Road trip or roving relocation?
Last year, having bought a used MINI Cooper over the winter from a friend at a fair price, I made a road trip across the country starting on March 31. Along the way, I stopped and saw friends in Columbus, Ohio, but was intent on getting to my destination of Concord, N.H. apace, because I wanted to make it there in time for the April 3 birthday party held at the home of the couple I always stay with in my hometown.
I did in fact arrive in time for that gathering, meaning that I completed the trip in about four and a half days. I was still almost three months away from adopting Rosie and I was also, in theory, still training to compete in running races. I was also planning to station myself at the 23-mile mark of the Boston Marathon for the fourth straight year, which I did (and the weather was so abysmal last year that I practically had Beacon Street to myself). I didn't run any races while I was there, although on the way back, I accompanied a friend to a 64-something at the Broad Street 10-Miler in Philadelphia. I stopped to see friends in Indiana, Illinois and Iowa, and after surviving the desolation of Nebraska and northeastern Colorado -- which is not as soul-crushing as the strip of I-70 that crosses eastern Colorado and Kansas -- I made it home around May 10.
This year, I'm making a similar trip in terms of its timing (I left Boulder on March 21) and its general eastward direction. Running is playing a supporting, not starring, role. I hope to never be at the Boston Marathon again, and having confirmed that "masters racing" is an especially ugly and embarrassing form of being graded on a curve, I shitcanned the idea of goal-oriented running about six months ago. But I'm still an eager jogger, and since June I've had have a companion who loves both trotting with me and riding shotgun in the car to wherever we decide to jog when we don't start from our home in East(ish) Boulder. I also have a much more enjoyable and lucrative source of primary income than I did a year ago, which is the sort of thing that tends to happen when you have low-to-modest career aspirations (to me, not having to be around other humans while I work is not a perk but a requirement), have stopped pouring booze into the anus in the middle of your face, and have a have a decent flair for marketing whatever professional skills you've managed to develop and retain despite routinely applying a flamethrower to your own efforts.
When I set out on this journey, I did not have a fixed itinerary, with the only confirmed stops being the house of the same friend in Indiana on the way east and the house of same buddy in Iowa on the way back west. I was strongly considering swinging through Roanoke, Virginia, where I lived for a couple of years and enjoyed some great running circa 2003, and heading either north or south from there before starting the return leg. But the one-two punch of multiple automotive troubles resulting from the same incident and an off-putting experience in Indiana in the final days of March made even uglier by those car woes had me thinking while I was still in Bloomington that I'd be headed back to Boulder as soon as I got my headlight fixed. Boulder can be a maddening place even for someone who is untroubled by the fact that American society even on its best day is an irredeemable shambles, but it's my home now, and Rosie's as well, and the more I imagined motoring through a bunch of uninviting land-patches mostly for the sake of motoring, the more alluring the notion of lounging around on the Front Range became.
As it happened, I kept driving east after I got the headlight replaced, which cost me a modest $149. That was on March 5, and I'm still in Virginia, in no hurry to get home, though when the time comes I won't be thrilled to have to drive across the country's flabby, shit-encrusted midsection again.
One of the many vexing aspects of owning one of the fucked-up douchemobiles known as a MINI Cooper is their highly proprietary construction, which can make getting replacement parts arduous. I wound up lingering in Bloomington for a full week longer than I wanted to waiting for the ordered headlight to arrive, and because my friend's house had turned out to be an unsafe place for both me and my dog thanks to the behavior of the various snorting and farting animals that reside there, I spent about a week in a room at a motel that is part of a notably seedy nationwide chain. (When I decide on matters such as what kinds of places to pay money to stay in, I really need to internalize the fact that, while it's OK to be thrifty, I don't need to ruin one of the few things I might enjoy, like road trips, by acting like someone teetering on the edge of being shit-broke anymore; but that's a whole other bucket of piss.
At the end of my stay in Bloomington, an boisterous and unapologetic hillbilly couple spent a couple of unruly nights in the room next door, with the man berating the woman nonstop despite the fact that she was the one with the car and the credit card (don't ask me how she managed to fall into possession either item) and the two of them basically bellowing about the current arrest warrant they man had. I won't describe what I did to get back at them for costing me hours of beauty sleep, because the way I went about this almost certainly straddles the line between ordinary antisocial behavior and, if you want to get creative, criminal mischief. But either way, I would guess that this couple went from being on the run from the law to being collared by it.
It wasn't until after my headlight was replaced that I decided to keep going east after all. I should describe what happened to my car in detail, because it's fairly unusual.
I will admit here that I was aware before setting out that I should have replaced all four tires before so long a trip, but instead, I had someone who is considerably less cartarded than me -- and that's setting a low bar -- look at the treads, and he declared that I should be able to make it to Indiana and back, but should at least consider rotating the front and back tires before heading out. I did not; the left front tire blowout was entirely my fault. I had rolled the dice on getting new tires before starting the drive and I lost that gamble. And it could have been worse for all three of us (the car, myself and Rosie; that will never be a feature film, but it sure sounds like one).
The end was not precisely sudden. After about 20 seconds of ominous rattling that started about 30 miles west of the Kansas border on I-70 -- a sound worrisome enough so that I would have pulled over had I been on a surface street, but I stayed in my semi-complacent Interstate fugue) the tire went, my second lifetime flat tire and by far the more violent of the two. I was able to guide the car, which has a wheelbase of about 14 microns, onto the low median without apparent incident. (I managed to register that Rosie, who had been calmly surveying the plain brownish-gray horizon from her seat to my right, seemed to think that this was all part of the plan.) The headlights of MINI Coopers are built right into the hood, which means that when a tire goes, the lights are susceptible to damage from flapping rubber.
As you can see from the pic above, not only did was the headlight destroyed, but the blowout, in addition to wrecking my turn signal on that side, did some serious damage to the frame as well. I don't care about cosmetic damage, and in fact, when I decide I've had enough of the car, probably within a year, I am going to beat the living Satan out of it with a mattock, possibly charging admission and donating the proceeds to any opponents of fertility research I can find, all the while wishing God were instead at the dealership 45 miles yonder carrying out the same work.
But for now I need the car, and when I zoomed onto the median when the flat struck, some obvious damage was done to the undercarriage. I continued driving after I got all four tires replaced (price tag: $560), another 900 miles or so, and when I left Bloomington over a week later, I was now able to legally drive the car at night, but the noises that had started to emanate from under the right rear wheel back in Colorado were still there. I continued onward toward Roanoke anyway, and got there after spending one night in a very desolate town called Winchester, Ky., a depressed town in a very desolate state. Kansas is banal because it's depressing to see nothing, and dispiriting to hear nothing on the radio besides country and Christian nonsense; Kentucky is painful because, while there is plenty to see, a great deal of it is just plain ugly; Appalachia, I think, smacks of hopelessness in a different way than does the aggressively backward Midwest. A more self-aware and hence less malevolent type of poverty pervades coal country, where opioids and meth are surely prevailing over Jesus-preaching efforts by now.
After I got to Roanoke, I arranged for a local garage to deal with the ruckus emanating from the right rear portion of the car. This turned out to be the assembly hub, which is the name for the part I was imagining. A new one set me back $480, bringing the total bill for the car to about $1,200. Obviously I'm not happy about that, but when I bought the car I more or less factored in expenses like new tires and other shit I could more easily delay almost indefinitely if I didn't take the care on long journeys.
Anyway, I have stayed here a lot longer than I intended or would have guessed was likely even had I planned to stay more than a week when I arrived. It's all been good. The easy and familiar comfort of being around close family outside of my parents and sister is something I haven't experienced in a while. I connected with my Uncle Dave, my one surviving maternal uncle now that this gem is wherever they planted him or his soot, and my Aunt Connie for the first time since I think, 2002, when I lived in Roanoke. Rosie and I have had a blast running the greenways and trails -- our streak is still intact at 177 days, and we're using a blend of my old routes and ones I never properly explored when I lived here before because I didn't have a car. But the full description of this part of my trip will have to wait until it's over, and anyone who really wants to see more photos for any reason has either seen them already or knows where to look -- this here shit's already far too long, greasy and malformed as it is.