Day 1

10:08 am June 13, 2011 Day 1

67 degrees f

Song that’s in our heads: James Brown’s “Get Up Off of That Thang”

I can’t believe we finally did it. We left the house! We’ve got 40,089 miles on the odometer and we’re gonna rack ‘em up. The number 13 has always been a very lucky number in the Duke family—my parent’s anniversary, some sort of Italian superstition, etc. So I think this is the perfect day to start.

We haven’t even gotten on the freeway and we’re already seeing things that need to be documented: “Thank you for your patronag [sic]” on a deceased movie theatre with a weird license plate cover with a Jersey Shore baby on it.

Okay we just hit the 405. Here we go, people!

11:54 am

We’re just coming into Palm Springs…passed Yucaipa (shout out Marymount girls)…and drove under some huge wind machine thingers. They were like giants! Felt like Don Quixote for a second.

I wanted to explain the title of our blog. Teddy and I have been calling our road trip the G.A.R. (not “gar”) since about January. As everyone and their mother knows, I’m an English major. But, that doesn’t mean my brain can’t journey into neural pockets of idiocy and I forget how to spell stuff. So the “R” was obviously, in my mind, “roadtrip”. Sam Roberts kindly reminded us that Road Trip was two words and that the “G.A.R.” should actually be the “gart”. I don’t like gart. So we decided to say screw it and go with “G.A.R.” because it is awesome.

Yesterday, Teddy came up with a solution. G.A.R. now stands for “The Great American Roadyssey”. And a Roadyssey it will be.

Okay, off to the Monarch of the Desert—a real-life jaguar exhibit in the middle of the desert. KITTEH KATS!!!

2:42 pm

97 degrees F

So apparently the jaguar exhibit was actually a full on animal conservancy/preserve! There were tons of amazing little creatures to see. We got there an hour before closing—they closed at 1:30 for some reason—and raced around the park to see some cute fluffy stuff. We went to the “American” section and passed over the “African”. While giraffes are cool, I have seen them in tons of zoos and Teddy saw them in real Africa so… off to gophers and groundhogs we went!

Actually there were way amazing animals—some I had never heard of before—like a Mexican wolf (stunning and terrifying) and the Chotil (?) who is some sort of cat/dog that was lying upside down and having himself a very good time.

By far our favorite was…the Badger. Wow. There needs to be some sort of child cartoon or cult following for this character. I swear, Teddy and I just stood there laughing at him. He was laying on his side, digging out a hole kind of lazily with his front paws. Then he jumped up and started kind of gallivanting back and forth like a little nut. He was fluffy like a dog and very silly, indeed. We bought a postcard with a picture of him on it for the memories…

The scariest thing we saw was not in any cage. Walking right in front of us on our path was this enormous snake. Black with large white spots—it was gorgeous, but a little spooky. We found out it was a Common Kingsnake. Common…psh.

On the way out, more creature excitement! We’re driving along the road and Teddy goes, “Erica, don’t panic, but there’s a hyper wasp inside the car on the dashboard.” Somehow, I don’t freak out, and calmly tell him to pull to the side of the road. I check out the hyper wasp, which really wasn’t any sort of species of insect that any person has ever seen before and was most certainly an alien. Teddy refused to open the door and flick it out onto the road and insisted upon using my sweater to sweep it upon himself and onto his lap. After a few minutes of sheer panic, we discovered that the alien was in fact dead. It now lives in the folds of leather by the emergency break.

4:15 pm

Indian Wells

100 degrees

Just ate lunch at Cactus Jack’s Bar and Grill in Indian Wells.

Ted here. I wanted to make sure Erica didn’t hog all the blogjuice. We had a bit of a hard time getting back to the freeway after Cactus Jack’s. There were some signs for the 10, but there was graffiti on the arrow portion, and then we ended up in some weird one way streets.

Deciding to embrace the getting lost side of roaddyseytripping we struck out in the general direction of the freeway. We ended up seeing a bunch of dust devils and driving to a dead end next to a palm tree farm and nursery. The farm reminded me of a vineyard, except the grape vines were replaced with a colossal maze of palm trees. It was cool.

We made it back to the freeway, and took a small detour to Joshua Tree. And now I want to stop writing.

5:55 pm

102 degrees

Middle of Highway 62, Rice, CA

Erica again. So we brought a cactus with us. We’ve had this cactus since November or December. It is most passionately called “The Love Cactus”. (A more or less tongue-in-cheek moniker borrowed from a romcom). When we were going through a rather drab portion of our 4 year relationship, the cactus (a little green succulent purchased from Anawalt) was rather calm and immobile. Then, for some reason, we kinda started falling madly in love with each other again, and you know what? The darn cactus grew this little stalk and was so, so happy.

We decided to bring the Love Cactus with us and plant it somewhere nice. It is so small and probably comes from California, so hopefully we haven’t done irreparable damage to Joshua Tree National Park. But, we had an emotional goodbye under a beautiful Joshua Tree and we planted our little cactus and left.

Sigh. It was nice. Then we decided it was time for me to drive…the manual. Teddy drives a manual Toyota Matrix—tons of bad jokes about abound about “entering the Matrix” etc. I was totally fine! I did it! It helped that there were no cars on the road and I could take my time. I have been such a brat about driving stick (because it’s terrifying and I didn’t really have a choice in the matter) but I’m beginning to change my tune.

I drove an hour and a half all the way to this weird turn out on the side of the road where we stopped. There was something ominous about the broken down, ripped up gas station off the highway. Obviously, we wanted to check it out. We both decided that the whole scene looked straight out of The Hills Have Eyes—which, if you haven’t seen, don’t. It is so gruesome and so dark. Usually, I can handle a good scary movie, but this one was just…indescribably scary. It’s about a family that gets lost on a …road trip… in the … deserts of California… and runs into all these mutated monster folk who were messed up from nuclear testing.

Fortunately, we lived. No monsters, but we had a nice hipster photo shoot and skipped over some barbed wire and had a jolly good time. It’s funny that whenever I’m in a sandy area and I see broken glass, the first thought in my mind is to go sea glass hunting. Whoops. More probably was my next quest—I really wanted to find some sort of like…messed up old ghost town baby doll as a souvenir, but no luck.

Also, you know when it’s so hot that your eyes feel like they’re breathing in sauna air? Yeah the breeze was flowing but it was burning air.

We then spotted the shoe fence! I’ve heard of this before—it’s the stuff of road trip lore, I think. It’s a huge barbed wire fence with shoes sticking up and out every which way, weird notes and the odd “Andrew was here” (lame) sign. Although it was a little tough for me to part with them, my Princeton sandals needed a place in history. Teddy and I each stuck one on a barb and put added a little ivy league pride to the middle of the desert.