I had no idea that my little travel diary was so riveting!  Many of you have written to ask for the next part of the journey, wanting to know how it turned out.  I am touched.  And you guys should get a life, but that is just my opinion.

Here is the final installment about my move to the East Coast several years ago.  For those of you just joining us, this is the travel journal I kept while driving from Sausalito, California to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  I made the trip with my beloved dog, Ibo, who sadly died three years ago.  For those of you wanting the previous installments, here they are:

Part 1          Part 2          Part 3          Part 4          Part 5          Part 6          Part 7

I left you at the Kum and Go gas station somewhere in Iowa with all of the bugs.  Well, I pulled out of the station and continued east, trying to continue as far as I could without falling asleep.  That lasted 15 minutes. I pulled over and tried to take a little nap.  It didn’t work.  So I had no choice but to try to make it to the next planned stop.  I stayed awake by singing Roxanne at the top of my lungs and periodically slapping myself in the face.  Proud moments.

Grinnell, Iowa — home of the crunchy college (in high school, my tree-hugging, hemp-wearing, 45 year old English teacher tried to persuade me to go there — nice try, but no thanks).  I figured I would stay there for the night, drive by the college, make fun of a couple of hippies, and buy a T-shirt.

[Ed. note:  I am trying to make all of this stuff interesting, but the fact of the matter is that I was in Iowa, for chrissakes]

I stopped at the Super 8.  What luxury.  One major difference between Iowa and the western states I visited: even in the little hotels out west (like the Kokepelli Inn, or the Brunswick Motel), there was a wealth of literature in the rooms.  Stuff on the Grand Canyon, Monument Valley, Mesa Verde, etc.  There was tons of stuff to see and do.  In the Iowa hotel there was one three fold pamphlet.  Only the back panel offered any “tourist” info.  And the page was only half full.

Two excerpts:

“We invite you to experience Iowa” (what a title and thanks so much for the offer, but exactly what do you mean by “experience”?)

“Its greatest treasure is the fertile soil from which more than $10 billion dollars [sic] worth of crops are harvested annually.”  (“Daddy, Daddy, can we PLEASE go look at the fertile soil today?  You PROMISED!!!)

The next morning, I got up, resisted the urge to visit some fertile soil and drove to campus (actually a very nice place, but no hippies to be seen), got a T-shirt, and got back on the road.  The drive through Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana was rather nondescript 9and that is being very kind).  There was one exciting moment, however, when the Explorer became rather difficult to handle.  It felt like there was some problem with the tires.  I had checked before I had left to see if my tires were recalled, but both Ford and Firestone had assured me that there was no problem.  Certainly neither of these companies would have lied to me, right?  So all of these images flashed into my head:

1)  The tread was separating from the tire

2)  I was moments away from causing a 27 car pile-up

3) I was going to die in a huge ball of fire in the bottom of some ravine (yes, I know I was in Iowa and the closest thing to a ‘ravine’ is a three foot deep flood drain, but hey, this is my disaster scenario, not yours).

What do you do when you think there is something wrong with your car?  You pull to the side of the road and you check it out.  So I pull over on to the shoulder.  The shimmy had disappeared by the time I had inched over across the line.  “Great, just great, the tread had just come off” I thought stepping out of the Explorer.  To my great amazement (and even disappointment — I had envisioned a multimillion dollar settlement since both Firestone and Ford had assured me that my tires were fine), my tires appeared to be, well, fine.  So, like the car care professional that every guy pretends to be, I examined the tires a little more carefully (I thought about kicking them but that would have been just too cliché).  I had no idea, whatsoever, what I was searching for, but boy, was I searching.  Ibo was looking at me like I had just gotten off a spaceship (she is a female, after all).  As I was kneeling down to examine the driver’s side rear tire, I noticed something very shocking.  The freeway had a rather large rut in the right hand lane.  This was undoubtedly due to the thousands of trucks that pass by every day.  I got back in the truck, not quite sure if I had accomplished anything at all, but feeling somewhat Sherlockian by figuring out the grand mystery.  I tested the theory by driving in the left hand lane for a while.  No shimmy.

The rest of the drive to Ann Arbor was rather unremarkable, sorry.

I got to Michigan and stayed at my mother’s house in Ann Arbor.  I feel like our relationship, although never bad by any means, has certainly become better over the last few years.  What does that mean?

Who knows, but I do know that I feel old.  And it was underscored when my brother came over.  I did not necessarily feel old because he LOOKS a lot older (he is three years older than am I), nor was it the fact that he has two sons who are now five and seven (I think — nice work UNCLE Jeff, you are not even sure how old your nephews are!  — is memory the first thing to go?).  No, the reason I felt so much older when I saw my brother was because he was driving a MINIVAN!  How awful, dreadful even.  Now if any of you out there actually own minivans yourself, I do not intend any disrespect to you.  In fact, a minivan might be the most logical vehicle for you.  But this is my brother.  The guy who had the Camaro back in high school.  Now he is driving a minivan.  My world is crumbling.  Does this mean he will soon be wearing Bermuda shorts and dark knee-high socks to mow the lawn?  If it does, I might have to stage an intervention.  This could be serious.

Well, I stayed in Michigan for a week and it was great to see the family again.  Really.  I am not just saying that because some of them are likely reading this (although no one will ever really know, will they?).  I drove the 600 or so miles to Philly on Monday.  It took a little over 10 hours.  Nothing exciting there, I did not even stop at the outlet malls (which is very hard to believe, but ….).

So here I sweat in the humidity that is Philadelphia.  School has started and I am already inundated with work.  So I am doing what comes naturally — procrastination.  I have 500 pages of reading to do and I am sitting here typing these last few words.

I should go, but I would like to thank all of you for suffering through my diatribes.  I hope to see/hear from you all soon.