Road Trips : Road Trip 98 : Oklahoma City - San Francisco

Friday 6 November 1998 (Oklahoma City OK to Albuquerque NM)
Odometer: 89127

 

Oklahoma City is a crossroads between the south and the west...a place which looks western but where you can still get fried okra. The "southern touch" continues through the Texas panhandle to Amarillo and ends shortly afterward.

More cheap gas before leaving downtown Oil Country and I headed west. Didn't make many stops as I'd covered this ground pretty thoroughly on last year's trip. Once in Texas, I hit some of the densest fog I'd ever driven through, which lasted for most of the 90 miles from Shamrock to Amarillo. I grabbed more fried okra at another Luby's and shed no tears about skipping the rest of the town.

 

I didn't spend the night in any of Tucumcari's 2000 (or however many) rooms, but I did a drive-through, accompanies by "Born to Be Alive" on some queen's "retro disco" college radio show. Seemed a strange enough way to experience Tucumcari, I thought.

Thanks to the end of Daylight Savings Time, I was finding myself doing more night driving that I really wanted on the return trip. A big disadvantage is that I was really beat every time I rolled into town. the one advantage was that I could scan AM stations from all over the place: news/talk from Salt Lake City, hillbilly music from Tulsa, and even traffic reports from LA. I purposely avoided any SF stations.

My time in Albuquerque was pretty uneventful. I hit a few bars, but was never able to figure out which was "the cowboy bar" of Albuquerque legend. There was way too much bad country music (which pretty much covers all country music of the past 25 years or so) and the one dive bar with "potential" smelled too bad to keep my attention. I went to a dance club and saw only one boy worth watching. He looked like a heroin dealer. He turned out to be one of the bouncers.

 

To top it off, most of the Central Avenue motels had their neon turned off. I was disappointed.

About the only excitement came when I was pulled by an Albuquerque cop. I'd only had one beer (being really anal, as I was, about not driving drunk), but I was still nervous. I pulled out my license as the cop called in my tag info. When he came to the window, he told me the license was unnecessary. Seems he'd pulled me because the glare from his headlights had made my validation sticker look blank. One he saw everything was OK, he APOLOGIZED for pulling me over.

I was stunned.

Saturday 8 November 1998 (Albuquerque NM to Needles CA)
Odometer: 89729

 

There is nothing quite so annoying as being in a huge thrift store in Albuquerque NM on a Saturday morning in the midst of a half-price sale. I was in and out in about three minutes and off to my final Luby's Cafeteria, where there was no fried okra, but there WAS fried zucchini.

I stopped at a truck stop just outside town to get gas. Imagine my surprise at seeing an Oakland city bus in te parking lot. The driver said it was being delivered. I saw amother one a few miles down the road, rolling along with its "West Oakland BART" destination sign out of place in the desert.

About this time, my odometer crossed the 90,000-mile mark.

 

This was another long day of driving with few stops. Once again, I was covering familiar ground, through western New Mexico and all of Arizona in one day. The only highlights were a devilishly cute gas jockey in Holbrook AZ and a brush fire in the median somewhere west of Flagstaff. I was completely worn out by the time I hit the California state line and rolled into Needles.

Needles CA has to be one of the most depressing places in the country. There was absolutely nothing there and absolutely nothing going on. And this was a Saturday night following a rodeo! OK...there ewre a couple of cute cowboys around, but they were on the way out of town.

I coped by going to the AM/PM, getting myself a 59-cent death dog, some Doritos, and a Foster's Lager, and then settling in for "The People vs. Larry Flynt". Slept like a baby, although I was a little worried that I was running the air conditioner while it was 50 degrees outside. Guess I'd sort of gotten used to the cold.

Sunday 9 November 1998 (Needles CA to San FranciscoCA)
Odometer: 90273

 

Gas price in Needles: $1.29 a gallon. Gas price when I said "fuck that" and drove three blocks back into Arizona: 97¢ a gallon. Sometimes I hate California.

I hated it more and more as I crossed the Mojave into Barstow. Traffic got progressively worse and worse. By the time I hit I-5 west of Bakersfield, I was in the midst of a nasty automotive clusterfuck. I had a near-death experience outside Santa Nella, where I just missed being car number 16 or 17 in a 25-car pileup. Fortunately, no one actually collided, although two cars were forced off the road.

There were minor storms in the mountains west of Mojave. There were fairly intense ones (by California standards) just south of San Francisco.

When I crossed Altamont Pass, I was more or less home. I was also just about out of gas. I finally stopped in Castro Valley. At this point, I knew I was really home in the good old Golden State because I had to drive through this suburban strip for fifteen minutes before I could find a gas station.

Oakland. Bay Bridge. Home. After 7003 miles...