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Road Trip V - Coming Home Posting Date: Jul 6 2008 8:56PM Seriously, you really should read back four weeks to the start of this series of columns. A little background would probably be helpful at this point. But just in case you’re some kind of special super-lazy breed of monkey, you should probably know that everything below happened sixteen years ago.
My faithful travelling companion and I had heard rumours that there was a big hole in northern Arizona that was supposed to be spectacular. By this late stage of our journey, however, we had become inured to hype. Our favourite places were all but unknown – tiny towns in Colorado and out-of-the-way canyons in Utah – while we had ho-hummed our way through icons like Denver, Vail and Lake Mead.
I mean, come on. How cool could the Grand Canyon really be?
Well, I’ll tell you this about the Grand Canyon ... it’s a big ol’ son-of-a-bitch hole in the ground, that’s for sure. Big as all get-out. So we stood there for a bit, soaking up the bigness, and briefly considered pushing someone over the edge just see how long it would take them to hit bottom.
In the interest of everyone’s safety, therefore, we left, not feeling like we were missing much. After all, we picked up the grandness of it all pretty quickly and once that was done, we figured we had the fundamentals. All that was left was to get back in mom’s grey Toyota Corolla and drive south on the uncharacteristically snowy roads heading past Flagstaff.
Almost four hours later, the wet snow was far behind us when we saw our first giant saguaro cactus which looks exactly like something that Wile E. Coyote should run into. This signalled that we were almost in Phoenix where perfect weather is so hum-drum, they say of another sunny day that it’s “like visiting Denver.”
I took advantage of the meteorological perfection to play a local golf course remarkable mostly for its proliferation of roadrunners running around in “washes.” For those of you not familiar with arid climates, a wash is an area of the landscape that would have a creek on it but for a complete and total lack of water. In Canada, we call that a parking lot, but whatever.
I played my eighteen holes in the company of Steve, Cliff and John. Steve was Arizonan in exactly the way someone from up north would expect. He was large, muscular, tanned, friendly and you couldn’t quite tell if he was acting just a little stupid to make fun of your northern high-mindedness or whether he was just a little stupid.
John, like me, was visiting. He was from Marysville, Ohio. When John found out I was Canadian, he said sympathetically, “It must get real cold up there.” Marysville, for those not in the know, is about 100 miles from Cleveland. You can drive from Marysville to Canada in three hours. Someone needs to get the people of the great state of Ohio a map.
Our final golfing companion, Cliff, was a large, white, gooey sort of a man who grew increasingly pink as the sun beat down upon him. He wore dazzling pale purple corduroy shorts and an ambitiously tight green tennis shirt. I never asked where Cliff was from because I feared he might say Canada.
After my round of golf, my travelling companion and I reconnected for a dinner of Mexican food which we ate in a restaurant that featured service from a tortilla chip boy, a salsa boy, a water girl, our waiter, our waiter’s helper, the guy who asks you how your food is, and the manager of the restaurant herself who sat next to me briefly and explained why my dinner had to arrive on two plates.
This dinner was a great big ol’ son-of-a-bitch of a dinner, I’ll tell you that.
The next afternoon, my travelling companion and I pointed my mother’s gleaming 1989 grey Toyota Corolla down the highway and started the long journey home. Hours later, we found ourselves in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I have seen enough Bugs Bunny cartoons to know not to make any rash changes of direction in Albuquerque, so we decided to stay the night.
We awoke to perfect weather and a complimentary breakfast of doughnuts, so I was feeling so good I decided to drive straight home, stopping only for gas, food and washrooms.
At approximately 3:00 am, thirteen days after leaving our beloved homeland, my travelling companion and I crossed the border from Detroit to Windsor and fell to our knees in silent worship.
We had travelled the United States of America, reaching places as exotic as Las Vegas, Nevada and Wagon Mound, New Mexico. We had seen the Rockies, the canyons, and the cities, but nothing has ever looked so good to me as the great big “Welcome to Canada” sign.
Nothing against any of the places we visited – except Denver, which as we know, bites – but there is absolutely no place like home.
Next Time: Nothing. The trip is over. |
