decorated. Some of them had themes, some of them the only theme was massive lack of taste. 'New York, New York' was our favourite, but only the whole we enjoyed the mass of neon and tack. Things looked so very much better at night, too. The above is Caesar's Palace. Like so many things in America, I only know about this place through an episode of Friends. (You know, the one where Joey works there?)

The Grand Canyon and Zion National Park

From Flagstaff we went to the Grand Canyon, which... well I don't entirely know what to say about that. It was just so big, so amazingly rich in detail, canyon within canyon and ridge after ridge. We sat on the South rim and looked across it for a long time, and after a while my eyes just weren't getting it anymore. You had little comprehension, just a troubling sense of immensity, to paraphrase one of the handy interpretive information boards. I didn't even try taking any pictures with my dinky little digital camera. It actually wasn't at all what I was expecting; I think I imagined just a giant pit in the ground impressive because it was a pit more giant than all the others, but it was really very beautiful, and colourful too- a lot of reds and purples and blues.

Of course the Grand Canyon is a major tourist destination so it was crawling with people who were yelling and throwing rocks at each other and daring each other closer to the edge. We became annoyed and snobby about the tourist rabble in between being awed at the natural beauty.

We intended to stay for the night in one of the Grand Canyon campsites, but having been on the road for a while the fact had escaped us that it was Memorial Day weekend, and the entire country seemed to have gone on vacation in search of natural beauty, filling up all the campsites while they were at it. Bloody people. We moved on to Zion National Park where we thought we might have better luck, but even there the only place was a free campsite (for 'free', infer: no bathroom) by the river, admittedly a nice spot. Zion is a little further north and is basically a series of sandstone-walled canyons. We looked around a bit and had short hike along the canyon. Got as far as The Narrows, which is where the canyon walls get, uh, narrow, and fill with water so you have to wade. Zion didn't have quite the jaw-dropping quality of the grand Canyon but it was very lovely and a lot more fun to spend time in.


I'm very glad we went from the Grand Canyon to Zion after all, and it was a lot quieter there too. It was still Memorial Day weekend though, and hordes of people were always a danger, as was becoming annoyed at said people. Plus at one point when wandering around it occured to us that we seemed to be the only lesbians in the entire National Park system. In fact we hadn't seen any ladies-who-like-ladies for so long that we felt very much out of the Portland gay bubble. I was surprised actually, especially in Zion I rather expected to see hordes of slightly butch-looking women wearing a lot of action wear and running up and down the trails.

Anyway, what happened next is that I got unpleasantly ill from some kind of stomach bug and spent our second day in Zion throwing up a lot in the bathroom of the Cafe Soleil, where we had holed up because it was somewhere indoors with a bathroom, unlike our campsite. Once I was stable enough to travel we went to Cedar City, and we stayed in some hotel room for a couple of days, moving very little, until I felt ok again. Kaia took very good care of me and was very sweet.

Painted Desert

The day after Kaia and I said goodbye to Alice and Charlotte, we were forced to say goodbye to Garon. Cruel fate! Garon stayed in his familial seat in Albuquerque and we moved on. Aah, lovely Garon, filled with wonderful qualities. What a special guy; and lately since it's just been him in a very feminine environment of us he's been our Representative of Man. Good job he has all those muscles. We had lunch together in the Frontier restaurant where they had this weird ordering system of flashing lights and good breakfasts, then I guess Kai and I drove off. It was very sad.

We were aiming for the Grand Canyon, but that day we could only get as far as Flagstaff, Arizona. Along the way we stopped by the Painted Desert National Park, almost by accident really. It was so pretty!


They're formed by wind and rain in cool and special ways, and I really have no idea about the geology beyond that. In one ear, out the other. They were just pretty. We wandered and drove amongst the dunes for hours until we lost track of time and had to hotfoot it to Flagstaff.

Also:

2:58pm- I see my first tumbleweed, on the highway!

Goodbye My Friend

So you just know I am currently singing the Spice Girls song of the same name as this post title to myself. Ahem.

Events of today were far too grave to deserve a Spice Girls singalong. Alice and Charlotte had been roadtrip buddies for most of the journey, and this afternoon they both went on their separate ways: Alice flew to San Francisco to meet up with her parents and do some sightseeing before she goes to England, and Charlotte is taking the train -Albuquerque to Vancouver BC (!)- to visit with Hannah, before she too goes back to England. It was really awful to say goodbye to these two lovely English women. Obviously I will see them again, but not only were they a lot of fun on the roadtrip, but I've realised just how much of a happy fixture of this year they have been. It honestly felt weird if I didn't see either of them all day. Charlotte especially, being my Anna Mann dorm buddy, was always around to share the business of the day with; very pleasant tradition. Gah, I got very choked up seeing them off one after another. I was really so lucky to have them as my fellow English exchange girls this year.

Methods to combat the departure melancholia included listening to Toxic by Britney very loudly in the car many times, (including impromptu dance parties in the back seat), and watching Spiderman 3 this evening in an attempt to stupefy ourselves with a dumb action movie (unfortunately it was weird, and shit). These things almost worked.

I'd better leave it here before I get emotional again. (Get away from me, emotions!) Oh, by the way, I have booked my plane home, I get back to England on the 24th June, mark your diaries.

After Moab

So we were aiming for Albuquerque, but couldn't make it before the late evening, and found a hotel for the night in Bloomfield, outside Farmington. All five of us stayed in the same hotel room, but in order to pretend that only two people were staying and save us some cash, Garon and Alice booked the room and for some reason pretended to be professional business people on their way to a conference, (they did a lot of talking about their 'brief'), and Kaia, Charlotte and I sneaked in though the back. Everyone was completely knackered from the hours of driving, it was good to get to a hotel. Nearby there was a lot with a sign up saying 'Adult Video Store', and a sign that said 'Jesus is Watching You' directly opposite. Mixed messages, New Mexico!

We got into Albuquerque the next day, and basically seemed to meet all Garon's relatives one by one. Every one of them was lovely, and clearly very glad to see Garon. He is clearly the golden boy of Albuquerque! We got some good New Mexican food, and I don't remember quite how this happened, but apparently we ate five dinners that night, such was the hospitality we received.

We went to visit Garon's pueblo, the Santa Domingo pueblo. His Mum is Native American and lives in the pueblo, and his Dad is a lawyer who specialised in Native American law, so that's how they met. We had a great time visiting the pueblo, and finding out more about Garon's family and childhood, and seeing all the windows in the street that Garon broke when he was a kid. We met yet more of his relatives, also very glad to see him. His Grandma gave us four girls a small handmade ceramic pot as a leaving gift, really kind of her. I'm going to be mortified if that gets broken on the journey back... They're very enclosed in this particular pueblo, keeping strangers out and keeping their traditions to themselves to try and keep their culture strong. We were really lucky to be able to visit.

My Birthday

22nd birthday on the road! Pretty cool I thought. We were in Salt Lake City for the first half of the 19th, having stayed with some hospitable relatives of Garon's the night before. Salt Lake was a funny place. I know exactly the first thing you'll associate with the place: Mormons! Am I right? There certainly was a lot of Mormon junk around the place.


The downtown area was full of gleaming impressive buildings, which were more often than not part of the Mormon association. We were there on a Saturday, too, which I think is the sabbath. At the above-pictured magnificent Mormon temple (which non-mormons are not allowed to enter), there were many weddings going on all at once. The place was swarming with guests, (couples in coordinating outfits), and we counted 12 brides. We also saw the Tabernacle, where they sing, the old house of Mormon founder Joseph Smith, the Mormon Conference Center, and the Mormon Geneology Library (you know they have this thing about baptising their ancestors). Kaia and I became paranoid about holding hands, and possibly just generally felt a bit weird in Mormon central. Not sure if that was justified of us. Got a birthday call from my parents outside the temple, but I couldn't really hear them on my crap phone. Ah well.

Around lunchtime we moved onto Moab, Utah, which took longer than anticipated. The scenery along the way got more and more incredible (there is going to be a lot about scenery in this blog for a while). Got into town at about sunset, since the driving once again took longer than expected. We had a lovely dinner in Moab, and it was so good to be with my awesome friends and girlfriend, even if I did find myself a long way from home in an unexpected place. At around 11pm we found out that every hotel in town was booked solid, and had to scrabble around until we found a campsite with a closed office but a spare lot. Camping again! I tried to moan less. It was hot that night but we had a tent made of cool mesh; me in the morning; "Oh hooray. My house is see-through".


Next day we got a late-birthday picnic lunch and ate it at Dead Horse Point, looking over a giant canyon whose name escapes me, (above), part of the Canyonlands National Park. After that we made a few stops at pretty places and then set off for Albuquerque New Mexico, Garon's home town.

Sightseeing

Oh, I haven't written about Renn Fayre yet. The memory exists in bits and pieces. Here are some things I saw at Renn Fayre:

A man eat a live scorpion

Dozens of people I vaguely recognised from class painted blue and running around naked

People storming and demolishing a giant wooden birthday cake

The whole college dressed crazy, half drunk, covered in champagne and dancing outside the library, snogging everyone in sight and getting covered in confetti fired from guns on the library roof

Little lakes and streams of champagne the next day

A glow opera, with people all ultraviolet and neon and enacting some kind of Big Lebowski/Reed injoke-themed pageant

The best fireworks I have seen since millenium night in London

'Karma Patrol' wandering around handing out water and bagels to people in various states of intoxication

Every Reedie I know being about eight times less stressed than they had been for months

Grand Tetons

On Day Three we met up with Garon and Charlotte, and later Alice, in the Grand Tetons, which is a mountainous National Park south of Yellowstone. Kaia and I arrived in the dark, later than we would have liked, and put the tent up in the dark. It was strange to wake up at the campground and actually see where we were in the morning light.

We stayed at Jenny Lake campground, which was next to the most clear, gorgeous lake I have ever seen, mountains in the background. It reminded me a little of the Lake District I guess; except there were bears around and we had to lock up our food in a big metal box so as not to attract them. Even though Garon would have wrestled any trespassing bear for us.

On the first day in the Grand Tetons we took a ferry across Jenny Lake and then hiked back. We got to a high point- 'Inspiration Point'- and were able to see across to the lake and the mountains. Ate lunch here and we were stalked by a bloody cheeky chipmunk that tried to crawl into our laps a couple of times. Found 'Hidden Falls' too, so very splashy and beautiful.

I am not the keenest on camping- I may have been scarred for life by D of E- so I probably moaned a lot at Jenny Lake but the others were very patient. It was actually a lot of fun, sitting around at our gorgeous campsite, enjoying the fire, wondering whether bears would be attracted to scented candles. Alice and her parents dropped by the second night, and Alice helpfully told me all about her hotel and how great the hot tub was. It was a bit chilly on night two, so I wore a large puffy coat of Garons' and sat by the fire and looked pitiful. Kaia had freezing hands and I had a cold nose, it was awful.

In case you were wondering, in the top photo that is a herd of buffalo. Kinds of animal I also saw: marmot, two kinds of chipmunk, ground squirrel, elk, bison, coyote and sandhill crane. I ate elk jerkey too, which might almost count as a close-up wildlife sighting.

First Day of Roadtrip

I have to confess, we set out for our roadtrip on Tuesday just a little later than we had intended. Packing overflowed into our departure day, quite predictably I suppose, and there were several more upsetting goodbyes to be made. Jeez, I am really going to miss all these people.

Anyway, Kaia and I got on the road early afternoon or thereabouts. We got in our delightful car, a cute little blue Honda we have christened Joni (after JoMitch, the patron saint of our trip), and set off driving. I should mention that I cannot drive, barely know what a steering wheel is for, so Kaia is the one and only Mistress of Driving for the duration. The first stop was supposed to be Twin Falls Idaho, but after driving til dark we only got as far as Caldwell, just outside Boise, so we stopped for the night at a Best Western and immediately fell asleep.

Went through a few forbidding looking places along the way, such as Bliss, Idaho (absolutely not bliss), and Victor (town motto: "A Place to Call Home To"). We also got stuck driving around in fucking Pocatello for ages, I can't remember why- long enough to work out that the locals call it 'Pokey'.

Meanwhile Garon and Charlotte had been to Yellowstone and coincidentally already had their time in Pokey. They set off earlier than us, miraculously managed to do their packing earlier than us, and the plan was to meet them in the Grand Tetons.

Notes on Food: Part VI

I think I've mentioned before the bizarre propensity Americans have for adding peanut butter to whatever candy products they can. Any particular confectionery you can conceivably stuff peanut butter into, they do it. In England you just put it on your toast, maybe make a peanut butter sandwich if you're feeling particular outre. Here it's like its own food group. Reece's peanut butter cups are a major one- are they just cups? Of peanut butter? It's like making miniature bowls of jam and calling them sweets.

Having had my moment of outrage at the peanut butter/candy crossover, I can't say I actually mind. I mean, I do find peanut butter really tasty. Have you ever seen that movie Meet Joe Black? It's very boring, it has Brad Pitt in it as the incarnation of death (I know, sounds promising! And yet it's still boring). When tasting never before experienced earthly pleasures, Death/Brad spends a lot of the film wandering around eating peanut butter with a teaspoon from a jar, just because he finds it the ability to eat peanut butter one of the very best things about being human. That's how I feel about peanut butter. I love it. (I think that's also why I've seen Meet Joe Black at least three times, even though it is incredibly dull.)


So, I love the peanut butter, and I love Nutter Butters. They are delightful biscuit sandwiches with a delicious peanut butter centre. Yum yum. They are also helpfully shaped like nuts, so you don't get confused about what you are eating. The nut texture on the surface of the biscuit is a very nice touch too, I always think. Nutter Butter bites are also especially enjoyable; they retain the peanut patterning but are round instead of peanut-shaped. Good for eating hundreds of while watching movies. I heart Nutter Butters!

Last Night at Reed

My last night at Reed was a little strange. On one hand I wanted to see some people, have some fun, do something appropriate for the end of my beloved Reed; on the other hand I had a monstrous load of packing to do. In the event I concentrated on the former, and stayed up til 5.30am doing the latter. Seemed reasonable to me.

Convocation was on Monday morning, and the campus was impressively spruced up and had acquired the biggest white tent I had ever seen to house the graduation ceremony. I saw all my senior friends graduate, I was so happy for them! Such a lot of hard work for them this year- that bloody thesis- and they absolutely deserve a big fancy congratulatory event.

In the afternoon I worked up on packing up my room while Kaia practised how to work a manual car for the roadtrip (glad I'm not a driver, sounds difficult). I was nowhere near done by evening, packing is hell. Towards dinnertime Kaia and I went out on the roof of Anna Mann, climbing out of my third floor window onto a cute little grey sloped roof. I have been wary about this roof all year; I was afraid of Death, but Kaia persuaded me. We sat and smoked a clove and watched the arriving dusk through the leaves of the huge Anna Mann oak.

Went off to the print room in the art department after that, made a few prints and cleared out my drawer. I've rather enjoyed hiding out and printing for the last week or so, keeping clear of the increasingly deserted campus, (very depressing). At about two in the morning Kaia and I went to the Hot Cake House with Joe and Pavel. The Hot Cake House is slightly dodgy and open 24 hours, we drove there in Joe's car while he played apocalyptic rock opera. I had a waffle, it was good spending some time with Joe and Pavel, I am very fond of both of them. Then a huge bumble bee landed on my face and 'Sweet Home Alabama' started playing , and we got freaked out and decided it was time to leave.

Notes on Food: Part V

I have a feeling that every college campus in America has its own cheap/tastes like piss beer that every student takes to heart, champions, drinks a lot of, loves and hates. A mascot beer. A default beer. I get the impression that at Reed, Pabst Blue Ribbon is that beloved brew.


Aah, PBR. It actually tastes pretty good. I swear. Also I went to a bbq where they marinated chicken pieces for grilling in nothing but PBR, and it tasted heavenly. I swear. Interesting fact: Tim and James finished off 60 cans of PBR between them over the three days of Renn Fayre, (plus extras).

Apparently, PBR had virtually dead sales America-wide, until 2000-ish, when they noticed sales were burgeoning all by themselves in Portland. One bar was selling PBR to skint students and simple working folk, thus beginning an ongoing surge in PBR popularity. I'm pretty sure that this bar was the Lutz, which is up the road from Reed in Woodstock. I have never been there, although I went to the Delta next door a couple of times. I heard that the Lutz was beyond so-bad-it's-good, thus arriving at just plain bad. Or it had unusually sticky carpets or something. But plenty of PBR...

American Graffiti

I am so sad about the end-of-term feeling that's around right now. I just don't feel like we students are really wanted, since all the preparations have already begun to make Reed a student-free place. It's Commencement on Monday, which is basically the graduation ceremony (the event at the beginning of the year was Convocation, and the thing at the end is Commencement, makes no sense at all), all these great white tents have been put up all over campus. Strange having your campus and your home transformed right under your feet for a reason that has nothing to do with you; makes you feel like having a attention-seeking tantrum. The whole place is getting cleared out too, and this includes painting over all the walls formerly covered in graffiti. I was very fond of the Reed graffiti, it was mostly amusing but sometimes even quite moving. I especially liked the infinite variety of grout puns (there's a Facebook group), and the "who do you love?" wall in the bookstore bathrooms ("I love a boy who wears baggy pants", "I love someone who lives far away", that kind of thing). Noticed today that they've covered over my two favourite habitually passed pieces of graffiti, both in the creepy staircase leading up and away from the bookstore corridor: "You cannot defeat Robogoats! Robogoats will delete you!!"; and, further down: "Angelina Jolie, she got some big ass." I used to read them out superstitiously as I walked by.

Well, this afternoon was my last deadline for college work. I wrote four short papers today (no wonder I don't feel much like typing any more) and they were all really quite passable. I'll spend tomorrow in the print studio doing some stuff just for me, but really I'm all done. It's undoubtedly a relief to be done, but the parts of my brain that were being occupied with papers and prints are now free to think about sad things. I'll now try to shut up those brainy bits with pizza and alcohol.

I am in the Library

Bloody finals week. For days everyone I know seems to have been struggling with evil monster zombie papers that actually want to suck my poor Reedies' brains out. Horrid things. I gave my guests a tour of the Reed campus, prompting the following exchange:
Guests: "Your library is so pretty! What delightful architecture!"
Reedies: "I am forced to spend every waking hour in the library. It is hell."

I suppose it will be over soon. If only Renn Fayre wasn't so fun we'd have a lot easier time getting back into work and not feeling resentful. I have some short papers to write for Narrative and Description and a lot of artwork to do for my print class; not so bad, I just need to get organised to do it.

Oh, about the guests. Cat is another visitor from my dear home town of Huddersfield, she flew over to visit me before I leave and then is heading south to see Becca at UC San Diego. Lydia is a good friend from an unconnected source- I know her from UEA but she's been doing this study abroad thing in Roanoke, Virginia all year. Kind of weird that my two friends that don't know each other should both be here at the same time, but I like them both a lot and they don't seem to hate each other so everything is peachy. I've been showing them various chunks of Portland, it's mostly just been great catching up. Oooh, awesome dance party Friday night: Transformal, at which there was some good rave-style music in sync with 80s kids cartoons projected on the walls (Transformers, hence the name, plus Spiderman, Reboot, The Land Before Time...).