on the road

Here's another one of those entries I began, but never finished. But it would be a shame to delete it all just because I didn't make it to day 3 =)...

It is still difficult for me to grasp the reality of the present moment. Here I am, sitting in my homey apartment in Northern Virginia, staring out my window towards Washington DC, insulated from the 100+ degree summer heat. As familiar as LA and San Diego felt when I was home two weeks ago, I can no longer consider myself a resident. For all intents and purposes, I am a full blown Washingtonian.

But not only did I get to return home and reunite with family and friends for a week, but I also managed to do something I have yearned to do ever since I discovered my love for driving: road trip across the country.

The details were hazy at first, but my school required me to have a car out here, and shipping it seemed like a waste of a perfect opportunity. I rounded up my team of tried and true travelers and plotted out our meandering course across the southern United States. We gave our self six days and six destinations before reaching DC just in time for fourth of July. Our must see cities included Santa Fe, NM, Austin, TX, New Orleans, LA, Savannah, GA, Charleston, SC, and Richmond VA. Our journey began when I picked up Naomi and Surleen from Los Angeles early Saturday morning.

Day1: We determined early on that we would rather spend more time on the road earlier on so we would have more time to enjoy the places we really wanted to see in the south. Hence, our first day was scheduled for 13 hours of driving. As it was a Sunday, we made good time leaving LA, however our first challange came soon enough. As we approached the freeway for Las Vegas, we were suddenly bombarded with blinking signs indicating a freeway closure at Victorville, CA. We didn't heed this warning too seriously, thinking that there would be straightforward detour signs to skirt around the closure and quickly return to I-15. No such luck. Instead, we were forced to exit the freeway at an exit with one road to nowhere and certainly no detour signs. Even my GPS didn't want to cooperate. We wound up taking a significantly slower and more circuitous route on surface streets, eventually meeting up with the correct highway 2 hours behind schedule. Thankfully, this occured on our first day. As much as our sidetracking frustrated me, I was still in hopeful spirits and with Naomi and Surleen beside me, we could not be brought down. The rest of the day was geographically uneventful (read: endless desert), although we were pleasantly surprised to find beautiful mountain scenery and greenery in Northern Arizona. Flagstaff made it to a growing list of cities in which I could actually see myself living... were I ever to require a new city =).

Day 2: We woke up in a modest inn in Santa Fe, filled ourselves with a modest breakfast, and headed out to downtown Santa Fe. The city center was quaint and beautiful, a grassy square surrounded by adobe style buildings containing galleries and artistic souveniers. One side of the square was lined with blankets displaying copious amounts of silver and turquoise jewelry. Natives sat patiently behind them in fold out chairs selling their craft.