Home

We're home now. Our last night on the road was spent in a divey motel in Anderson, California that was, oddly, missing an alarm clock. We didn't want to cross over the Siskiyou summit too early in the day (which was a good thing because, well, we didn't have an alarm clock) because of the potential of ice on the road so, to celebrate our last day on the road we stopped, as most people do when they're traveling through America, at a greasy spoon in Redding. For our last meal, we chose the Black Bear Diner (and, when I say "last meal" I'm not being entirely facetious--there was so much food we, quite literally, may not have to eat ever again or, alternately, the artery clogging potential will do us in before lunch). The biscuit that came in lieu of toast, while not as tasty as the ones at the Flying Biscuit in Atlanta, was decent enough and, depending on your point of view, had the added bonus of being as big as a large infant (I actually considered not eating it and, instead, claiming it as a dependent on my taxes but, alas, it was too alluring with all of its buttery goodness and, thus, suffered a saliva soaked end). Sufficiently stuffed we made our way to Yreka where Pete agreed to meet us to tow the trailer the rest of the way with his 4-Runner, as the mountain/weather combination could have been the one-two punch to bring down Sedona's up-until-now trusty little sedan. But, of course, who needs a steep mountain pass and a blinding snowstorm to damage a car when you can, as Sedona did, shortly after unhooking the trailer in the parking lot of the ingeniously named Liquor Barn, jump it, Dukes-of-Hazzard-style, over the curb and into the street. Fortunately for Sedona there were only a handful of people watching, pointing, and laughing, and I, for my part, won't tell anyone (so, shhhhh). Luckily, the undercarriage survived--it would have been embarrassing, to say the least, to end a 3,000 mile trip 40 miles from home, high-centered on a sidewalk. The weather was not as bad as it could have been, considering, and we made it over the top with nary a problem. Even though it's nice to be home, a part of me will miss the open road--the incessant rattle of the trailer hitch ticking off the thousands of miles of blacktop, each gaudy, cheesy billboard a poem of America.