In a spectacularly unpopular move, my fabulous girlfriend DANAE decided it was time to pack up & move to Atlanta, Georgia. When I say unpopular, I mean (for example)… who now will make me delicious shrimp tacos on Taco Tuesday, complete with homemade tortilla chips & salsa that blows your head off? Who will meet me to carefully read and study each volume of the “Bad Girls Guide” book series ? With whom will I gossip freely with about men, life, and beauty secrets? Who will have lunch with me during tax season? Who will take me quad-riding in the desert ? HOW WILL I LIVE WITHOUT HER ?!?!?!?!?! It’s catastrophic.

So we decided to get over it & make a road trip out of the situation. GOOD IDEA.

Thursday morning, June 2nd, we hit the road at the crack of dawn (… right..). Danae’s Jeep was loaded up with the remnants of her possessions and her energetic golden retriever (dog) named Alex. We had plenty of emergency copies of People magazine, Vogue, and Cosmo. The CD player was loaded with Jimmy Buffet. We had our cool sunglasses on. Boy Scouts couldn’t have been more prepared.

After a brief stop at the Barstow Station (a location which is described in my Death Valley post), we continued on through the barren Mojave desert, across the Colorado River, into Arizona. Somewhere along the way we stopped at a rest stop that was full of German tourists from Stuttgart. I asked them how they liked the US, & they said nervously “oh, very much” then walked very quickly away from me as if I was a little weird for talking to them. ???

Highlights of our 4-day trip include:
- Freaky small towns in Arizona. They only eat steaks, close early, don’t seem to like visitors, & have drunk cowboys stumbling around the streets at night. Typical!
- Multi-hour traffic jam in the middle of nowhere in the deserts of New Mexico! We had plenty of time to talk to truck drivers.
- Very scary motel room in Alabama… we checked in then checked OUT! .. hit the road & drove until 3am until we reached Birmingham where my Mom had found us a SUPER LUXE hotel (not really, but it FELT like it!!) where we kissed the ground and thanked God for air conditioning & ice machines
- Drove into Atlanta, then had to go straight to the airport to drop me off for my flight back to LA !! I guess we ran out of time with all those bathroom stops, candy stops, soda stops, Alex stops, shopping stops, I’m-bored stops…

A few gratuitous photos follow:

Alex makes friends with road workers at a desert rest stop:

Authentico steakhouse in Arizona:

Wide open spaces in New Mexico:

Me driving Danae’s very full jeep:

Alex having some fun!