Kings of the Road

"If you're not going 80, you're not traveling." Thus saith the bold and intrepid adventurer Lok-kin Yeung. And to be honest, in that case we've been traveling a whole helluva a lot. Of course, unfortunately we discovered that at 81, the cops pull you over in Washington State. At least occasionally.

Despite the occasional inconveniences of long-distance road-trippin, driving in the west as been an incredible experience. Nowhere else in America does the road beckon you so strongly; open and inviting, it stretches out into the distance like a concrete river flowing straight into the shadowy mountains or into the bright blue sky. Horses, cows, and in some cases antelope roam placidly on either side of the highway, while in teh parks you can coast slowly by herds of bison, oodles of elk, and at one point a mountain goat. The landscape, when not obscured by a windshield made opaque for reasons that will be explained below, is quite simply awe-inspiring, and can change from farms and boundless plains to snow-capped mountains in the space of a highway exit. And then there is the speeding.

The first thing you should know is that there are no police on Western highways (well, until you get to Washington State, apparently), especially the smaller roadways. In five days driving we saw the fuzz drive by maybe twice. Secondly, the speed limits usually hold steady at 70 or 75. Third is that the roadways are invariably abandoned. This combination has allowed us, except when we have to avoid steamrolling schoolchildren in the occasional small town, to crown ourselves kings of the open road. This has of course spawned an ever-escalating speed competition between Lok-kin and myself, with Ricardo thus far playing a passive role in third place. While some may find our speeds tame, they climbed rapidly from the first, tentative topping of 90 mph on the third day to ever more boisterous violations of traffic laws and common sense. This was followed by 93, 95, 98, and then the highly inadvisable, illegal, and totally awesome cracking of the century mark. While I hesitate to write this on a public forum where my mother will likely see it (I love you, Mom), we (or, to brag, I) jacked up the speed to 109 in Montana, earning for myself eternal glory and what will most likely be an angry phone call. Alas, given our recent apprehension by the friendly cops of Washington, it is unlikely we will be continuing our exploits (I promise!).

Just Plain Buggy

The trials and tribulations of long-distance driving are certainly formidable, ranging from the persistent ache in your lower back, tuchus, and pretty much everywhere that comes from sitting in a 2-square foot space for 8 hours a day, to the need to get an oil change roughly once a week. These inconveniences are far surpassed, however, by the pernicious inability of bugs to recognize a highway as a ****ing stupid place to congregate.

In the week or so we have spent driving in the West, we have committed a veritable mass-slaughtering of bugs, to a degree that would impress many exterminators. It is rather unnerving to see fly after fly essentially divebomb your windshield, meeting an untimely and aggravatingly sticky death at 85 miles per hour. Before long, however, it becomes simply infuriating, as the front of the car becomes an overcrowded graveyard of winged invertebrates. At every gas stop, painful effort must be spent scrubbing ill-fated fleas and flies off of the windshield, simply for the sake of driving with reasonable visibility. Even after the glass has been painstakingly rinsed of the blood of innocents, within hours it will have been rendered opaque once again by hundreds of grotesque splatterings, each with its own trajectory and blast radius. The entire front of the car suffers this bombardment (yes, it's suffering is as intense as that of the small creatures meeting their untimely ends on its chrome), and has been recolored an exoskeletal black and grey from its original metallic blue.

Nevertheless, other than those infernal insects and tricksy law enforcement officers, life on the road has been swell. We look forward to many more miles on America's roadways, even as we try to ignore the continued splatters against the windshield while we cruise our concrete kingdom beneath a clear blue sky.