The Road Trip (part two) The long awaited sequel... In September of 2003, according to plan, I flew from Cleveland to Albuquerque.  The plan, of course, was masterminded by my dear friend Pat.  I was to fly to New Mexico in order to accompany him on his drive home to New York.  It might not make sense, but it’s something akin to parking your car really far away in the mall parking lot so that you have a long walk and are forced to exercise.  It’s like that, if you consider four days in the hottest, most foul-smelling car in the country to be exercise. To the car’s (and Pat’s) credit, it didn’t start out smelling foul.  Sure, it had a weird musky odor, but it grew on you.  The smell can be blamed on the glorious hot springs of New Mexico.  The night before we embarked on the eastward trip home, Pat drove me to the darkest, most secluded, mountainous area where I was sure to breathe my final breaths.  We trudged up the rocks in the pitch dark, aided only by a keychain pen light and my constant predictions of death.  Looking back on it, I was not aiding at all.  Anyways, Pat claimed to know the route to a fantastic natural hot spring, where naked neo-hippies were rumored to have been seen on occasion. “Are you sure you know where we’re going?” I asked. “Uhh, pretty much.  I know we have to go up,” Pat replied. “Yes.  I trust you completely,” I said without a trace of sarcasm. “We just have to listen for the sound of water,” Sacajawea responded, instilling me with much confidence in my guide. After about 15 minutes and considerable doubt of Pat’s navigational skills, we accidentally stumbled upon the springs.  Much to my dismay, there was not a naked person in sight.  We got in, semi-clothed, the squares that we are, and enjoyed a nice long soak. When it came time to leave, the danger factor of climbing down a steep mountain in the dark was compounded by the fact that we were now very wet and cold.  I thought the best idea was to sit down and stay put until dawn or at least until some sherpas came to our rescue, but Pat insisted that there was no problem with being dripping wet and clad in flip-flops as we navigate down a mountain by way of the moonlight.  Surprisingly, we made it to the bottom and remembered the location of the car.  I was sure that if we did somehow get lost, a friendly mountain lion would come to our aid.  Feeling as though we had not taken enough chances in one night, I ordered Pat to drink a fifth of vodka and pick up a few hitchhikers as we drove home.  He refused. We got back to the house around midnight and our estimated time of departure was 4 am, so we hung our clothes to dry on the light fixtures and went to bed.  We woke up what felt like twenty minutes later, ended up in the car, and the next conscious memory I have is eating breakfast in a Roswell, NM pancake house. “Shit, I forgot to grab my shorts and shirt from last night,” I remembered, wondering if perhaps it had all been a dream. “Oh, I got them this morning. I put all the wet clothes in a plastic bag which I tied shut for safe-keeping,” said Pat. “Good thinking.  That is an excellent way to dry clothes,” I said. We ate our pancakes and proceeded to do a little “sight-seeing”, if you can call it that.  We walked the streets of Roswell and saw the alien museum, alien gift shops, alien banks, and alien donut stores.  I concluded that Roswell was possibly the most pathetic place in all the country.  (I revised this opinion on November 3rd 2004, when Roswell was bumped to a distant 2nd by the entire state of Ohio.)  I don’t mean to be too hard on Roswell – they have succeeded in establishing a lucrative business market centered entirely on funny alien t-shirts.  My favorite slogan:  Ship Happens. I was a little rusty on my stick-shifting, so Pat was kind enough to drive the entire way to Austin, Texas.  I tried to help out, but suddenly traffic lights started appearing out of nowhere sending me into a severe state of panic and Pat was forced to take over.  To this day, Pat will claim that he drove “the whole way home,” completely overlooking my 20 minute contribution. We stayed in the comfort of Pat’s cousin, Tony’s home in Austin where we had nice beds, food and the opportunity to wash moldy clothes.  We took advantage of most of these amenities.  We stayed a day and got the Texas experience complete with football, tailgate parties, and open, unabashed talk about religion.  It was a lovely town and I was sorry to leave.  I was, of course, much sorrier when we re-entered the vehicle a day and a half later to find that the smell had grown strong enough to drive the car itself. The smell got tired from being so rampant, so Pat offered to drive most of the way to New Orleans.  The smell felt quite at home there.  Somewhere around St. Charles, LA, Pat’s gambling addiction got the better of him.  After countless billboards for riverboat casinos, we decided to get some fresh (i.e. humid and rampant with enormous bugs) air and waste some money on a boat.  We were optimistic that while neither of us was 21, perhaps such age restrictions didn’t apply on the water, or in the South.  Unfortunately, as we attempted to board the great floating casino, some extremely large, incomprehensibly Southern, black men felt that we were trying to pull the wool over their eyes.  It seems that they thought we were trying to trick them with our authentic underage identification.  We apologized for the confusion and thought we could go on our way, but they made us wait for their even larger boss.  The boss sauntered up to us, and we had to explain. “You see, we thought that maybe you could go on the boat if you were over 18.  We don’t know anything.”  He took Pat’s id and looked at it carefully, angry and perplexed. “And where’s yours?” he asked me. “Uh, I left it in the car.” “You can’t come in here with no i.d.  I don’t what you two tryin’ to pull here.” “Yeahh… I know.  We’re not trying to pull anything.”  We were not, in fact, trying to pull anything.  He continued to eye us suspiciously and mutter things to the other men that my Midwestern ear could not decipher.  After a good 5 minutes of the bad cop-bad cop routine, he returned Pat’s id and warned us that if we ever tried this again he would “send [us] up the river.” After narrowly escaping the river, we had plans to eat in a famous vegetarian restaurant in New Orleans, being deprived of such cuisine during our stay in Texas.  (I had never seen “brisket” until that state).  We got to the city around 7 and found the restaurant approximately 3 weeks later.  Or so it seemed.  We knew the address and we even had directions to it, but the street layout seemed to be designed specifically to prevent us from getting to our destination.  Every time we stopped to ask for directions the people were either tourists, drunk, or incomprehensible Louisianans, (thus presumably drunk).  When we finally ate, it was the sweetest nectar we had ever tasted, metaphorically speaking.  The literally sweetest nectar I have ever tasted was when my dad put hummingbird feeder in the fridge and I thought it was fruit punch. We stayed in a youth hostel like none other.  It was called St. Vincent’s, which Pat repeatedly insisted on pronouncing in a French accent (the same one he uses to say ‘Pokemon’ and ‘pecan’).  It was a real luxury hostel.  There were no bunk-beds or shared bathrooms.  It was basically the cheapest, haunted hotel in the city.  When I reminisce about New Orleans, I don’t think of voodoo, Bourbon Street, or even drunk women bearing their bosoms;  no, I will always remember it as the city where I opened the smelly bag of moldy clothes.  We were a mere 15 hours from home, but I couldn’t take it any longer.  I held my breath, opened the bag, threw them in a sink-full of water and hotel soap bars and prepared for the worst.  I made a mental note to avoid placing them in a sealed plastic bag before baking them in an oven/car this time.  After a nice, long soak, the clothes were ready to go, so Pat and I followed them.  The staff at St. Vincent’s prepared us individual breakfasts in awkward silence the next morning, an d were offered ‘grits’ which we politely refused. We embarked on the journey that I said could not be done.  New Orleans to Columbus.  One day.  15 hours.  Pat’s crazy idea.  I swore we’d never make it, but all my naysaying didn’t stop him.  We made it, and nothing was ever the same again.  The car would never smell the same.