The RT (Road Trip) to Montana, Calgary, Jaspar and Utah
posted at 12:01 pm
on Aug. 3, 2002
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The RTP (Road Trip Plan)
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Back in L.A., my trip seems more real than my current existence.
Everything in L.A. conspires in this unreality: the air makes things look hazy, the heat makes me feel sleepy and the people around me say things that make no sense, like “Did you TiVo the Late Late Show?” and “I wasn’t CCed on the RFP. Can you FTP it to me PDQ? IM the EIC ASAP, OK?”
So instead, I think back on the vacation and what it added up to:
1 glacier stood on
2 people got married
7 national parks visited
12 nights on foreign pillows
13 days (5 with email, 8 without)
43 friends met and re-met
770 peanut M&Ms consumed (4 stale)
4,080 miles covered
11,261 insects smushed on the grill (and sadly 1 bird)
Susie and I started out by swapping our Miata for a friend’s Ford Explorer. Said friend Jaclyn calls her vehicle “ComfyCar,” and it sure lives up to its name. Our Miata had no name when we left, but I think now I’ll be calling it “Hoppy,” because when I got back into it after two weeks in a Ford Explorer, it felt like I was riding a turbo-powered frog.
We headed from the very edge of America, literally two blocks from the Pacific Ocean, and pointed the car North East. By that night, we’d arrived in Las Vegas. There, we stayed in the home of our two good friends Victor and Clara, who have a house set on a golf course / moonscape. It’s so dry there that the smallish mountain behind their house is devoid of any living plant, and it is lit up at night by floodlights, resembling an extraterrestrial spectacle.
From Vegas, we put the pedal to the metal, and made it all the way through Utah to Butte, Montana, and the day after that to Calgary after a short stop at the Canadian border to prove we weren’t smuggling in guns or smokes.
My Mom was glad to see us but a little harried; she was packing for a trip to go teach in Harbin, China. I stayed up until 5 a.m. as she limped about (because of her inoculations all given in the same leg muscle), put things into suitcases and fretted about lesson plans.
My sister drove Mom to the airport, and then drove back and got her carry-on bag and drove that back and off she went to China. I’ve since heard she’s having much fun with an international crowd, but won’t be bringing back any delicious foods acquired on her trip.
That day I also went to Mike and Julie’s rehearsal reception (Mike and Julie’s wedding was the impetus and the ultimate goal of this road trip), and there met a lively trio of sisters, cousins of the bride. They were a lot of fun; they were the kind of women that just might possibly leave you handcuffed to the bed when they’d finished with you. Grady spent a fair chunk of the evening pondering this possibility, I think.
The rehearsal was punctuated by Calgary weather, that is to say: Sunny, followed by cloudy, followed by a small tornado, followed by a nice clear sunset, followed by a smothering night heat and still air, followed by rain. I felt worst for the woman working as the bar tender, who had to wear formalwear and spend much of her time in the unventilated kitchen, hauling boxes of drinks up and down the stairs. On the other hand, she was being paid to be there. 😊 Not that it was bad; most of the time I didn’t notice the heat because I was interesting conversations with people I hadn’t seen in ages, and sitting out on the lawn on a blanket with Susie, who was also enjoying herself.
The next day, the boys met up for breakfast at Kane’s Harley diner, which is becoming somewhat of a tradition. We had eggs and sausage and poked fun of Mike’s pending nuptial nervousness as only old friends can, that is to say, malicelessly.
Our collective duty, as assigned by Mike, was simply to drive out to Mike’s parent’s cabin in several vans, and to bring with us many many coolers full of ice. That ice was to be used to fill an entire canoe, which would then sit in a position of penultimate power opposite the head table. It would be filled with beer, and, simply by being a canoe filled to the brim with beer bottles, would mean that two of Mike’s long-time plans would be fulfilled in a single day (the other one being to get married).
We did make it to the site with 14 coolers or so of ice. It was enough to fill the canoe, but there was worry that the hot day would be hard on the canoe. Refills were not an option, though, so we simply covered the canoe with a tarp and tried our best to keep the sun off it. (I’m not one for suspense, so here’s a peek ahead to two days later: traces of ice were still found in the canoe—ice apparently keeps frozen very well when it’s in large quanitities—this explains glaciers, I suppose…)
The wedding itself will take some describing. Picture a wedding: yours, your friend’s, one on TV, any wedding. Now picture the opposite of that. That was pretty much this wedding. With the exception of some tasty and traditional wedding cake, the ceremony (led by the couple), the setting (an unmowed field with haybails in a circle), the style (a cross of Tibetan and Celtic), the vows (which ended with “We now pronouce you Julie and Mike”), the outfits (he wore cowboy boots, she had an orange cape), the pre-wedding conversation (while waiting, guests played football and tossed a frisbee), the post-wedding celebration (musical instruments were handed out and played by everyone), the rings (there were none), the alcohol (no champagne, but good Canadian Big Rock beer), the honeymoon (Julie went to bed and Mike hung out with his old Scout friends until 2 a.m.), the officiant (no priest, Mike’s brother Paul did the duty), and the clean up (groom brought bags of trash back into the city himself in the old blue station wagon that also held all the wedding presents). It was amazing. It was a wedding ceremony that so obviously reflected the love, and the personality, of the two people being joined, and it was a party that was also obviously 100% free of those “well, we have to have a valet, because my Dad wants it” sorts of items.
Anyway, the wedding was superb, and Susie and I had a fabulous time.
Throughout the two wedding days, we also saw our old friend Ashley, and had hopes to see Zeus, but couldn’t connect. Better luck next time, eh?
We then headed north, through Banff National Park, past Lake Louise, to the Columbia Ice Fields, a huge, we’re taking, enormous, chunk of ice that is no kidding left over from the Ice Age. Every winter it grows a little, and every summer it shrinks a little more, and attached to this ginormous, megamonumental piece of ice are several glaciers that expand out over a huge mountain ridge. One of the pieces, the Athabasca glacier, has tours on special buses with 8 foot tires. We stood on ice as thick as the Eiffel Tower is tall, and drank cold, pure water that was melting off the surface. Great fun.
Later tha day, we arrived in Jasper to hang with an old friend, Anya, who is a doctor working all around Alberta via a locum program—basically, some doctor in a small town wants a vacation, so the province sends in another substitute doctor. We spent about two days there, going on small hikes, taking a gondola to the top of the local mountain, and we spent an entire afternoon just sitting around reading. Very relaxing.
We barely stopped on our way through Calgary, spending just long enough to have more ice cream from the store across the street from my Mom’s. The next day, we picked up pal Clint, who we had asked to come back to L.A. with us, and headed south. We got as far as my Dad’s house in Swan Lake, MT, and stopped for the night. By calling ahead to my sister Nicole (Nicole is working as a bartender in Swan Lake and is staying with my Dad), we’d found out that another local bar was having “Steak Night”—Clint got to sample 16 ozs. of Montana’s finest, and I got a good night’s meat-enduced slumber.
We departed from Swan Lake after a relaxing morning of hammock-swinging, breakfast-eating and car-loading. Our goal that day was to make it to Dillon, which wouldn’t normally be that hard to get to except that a) the hammock-swinging went way over-budget and was having a significant impact on our deliverable distances, and b) the road doesn’t go there from here; we had to take some pretty exciting and small roads to get to where we wanted to be.
But we did eventually make it to Dillon and were rewarded well: the town has one of the only Patagonia outlet stores in the U.S. I bought some shorts and a frisbee. What a deal!
Hang in there, we’re in the home stretch!
From Dillon, we headed south through Idaho and Utah, stopping in Zion and Monument National Parks to gawk at some truly amazing canyons carved in red sand stone. It’s a stunning place, and also nice and toasty: as we were taking a lovely shuttle bus up the scenic route from the visitor center, our car was sitting in 110 degree (F) heat. In Celcius, that’s fourty-zillion degrees.
I could tell you so many more stories: the rotten cherries, the bird we caught with the vehicle, the deer(s) we saw, the meals good and bad, the gas stations, the accidents in parking lots, the weather, the hotels, the motels, the historic rest stops, but frankly, I’m running out of commas.
So let me just add that our final stretch, from Utah’s Ephraim to Vegas and then into Los Angeles was uneventful but fun, and that we got back to L.A. on Monday afternoon, after a wonderful trip. And also that my butt kind of hurt by then from all that sitting.
