Leo and I are now safely in Scottsdale. We arrived around 9 pm Arizona time on Wednesday, after leaving Seattle at 1 pm on Monday. It took a little longer than I’d hoped, but the end result is that I’m here safely, along with my beloved car and beloved dog, who just could not be more excited to see his grandfather. Leo did really well up until about the last four or five hours of the drive, which he spent whining and crying and generally refusing to interact with me. What I did learn: Any fast food restaurant will sell you a single beef patty for fifty cents, and it’s a great way to get back on your dog’s good side. Also, when you’re just looking at (and smelling!) the single beef patty, tearing its greasy, charred mass apart with your fingers so your dog can eat it, you wonder who in their right mind would feed this to humans?
Other highlights:
This trip marked the joyous occasion of me finally getting my much-coveted photo of the highway sign for Weed, California. You have no idea how many accidents I’ve almost caused in the past trying to get that photo. Now its done and everyone can drive through Weed, California knowing full well that no one sharing the road is in any way impaired. Phew.
I really really really liked this mountain. I don’t remember where I saw it, probably somewhere in Washington, but I took like a million pictures of that mountain. It was just very majestic and shit.
Farmers were setting crops on fire and I thought that was cool too. Why do the farmers set the crops on fire? It kind of looks like a war scene, and for a moment I was lost in a little reverie where I was a fearless army of one and I had to evade and thwart the enemy before they raped and murdered any more innocent women and children. And then a Britney song came on and I got distracted.
I couldn’t safely turn around to constantly check on my baby in the backseat, so instead I would reach my arm around, take a photo, and then look at the photo to make sure he was doing okay.
This is the funniest part: Remember last December when me and Trish and Jesse rented that cabin at Mt. Baker and our landlord was REALLY REALLY OBNOXIOUSLY “HELPFUL” by labeling everything in the fucking cabin? (If you’d like your memory jogged, all the photos are here.) So this landlord must have a brother who owns the gas station off I-5 at the Mercer County line. It’s seriously a middle-of-nowhere gas station, like the only edifice in 20 miles, and I stopped there for gas and decided I ought to use the restroom as well.
First, I saw this, which I thought was weird:
Then I actually entered the bathroom, and I had to muffle my hysterical laughter, lest someone think I was huffing paint in there. Here are the signs in the bathroom:
And then there was some VERY SPECIFIC DIRECTION about how to find the chocolate candy in a store the size of my bedroom.
You have no idea how hard it was to resist asking the clerk, deadpan, where the chocolate candy was. I posted these pics to my Facebook and this one reader was all like “I have been in that SAME gas station and I told everybody about those signs for weeks!” Ha. Small world. Weird signs.
Anyway. Safe at home, almost completely unpacked, cuddling with my baby Leo in bed. I miss Seattle and I miss my friends and my activities there, but I think this will be a nice mental shift for me. I’m looking forward to seeing what comes of it.
