Renting a car makes it real easy to make friends at a hostel, and after I moved out I hung out with J and D, two guys who were sightseeing in Hawaii after J’s brother’s wedding.

We did some picnicking on the beach, drove around West Maui (which I think is a better drive than the Road to Hana), biked down the volcano, hung at the pool and topped it off by watching and making fun of a couple of westerns. Actually, come to think of it, we made fun of a lot of things. Exactly my type of company.

Lack of planning (partly our fault for constantly distracting him) left D without a place to stay the night before he took the ferry to Honolulu so I had my first overnight guest while living in a car. I wish it’d been in an area I knew better. We had a couple false starts (or stops, rather) trying to pick out a place to stay, but in the end D found a nice residential area and we slept pretty well until about 6am. Or at least I did. D is 6’1″ so I doubt he was quite as comfortable in the passenger seat as I was in the driver’s seat. I was happy to introduce the whole sleeping in a car thing to someone new. I was quite amused by the whole thing.

Then again, I’m quite amused by many things.

For J: Why does the moon rise 50 minutes LATER each day. Trust the astrophysicist.

Oh well, at least I got an idea of what backpacking is like, (even if I did spend only 3 days rather than 6 out there). I don’t think I’ll be doing the Appalachian Trail anytime soon, but I would still like to do some shorter trail (hopefully with more success than the Kalalau trail). In fact, I think I’m going to make it one of my new year’s resolutions to do either a backpacking or bicycling trip sometime this year.

ahh well. It’s not as if I had any particlar plans for today beyond reading and reorganizing the car anyway. I even began sorting through some of the hundreds of pictures I’ve taken in the last week. Though I’m typing this on my phone so posting those will have to wait.

I spent the last two days at Dinosaur National Monument. Two days was enough for now but I already want to go back sometime and do more exploring on the Green River. Preferably sometime when the mosquitos aren’t so bad. I got eaten alive by them, a red ant and something else I never sawM but must have been a spider because it left a bite mark 3 or 4 times the size of a mosquito’s that still itches today.

As a side note, I just wanted to mention that I’m finally reading Blue Highways.  Only just started it, but enjoying it so far.

Perhaps I should start a book page.  What are people suggestions for travel related books?  Currently on my list to finish/start:

• Blue Highways – William Least Heat-Moon
• Travels with Charley – John Steinbeck (Also, I’ve still never read Grapes of Wrath)
• American Nomads – Richard Grant
• Doing Nothing – Tom Lutz   (not about travel exactly)
• Travel in the Ancient World – Lionel Casson (One of my favorite authors.  I read this a long time ago and finally getting back to it.)

I’m sure there’s a couple more about travel in the shopping bag of books I’ve got in the van, but that’s all I can think of at the moment.

Any suggestions?

Tomorrow, I’m going to be visiting the lowest elevation in the continental US.  I’m certain that while there I’ll be tempted to dig a hole and make it even lower.

I’ll probably post a bit more about the conference later, but I make no promises. I may be too busy playing with my new thread.

For nearly the first time this trip I passed by a truck stop, (been doing most of my traveling on smaller highways), and I had a chance to take a look at some of the 12 volt cooking appliances. I have been feeling a definite lack of hot foods this trip. Or perhaps I should say ‘cheap’ hot foods since I’ve been visiting with a lot of old friends this trip and we usually end up going out to eat.

That’s fine with me, of course. I think that’s part of the fun of travel, but as time goes on I’ll definitely be wanting to do some more of my own cooking here in the van.

Which is why I will probably end up getting the RoadPro cooking pot. (Sorry, no links right now. I’m posting this with my phone and can’t do them).

They have a couple different appliances, including a skillet which also looks pretty sweet, but knowing what types of things I’d actually cook on a regular basis the pot would be better.

There’s a crockpot, which Tara, from Hobostripper.com, says is not very good and a little oven which is also tempting, even if only to say I have an oven in the van and can make fresh cookies when I want. As neat as it is though, I’m not sure I’d use it enough to justify the space.

There’s a small electric water heater which I like the idea of, but might not be necessary if I get the electric pot. Still, when I was traveling in the winter I constantly had tea heating in my, -now broken-, SmartMug. Maybe that’s something to consider for the winter.

Now that my curtains are finished, (at least they’re up and working and I’m unlikely to put anymore time into them even though they’re less than elegant), my next little project of the van is figuring out the cooking stuff. Anyone tried any of these?

After about ten days driving up the CA coast without the internet and very little phone reception I’m spending a couple hours here in Crescent City getting, (sort of), caught up.

It has become clear to me that I need to start up a page on this website dedicated to the places I’ve found to eat on the road. That will take some time though, and I’m afraid you’ll have to wait for it.

Pictures also will have to wait. I need to buy a new card reader since I’ve been planning on getting one anyway and my computer and camera aren’t talking to each other anymore. But honestly I haven’t been taking a lot of pictures like normal. Pictures simply don’t do justice to what I’ve been seeing the last week along the coast.

The last time I left San Diego it took me a couple days to really settle into the attitude of traveling with no real worry as to plans. This time it’s taken longer, possibly because I already had something of a route planned out already since I’m heading to Spokane for a tatting conference. It’s hardly much of a confining commitment, but between that and coordinating with friends I’ve been driving nearby I hadn’t really felt like I was getting into the travel attitude I strive for until just this last week.

It really sunk in yesterday when I was on way down to the Tall Trees Grove in Redwoods National Park. Skipping down the trail surrounded by these huge trees in a part of the park you need a permit to visit, (it’s free, just ask at the visitor’s center, definitely worthwhile). It’d been raining and cold earlier and was still cloudy, but you wouldn’t be able to see a blue sky through the canopy anyway.

Part of what made it nice also was that I recently read “The Wild Trees” by Richard Preston. One of the things I’d like to do more of as I’m traveling is to actually do some more research into the places I’m going before I actually get there. I’m a bit lazy with that and I don’t find out until after I’ve left a place some of the things I’ve missed.

Still, seen a lot. Is it really possible that I left LA only about three weeks ago?

This is what I love about travel. How is it possible that only a week ago I was in Point Reyes, two weeks ago I was hanging out with friends in the Bay Area and exactly three weeks ago I was sitting on the side of the road taking pictures of buffalo.

There is so much more I’d like to talk about here, many more things I’d like to do with this website, but right now I’m having trouble sitting still here, I’m ready to get back out there and I still need to do laundry before I leave town.

Ahh, that’s why I’m traveling. What a gorgeous road and I never knew about it.

I headed out of Los Angeles on the 5 freeway on Thursday night and stayed in Taft, CA. In the morning I stumbled upon the Taft Oil Museum while getting lost trying to leave the city in the right direction. It’s a really lovely museum. It focuses more on the history of the town rather than oil specifically, but since the town started as an oil mining town it still makes sense to call it an oil museum. Eventually there will be a replica oil mining camp from the buildings on the ground. Most of those were closed while was there so I just enjoyed wandering around the main museum.

Driving around Taft, the area reminded me of what I suspect Los Angeles must have looked like in it’s early history. Low mountains surrounding a flat plain dotted with oil derricks. The scene above is near the beginning of highway 58, the route I was taking to get from the 5 to highway 1 along the coast. A fabulous road to start off the trip with. And the perfect example of the happy cows of California that are suppose to produce the best cheese. It seemed appropriate to stop and have lunch, (which did include cheese), on the side of the road near these cows. They were all a little concerned about my presence there, but it was fun to watch the young ones playing.

Further along the road, the buffalo couldn’t care less that I’d stopped. They stayed right up next to the fence making sure they got every blade of grass. I’d never seen buffalo up close, so I stuck around and took pictures here too. Anything really to break up the driving some. This was a long day as far as mileage covered since I wanted to skip anything that could be seen on a weekend trip from Los Angeles and I wanted to get up to the Bay area while it was still the weekend and I could visit with friends easily.

I’ve just realized I didn’t upload any pictures of Soda Lake, the whole point of taking this route between the 5 and the 1. I’ll have to add one on a later post, but it’s quite an interesting spot. It’s in the northern top of Carrizo National Monument, an area that is shaped by the San Andreas fault, which runs through it. A long time ago, (a quick google search isn’t giving me any dates, so you’ll have to get vague knowledge), much of what’s now California was covered by the ocean. That ocean shaped the land that we see now, (and the ancient sea life caused the oil deposits).

Carrizo National Monument and Soda Lake is a spot that I think I will have to visit again on a weekend trip from Los Angeles to explore more. For that first day however it was on to Highway 1 and the Big Sur.

Much has been written about the California coastline and the drive along Highway 1.  It was a great drive for the sunset, but, of course, when you driving that winding road it takes quite a while to do. I stopped when it got dark and enjoyed it again in the morning light. I will not even attempt to do it justice here. I’ll just brag about the view outside my window when I woke up:

Below, you can just barely see the spot where I stayed, way off in the distance. It was the furthest curve of the coastline in this picture.

Along the way I listened to the start of Kevin Starr’s history of California as a book on tape. Very interesting focus a mental understanding of the history while driving around the state and focusing a mental picture of what it encompasses physically as well.

It was all along gorgeous roads, but quite a lot of driving for the first day. I enjoyed spending the last two days hanging out with friends in the bay area and am going to be doing the same thing for the next couple days as well. After that heading off north to spend some time in Point Reyes in Marin County. One of my favorite places in the US.

I’ve been back in Los Angeles for the last month working at KJAZZ, (America’s most listened to jazz and blues radio station according to the latest numbers), on the pledge drive. During the prep time for the drive I work out of the station’s offices in Westwood, but the drive itself is run from the studio in Long Beach. Most of the drive staff, of course lives near the Westwood offices, meaning that they had somewhere between 1-2 hour commutes each way depending on the day of the week. Not much fun to face when you consider that our work days were 12-15 hours long. With my little van serving as my home base, however I was able to stay down in Long Beach and skip all that crazy traffic on the 405. From the time I arrived in Long Beach on the evening of Feb. 20th to when I headed back up to Westwood on March 2nd I traveled all of 40 miles. Not bad.

I used to do something similar for the month when I lived in my van while working Monday-Friday in Westwood for KJAZZ and Friday-Sunday in Sherman Oaks for Premiere Radio Networks. (Yes, both places on Fridays, unfortunately. Thankfully it was only for about five weeks and the weekend job consisted of sitting in a studio with nothing to do unless something went wrong on the show.)The two places had only ten miles between each other but since I no longer had an apartment to go home to at the end of the night I finally got around to exploring Sherman Oaks, a place I’d worked for over two years. Turns out there’s some very cool restaurants there and an awesome park I’d never known about. If I’d still had my apartment in Santa Monica I would have driven back each night and stayed home.Not that I had any time to explore Long Beach during the pledge drive. At least not this drive. The first pledge drive I did get an evening off and I hung out at the Bolsa Chica Lowlands.

This post is, of course, a subtle apology for not writing more during the last two weeks. Despite the lack of a commute I’ve been too busy with the pledge drive to consider writing anything of much substance. If I had, I doubt it would have been coherent.

I’ll be in LA for the rest of this week and then will go down to my parent’s in San Diego for a couple days to pick up my bike and camping gear. Then I’ll be heading back out on the road, this time going north mostly along the coast. Eventually I’ll make it to Spokane for a two day tatting conference in April, then back to LA by way of Yellowstone and a few other possible places. Here is a very rough idea of the route. (Sorry for not embedding it, Google Maps and WordPress don’t seem to get along.)

Unfortunately since I’ll be coming back to LA for the next pledge drive in May I won’t be on the road for long this time, only about 6 weeks. This is a significantly longer distance than what I did in November and December of last year so this will be an interesting contrast. I should also be able to do a few short trips from LA once I get back and get started on the next pledge drive. After all, with no apartment to hang out at on the weekends I’m more likely to actually explore.

I’m looking for suggestions for places to visit for the next 6 weeks, so if you have any favorite spots between here and Spokane and back please send me an email, jessica (at) ayearinacar.com or, better yet, leave a comment so everyone can check it out.

Just got back from an overnight trip to Kangaroo Island, with mom, my friend Kylie and her parents from Adelaide. It was a great trip. Kylie’s dad worked on Kangaroo Island as a firefighter so knew a lot of the people who we visited. We toured two sheep farms (one where they raised them for wool and one for milk) and a bee farm, ate lots of good food, saw the pelicans being fed, and koalas sleeping. Missed out on the penguins and didn’t see any kangaroos until we were back on the mainland, still great fun and great company.

Also, I want to be a bee farmer now. Adding it to my list.

I did a quick interview with one of the sheep farmers for This Week in Science so I’m excited about that, though it will be a while before I get it together. Special thanks, btw, need to go out to the hosts Kirsten and Justin for plugging my blog and linking it in their show notes. You guys are awesome. Apologies for not having said so earlier.

We “miss” New Years because of time zones, but maybe they’ll do something on the plane. Hopefully they’ll just let us sleep. This is the first new year I haven’t been working all by myself in a studio somewhere so I actually like the idea of skipping it all together. Next year I will do something interesting and count that as my first new year’s evening not working.

I’ve been so busy with traveling in a car that until now I hadn’t really thought much about this month in Australia. This last week though I’ve finally had a chance. It’s going to be very different from the traveling I’ve just finished doing and what I’ll be doing again when I get back.

Traveling with three other people will probably be a bit of an adjustment. I think for the first week or so I will enjoy not having to make the decisions about where to go or what to do next, but then I’m going to start wanting to do my own stuff even when that’s really a lack of anything. One of my favorite things to do when I was in Italy was walking around the cities. I loved sitting around on benches or church/museum steps and tatting. Tatting, as I’ve said before, is an excellent way to strike up a conversation since people want to know what you’re doing. Tricky in Italy since I speak very little Italian, but slowing down and showing them step by step is still works to connect.

Being on a more structured trip will take some adjusting too, we’ll have about the same amount of time in various cities as I’d been spending on my trip, but the very fact that I could have stayed longer than originally planned if I wanted (and as I did in Albuquerque), made it a different experience. In the van, the length of time I stayed in one place was based on what I wanted to do, in Australia and New Zealand what we do will be (somewhat) based on how long we have.

This is really just a small section of the much larger topic of various types of travel. When planning for taking my year off I was surprised with how many people wanted to know why I was traveling around the US and not going over seas. It’s a very different type of travel. I’ll write more about this later. Right now we’ve got to leave in about a hour and I still have to pick out some tatting to take along. I’m only taking a little (love traveling light) so need to decide what color of thread I want to look at for the next month.

 I should back up.

I started out from San Diego and head out first to Anza-Borrego about a week ago.  I made it as far as Julian before it got dark, .  Had there been space for it, the eleventh commandment would have been “Thou Shalt Not Pass Through Julian, California Without Purchasing An Apple-Pastry Product.”

 So I got an Apple turnover and headed on to Anza-Borrego in the dark. 

 Anza-Borrego is the largest state park in California and I believe the largest in the continental states.  

 Turns out the desert is hot.  Even in mid November.  And it’s even hotter when you’re pushing your bike back to the visitor center because you’ve gotten a flat less than 2 miles out on the first bike ride of your big trip. 

 Alas.  At least I hadn’t gotten very far.  I had a repair kit with me, but since I was so close just headed back to the car, and reflected on what it would have been like to cross this area with Jaun Bautista de Anza in the 1700s, and the solitude of the desert, (in between turning down offers of help). 

 That night I fixed the flat, promptly pinched the tube and flattened it again and decided I would until I made it to a bike shop for a new tube and a new set of tire levers since the plastic ones I had tended to bend more than actually pry.  As it turned out I needed a new tire as well.  All that was finally accomplished here in Lake Havasu yesterday. 

 Not having a bike has put a bit of a damper on the first couple towns of my trip, but now that it’s up and running, (with hopefully no more flats for a while), I’m looking forward to seeing how my back reacts to a biking. 

 My back continues to hurt, alternating between extreme pain and general annoyance.  I’ve found that if I sleep on my back it seems to help, as does walking around for a while, but those first 20 yards are a very slow shuffle.  At some points I’m almost afraid to sit down for fear that I won’t be able to stand back up. 

 I discovered yesterday that Advil helps.  I always forget about things like that.  Still I’d rather figure out what caused it to start in the first place.  It’s been over two weeks now and I’d like to be back to normal. 

After Anza-Borrego I spent a day at the Southern end of the Salton Sea.  Both are places I’ll probably go back and explore a bit more, but the heat, (and lack of a bike) spurred me on.  Also I hadn’t quite gotten used to the fact that this is not a normal road trip.  hadn’t quite figured out how to slow down yet, (actually, I’m still working on this).  Spending my third night at a proper campground next to the Salton Sea helped with this.  (One of the great things about Anza-Borrego is that the entire park is open for boondocking.)  If I’m going to pay $17 for a campground I’m going to take advantage of it.  So I enjoyed the minor luxury of having a little plot of land all to myself and spent the evening and next morning reading and relaxing.  

The next two nights were spend outside of Quartzsite, AZ, the winter mecca of snowbirds.  In January and February it swells to nearly a million RVs in town and on the BLM lands around town.  It is a ghost of that now, but fun to wander around for a bit.  I’ll also probably be going back there at some point, but on Thursday, (Thanksgiving), I was going a bit stir crazy because nothing was happening and nothing was open.  Damn holiday!  So I headed north and ended up here in Lake Havasu. 

There is more, of course, but this is a public computer and I’ve monopolized it for long enough.  I’m going to attempt to stand up and hobble down to the London town shops to walk around for a bit and loosen my back before getting back in the car and heading out to Kingman.

All throughout October I was focused on the KJAZZ pledge drive and really had no time for anything else. As soon as that ended it was off to Chicago for the 3rd Coast festival, and I could barely wrap my head around plans for that. (In fact, I shoveled most of the planning off to my dear, sweet friend Connie who I badgered until I convinced her to go and then proceeded to let her take charge of booking the plane tickets, the hotel room and figuring out how to get from one place to the next once in Chicago. Thanks Connie!)

Once that was done all I could think about was finishing off KJAZZ stuff so I could head down to San Diego as quickly as possible and focus on packing for my trip. And now I’m here and almost so focused on the packing that I’m forgetting what I’m packing for.

It still hasn’t sunk in that I don’t need to rush, and that if I leave a day later than I originally planned it’s perfectly fine. Suddenly I have no deadlines, no plans, and no need to be anywhere in particular.

Which is nice because I have to-do list a full page long and two columns. Even after a full year on the road I doubt I’ll be able to shake my addiction to making to do lists. I may not follow through with them once made, but I think I’ll enjoy it when the things on the list are:

1. bike around
2. sample regional foods
3. meet people interview someone cool
4. hike someplace beautiful
5. take tons of pictures
6. check out museums
7. sit quietly and tat up some new piece of lace
8. read a book or two
9. write in journal
10. drive somewhere new and repeat 1-9

Maybe I should change it from a “to do list” to a “could do list.”

There was a glimmer of this new reality sinking in as I approached my parents house on Tuesday night. I was listening to an interview with “The Hungry Cyclist.” He mentioned a book that had inspired him to take his bike trip around North and South America. I made a mental note to check out that book when I’m on my trip and had time. Only then did I realized that time was less than a week away. But I still don’t think it will really sink in until I’m actually on the road.

For the last two years I have been putting aside books I want to read and things I want to do, waiting for this trip and now suddenly it’s nearly upon me. I have an absurd number of books to savor, an pile of crafting supplies, hours of interesting radio shows and podcasts to listen to, and a huge continent with nearly half a billion people, many of whom, I suspect, are interesting.

And now, finally, there’s nothing between me and the road more complicated than figuring out how many books I can fit in the van.

It was great, I toured the Santa Barbara and Santa Ynez missions, talked with strangers, hung out on the pier, watched dolphin and seals in the ocean, tatted, read Jorge Luis Borges, did some writing, almost went on a glider flight over the valley (too overcast), and ate excellent blackberry pie with an awesome crust at a place that also had very beautiful baked potatoes. It even rained one night for about 20 minutes which was very nice. I can’t wait to be out in the (parked) van in a proper rain storm, preferably somewhere with a nice view.

It was also a nice experiment in going to a new place and finding (free) places to sleep. This involved some driving around, but wasn’t too hard, except for getting crazy lost one night in Goleta and ending up on a dirt road somewhere near the UC Santa Barbara campus. It was nice to know that I could show up in a new town and find places, though Santa Barbara is pretty friendly to homes on wheels.

The state parks up there are $25 a night. Seeing that just makes me like the grocery store parking lots more. You can eat quite well on $25. And I did. Spent too much money on food that week, but it was well worth it.

Yesterday, I spent the holiday morning at work taking advantage of the fact that there was no around and I could actually get a editing booth, and then spent the afternoon hiking. Except for the heat (which was actually not as bad as the weekend) it was quite a pleasant day. Though I did kill my battery running the fan and the radio in the evening. Got a jump from the vandweller parked next to me and was on my way.