You know how you have that one friend where, if you want to do something slightly weird but mostly awesome, you know that he/ she will be fully on board? I don’t mean the person that you call when you want to do something illegal (that would be Emla, for me) or the person you call when you want to talk about how you just realized that you sing a song to your ice cream whenever you’re putting it away after grocery shopping (that would be Jordan, for me, and the song is “Raspberry Sorbet” to the tune of Prince’s “Raspberry Beret”), but the person you go to when you’re thinking it might be fun to take the old lady bus to Atlantic City and gamble for the day or when you need company for that progressive marionette burlesque show you have tickets to. Or when you want to join thousands of your fellow citizens in dressing up as Santa Claus.

For me, that person is Annette. Annette is one of my New York soulmates, so you can understand how heartbreaking it is for me that she’s moving to Chicago. I’ve come around on the idea because she’s doing it for all the right reasons, and because it gives me an excuse to do SantaCon Chicago in ‘09. Also because she foolishly asked me to be her driving companion for the moving van portion of the adventure. It’s been just over a year since Ma Stickles and I did our epic road trip, so I am thrilled to get back out on the highway. It looks easy enough:

Easy as pie. He are the (tiny, unimportant) conditions that I presented to Annette after she confirmed me as wingman:

1. I want to be able to stop at as many WalMarts, Targets, and truck stops as possible as part of a complicated scavenger hunt that I need help formulating (stay tuned).

2. I will be videotaping our adventures, and then posting the video montage on our internal company blog, since (until tomorrow), Annette and I are both gainfully employed by the same publishing house.

3. I’ve never driven a car, let alone a moving van, in New York City, so she’ll have to handle that part.

4. My driver’s license just expired and I don’t have time to renew it this week, but I’m prepared to cry if I get pulled over.

That sound you hear is Annette ralphing into her garbage can up on the 10th floor and trying to figure out how she can escape Brooklyn without me on Wednesday.

No, really, it will be so fun! Especially the videotaping part! To further awesomeify things, there’s a big crazy conference for children’s librarians in Chicago this weekend that basically all of my friends are going to (because we know how to party) and I get to crash it. AND I just found out that Older Brother Bud will be in Chicago the first night we get there. COULD THIS TRIP GET ANY BETTER??

Annette says that this trip should only take us about 15 hours which, for someone who spent 2 weeks in a Prius with her mom and the most vindictive GPS system known to man last summer, is basically the blink of an eye. I’m worried that if we don’t specifically plan to have fun, we might wind up having only accidental fun instead of intentional fun. And wouldn’t that just be awful. Here’s where you come in.

I need suggestions on what you would like us to do/ accomplish/ find at various roadside rest stops and WalMarts. We’re not going to break any laws, ruin any property, or insult any local residents, but anything else is up for consideration. If you want my picture in front of an anti-abortion billboard, we can work to make that happen. If you’d like Annette and I to purchase and wear matching tshirts of a certain nature, we can do that, as well. If you have a list of scavenger hunt items (shot glass with the American flag on it, glow-in-the-dark condoms, license plate keychain with your grandma’s name on it), I am happy to devote a full day to finding them.

I want you to think very hard about this and come up with something fantastic. Don’t go with the first thing that comes to mind. Click over to Daily Puppy for awhile, pour yourself a glass of wine, and really give it some thought. Leave your ideas in the comments, or email/ text them to me. I’ll try to get the final list up before we leave Wednesday night.

and we loved the view of the arch. We were under the overhang, which was lucky as it started pouring half an inning after we arrived. The rain delay only lasted 20 minutes or so but was more than enough time to make me look like a drowned and exhausted rat.

At every stadium I go to I try to find one thing that they do better in that city than anywhere else. My favorite thing about St Louis is that after every at bat, they put the scorecard notation up on the big screen so that people who want to keep score the old school way can do it easily. Whenever I’m at a game with my dad, he always seems to find the one guy in the crowd who’s annotating a score card so he can point at him and tell me that it’s a dying art, and this was such a smart and easy way to keep it alive I hope all the other stadiums eventually pick it up.

 Our next morning in St Louis was brought to us exclusively by Camilla of OldJob fame who had great suggestions about what to do while we were in town. We hit Left Bank Books first, where I grabbed another bunch of books (including a used copy of Matilda, since my problem with used book stores is the same problem I have with dog shelters, except it can be alleviated with a much smaller financial and time commitment) and perused their selection of Congrats On Your New Baby cards directed towards lesbian moms.

Immediately from there we hit the frozen custard stand Camilla had suggested, which was one of the best meal time decisions we made all week. Seems like the easiest way to make me wildly happy is to put something cookie dough flavored in my hands:

I would probably go back to Missouri just for this. I love you, Ted Drewes.

This was my easily my favorite state, and one of the few places I can see myself going back to. Not that I didn’t love everywhere we went (though, wait, I didn’t– I have nothing good to say about Nebraska), but while I was glad to see everything that we did, each day was another brick in my I’m Never Leaving New York wall. I missed it so much it was physically palpable, as pathetic as that was. In high school, when we found ourselves in a typically boring setting (grocery store, CVS) Jordan and I sometimes played a game where spent the whole trip acting like That Guy Who’s Reminded of His Exgirlfriend By Everything He Sees (“no, it’s nothing… it’s just… she loved lentil beans. She ordered lentil soup once at Friendly’s and when I asked her how it was she said it was ‘alright….’ I just wish she were here to see these lentils. They would have really made her happy.”) and I eventually started feeling like that about New York everywhere we went. When a woman randomly came up to my mom and I in San Francisco and gave us directions that we hadn’t asked her for all I could think about was how that never would have happened in New York and that I couldn’t wait to get back there. I had the same cliched “Nice place to visit, but…” reaction to every place we saw. After about three hours in Wyoming, though, I was emailing my boss about something for work and tacked on “…not that any of this matters, though, since I’m moving to Wyoming to compete in the Miss Frontier Days pageant and marry a cowboy.” She didn’t respond.

Cheyenne is covered in these big boots, each of which are decorated differently (this one is, I think, poker themed), like the apples that popped up all over NY that time or the mermaids that are in Virginia (VA beach? Norfolk?). We took this picture outside of the museum that’s devoted to Frontier Days, which we now know is a massive week-long rodeo and general hoedown in Cheyenne that’s visited by ten thousand people every year. This museum is pretty much the best advertising that they could have because afterwards my mom and I were like “Maybe next year we can come for the rodeo! How great would that be?” which is not a thought I’ve ever had before.

Know that that is, my friends? A surrey with a fringe on top. Rodgers and Hammerstein never lie!

The lobby of the museum houses the buggy collection, complete with creepy faceless dolls who are taking the long ride to nowhere:

And even Tom Selleck stopped by:

I’ve never really had trouble controlling my discretionary spending, but that was before I spent two weeks visiting about 18 different museum gift shops. I had a lot of trouble in the one for the Frontier Days museum and am now the proud owner of various things including a set of christmas ornaments featuring Santa riding a bucking bronco. I have a particularly difficult time when faced with their book sections, and can’t say no when I’m faced with tomes such as:

Soiled Doves: Prostitution in the Early West.

I thought the fact that I was buying over $50 worth of useless crap would be enough of a distraction for the high school girl who rang me up (who mentioned to her coworker in passing that she had gone to high school 30 miles away from her house, which made me rethink my Wyoming relocation plans) but she zeroed in on this in a second. “I read this one, it’s SO good,” she told me. Which put me in kind of a weird place, because my instinct was to say “Oh, if you thought this was good, you should try Sin in the Second City, which is all about turn of the century whorehouses in Chicago” but that would have made me THAT GIRL, right? That Girl who trolls museum gift shops for books about hookers? Right? No one likes that girl.

After this, we went to a Cowgirl themed museum/ gift shop where we spent just as much time and money and where I found Meg’s birthday present. It’s going to take her awhile to grow into them and I don’t plan on making buying her consignment birthday presents a regular practice, but I couldn’t resist.

My #1 Rule of Meg Presents is that I won’t buy her anything that I wouldn’t wear myself, if it came in my size, but these guys took it another step (heyo!)- I covet these boots like you would not believe, to the point where I’m fairly sure I’m going to wind up buying myself a pair before ‘08 is out. This worries me a little since it means I’ll probably have to start wearing jeans, as I don’t approve of the Boot n Skirt look unless you’re at a theme party, but I’ll cross that bridge once I get to it.

We woke up in Salt Lake City and I had yet another breakfast that involved bacon, trying to keep my Percentage of Vacation Meals Involving Pork Products at above 70% (this is surprisingly easy to do). I vetted our route with one of the sales VPs I work with so that she could tell me what bookstores to visit along the way (according to my mother, this makes the entire trip a tax write-off. I can’t wait to explain that to the IRS) and first on her list was The Kings English in Utah. I would pretty much live in this store if they decided to take in boarders.

I bought many things, including the new-ish Joan Bauer book that I’ve been meaning to grab and the Patron Saint of Butterflies because it was autographed and because you can never have too much teen fiction about polygamyst cults.

Afterwards, we went off to the Utah Museum of Natural History, chosen based on my love of the real Museum of Natural History on the west side, and because I hear there are lots of dinosaurs in Utah.

And I love dinosaurs.

This museum also proved to be a great place to continue my accidental photographic study of stuffed wild animals retained in clear boxes:

This was my favorite museum display signage that we saw all trip– Oh, what’s that over there, is it a dinosaur? Huh, I’m not sure. I wish someone would clear it up for me:

 This is the last video that I made on the trip, so I’m glad I didn’t hold off on the song choice for a more special montage or one that might have images that even remotely coordinate with the lyrics.

Cristin Loves Dinosaurs from Cristin Stickles on Vimeo.

After leaving Salt Lake City, we drove across Wyoming and stayed in Cheyenne at a hotel advertising some fantastic musical selections:

Ohmygod, Pyschostick!! I love their gospel album!!

I’m pretty sure you’re not allowed to take pictures or video tape in casinos so I didn’t do much of either– in fact, all of my photos from Nevada Day are limited to highway exits that show towns named after my brothers:

Or pictures that prove that you can not only buy booze in the Reno CVS, you can buy a box of wine for $2.99.

I have no intention of drinking this, I just knew that I had to own it upon seeing it. This is a constant disappointment to my mother, who was recently overheard on the phone saying to one of her sisters “I don’t think Cristin’s had a single drink this entire trip” without the note of pride that should be present from anyone who knew me during college when I regularly took down a bottle of champagne while studying. Alone. On a Tuesday.

I’m starting to have some fairly intense episodes of road hypnosis, where I’ll be in the middle of a six hour stretch of driving and find myself making firm decisions that I have no way of carrying out while on this vacation. I am cutting all of my hair off and going back to the bob. I am figuring out a way to start horseback riding again, even though I can’t think of a less possible activity to accomplish within the 5 boroughs. I am going to Home Depot and coming up with some ingenious way to display the dozens of magnets I have bought on this trip that does not involve a refrigerator. It’s becoming hard to weed out the good decisions from the not-so-great ones, as everything starts to sound like a great idea when I get into this kind of a lull. When we were at a vegas rest stop I saw one of those tubs that I generally associate with sidewalk chalk (small, plastic, brightly colored with a handle) filled with Double Bubble for sale. “Christ, that would be awesome,” I thought because, in that moment, I really wanted some effing Double Bubble. Never mind that my teeth are made of clay and started shrieking at the mere sight of it or that Gum is on my list of Never Haves (along with Coke and Oreos) because I never learned to spit it out before my mouth automatically assumes that it’s real food and should be swallowed. Or after we passed billboards for 18 places in the span of 50 miles that were selling moccasins in Oklahoma I was all “Maybe we should get some moccasins. If there’s this much supply there must be some kind of demand. Maybe I’M the demand and I just don’t know it.” I snapped out of it, and own neither a tub of gum nor moccasins. I will be cutting all of my hair off, though. It’s just a question of whether or not I can hold out until after the weather gets less humid and more short hair friendly or if I’ll snap the second we get back to new jersey and start sawing away at it with gardening shears.

During one of these quiet moments of thought while I was cruise controlling along at 78 mph I struck and, I’m assuming, killed a bird. It didn’t hit the windshield full on, but kind of glanced off of it and continued on to my left and before I could process any thoughts about it my mom went “ThatWasntYourFault” like she was scared I might start crying. Of course it wasn’t my fault. Hitting something on the ground is my fault– I feel bad when I can’t swerve to avoid tumbleweeds, and even worse when we stop for gas and I notice little parts of them stuck in the grill of the Prius. “I ruined that tumbleweed’s life,” I said somberly the first time it happened.  For a while I was clinging to the thought that the bird was fine– there were no parts of him stuck to the car tumbleweed style and he did continue airborne after we made each other’s acquaintance, but judging from the volume of our moment of interaction, I can’t imagine that he had a very good afternoon. I was a little angry that he didn’t cling to the windshield, bug-eyed, as he would have if I lived in a cartoon. But I refuse to feel guilty about this. If you can’t navigate around the prius then maybe you should be taken out of circulation.

I managed to take all of 45 seconds worth of video while we were in Reno, and normally I would never subject the world to anything this Blair Witch style where I am not wearing nearly enough make up for this extreme of a close up, but there are a few quick shots of my mom in there and the look of pure happiness that she gets when within 50 feet of a slot machiene is like Christmas Morning mixed with Puppies and Rainbows and Marshmallows.

Cristin Hates Reno from Cristin Stickles on Vimeo.
 

Here’s another reason I was glad Marie was driving. We made it down the crookedest street in the world and at the bottom were more people taking pictures than at any other tourist site we’d been to. I happily joined them.

Then we stalked down some trolley cars to take some more pictures. We had intended on actually riding one, but that looked scary and I’m usually more than happy to fake the experience than actually complete it, and this was no exception.

See how I casually lean against the trolley? This pose says “I’ve been on one of these things thousands of times.”

My favorite stop was City Lights bookstore, which is a lot like NY’s The Strand except, you know, organized. I bought a copy of A Wrinkle In Time, having recently decided it deserved a re-read since I didn’t like it much in elementary school. Fingers crossed for this time around, Madeline L’Engle (RIP).

Anna is spending her summer as one of SF’s writers in residence and had beat us to the city by about 5 days, so she met up with us for lunch. I love this picture because I think it’s plainly obvious that we are effing thrilled to see each other, despite the fact that we’ve lived in the same town for the last 4 years and see each other constantly on the east coast.

That’s Alcatraz in the background– I thought we were badasses just for standing near it, but a few weeks before Older Brother Bud completed the Escape from Alcatraz Triathlon that involved swimming from that island to the shore and then biking and running through the hills. So, he wins. AS USUAL. Siiiiiiigh.

Our last stop before mom and I departed was to take some pictures in front of the Golden Gate bridge. As we were taking this one I didn’t realize the hilariously creepy element to it:

Looks like Camera Guy was quite taken with Anna, who is on the other side of my camera. If one of us goes missing within the next few weeks, make sure the cops know about this.

Mom and I drove into Reno last night and are getting ready to go do a lot of gambling before noon on a sunday. This was our first night in a Motel 6 (we’ve been favoring Quality Inns) and I was less than impressed with the decour.

Though, upon more careful consideration, it’s hard to argue with a motel chain that comissions bedclothes:

We didn’t stop in Vegas, which I think broke my older brother’s heart. There’s a rogue gambling gene in my family and Bud and my mom are both proud carriers– the last time they were in Vegas together, I got a voicemail from him at 2am (Vegas time, not NY time) saying that he was going to have to put mom in a headlock to get her out of the casino and back to the hotel. They love it, but I’m mostly just confused by it. This is probably because I’ve never done anything more serious than betting oyster crackers at our lunchtime poker game at OldJob, so I’m going to give it a whirl when we hit Reno and see if it’s not something that I could have fun ruining my life with.

I was the one driving when we crossed into San Francisco, which made me a little nervous since the city seems to be built entirely around one way streets and major intersections controlled only by the suggestion of stop signs. Our hotel is 4 miles away from Marie and Kevin’s house, and it took us half an hour to get there after we ran into (almost literally) about a thousand people on bikes blocking traffic. They didn’t seem to be supporting any particular cause aside from waving cheerfully when cars honked at them. I felt like they were all straight out of San Francisco Central Casting, and as hilarious as it was, it made me homesick for new york. “What the hell was that?” I asked Kevin once we finally reached their place and met their perfect baby girl for the first time. “Is it the last friday of the month?” he asked. Affirmative. “It’s Critical Mass. They do it every month. They’re asserting the cyclists’ right to the road.” I really miss New York. Kev and Marie also informed us that we happened to be in San Francisco for the Pride parade on Saturday, and the local news told us that we were also visiting on a day when they’d be trying to set a record for the most same sex marriages officiated on one day. Mazel tov, San Fran!

Here’s 4 minutes of our Critical Mass experience:

 
Critical Mass from Cristin Stickles on Vimeo.

I loved it here. It was, however, amateur hour in terms of Canyon Visiting– maybe I was used to a higher caliber of nature lovers from our time at the GC, but the people at Bryce Canyon had the nerve to speak at a level slightly above that of an ESPN golf commentator and it drove me insane. When someone took a cell phone call I almost threw them over the edge.

Bryce Canyon also got the unfortunate distinction of being the place where I remembered that my camera had a black and white function and decided to be all artsy for a moment or two:

Before going back to demanding that my mom take pictures of me:

Or taking unsuspecting pictures of her in her pioneer stance while she wasn’t looking:

Or finding frozen examples of wildlife in the museum to take pictures of:

Step 2: Put your junk in that box.

 And now, for those of you who couldn’t get enough of my last video of rocks with a completely unrelated soundtrack, here’s my Utah video:

Bryce Canyon from Cristin Stickles on Vimeo.

From Utah, it was off to California!
 

I learn something new and exciting about myself almost every day (like today, when I learned I could be thrilled to pieces by the sight of state corrections officers escorting shackled prisoners off of a van and into the very rest stop where I was standing so that they could use the facilities) but I was not prepared to discover that I’m the kind of person who cries the first time they see the grand canyon. I mean, really. At least the other lame things that make me cry are (kind of) points of pride– I have trouble quoting my favorite passage of The Velveteen Rabbit or making it through the end of Field of Dreams without crying, but both of those, I think, say a lot about my interests and values, and I don’t know what crying at the grand canyon says about me.

Eventually I stopped acting like a little bitch and got my life back together. And took many, many pictures. Very few of them have both my mom and I in them because this was the first place where I didn’t feel comfortable marching up to anyone and shoving my camera into their hands– no one was speaking at a decible above library level, and they were each in their own kind of reverie. I didn’t realize how great this was until we went to Bryce Canyon the next day and and I almost threw someone over the edge of it when they let their cell phone ring go beyond 8 notes before answering it with “Who is this?”

We hiked one of the trails for a bit (and by that I mean we walked on a slight incline for about 10 minutes and then turned around and walked back up and patted ourselves on the back for being so athletic) which made me realize that I actually missing hiking, which made me realize that I probably wasn’t allowed to think that considering hiking was never something I regularly did. I, once, spent three weeks doing nothing but hiking during outward bound, but at that time I was mostly consumed with thoughts like “Don’t die. Don’t die. Don’t die” and didn’t have the brain space to comprehend that hiking could kind of maybe be fun.

I did force some unsuspecting bystander to take this one of the two of us together, but I mostly spent my time making my mom take pictures of me where it looked like I had no idea my picture was being taken, and had been caught in a pensive moment of singing What A Wonderful World to myself.

“I’m going to stand over here– you go over there and take my picture for my Facebook profile.” My mom is a woman of enduring patience.

When I wasn’t busy taking the kind of pictures that would annoy me on someone else’s blog, I was busy stalking hilarious foreigners. We wound up on the same shuttle circuit as a group of elderly japanese tourists who were all wearing hats and gloves and spent a lot of time hiding from the sun.

I also applied myself to the task of finding the most ridiculous thing in the gift shop and then talking myself out of buying it. In this case, both were pretty easy to accomplish. I had already bought Death in the Grand Canyon and didn’t feel the need to own this great piece of literature alongside of it:

There’s a special markets sales rep somewhere who’s terribly proud of herself for this one.

 I’m also learning many lessons about my tiny video camera as I go along– first up, the software isn’t allowing me to use songs that I bought of iTunes so I have to fall back on the array of stuff I uploaded from actual CDs or downloaded illegally during college. This is unfortunate for you guys, since I have, shall we say, interesting taste when buying complete albums. Lesson two– stop trying to walk and film things at the same time. I would delete all of these clips but that would make my mom cry, so instead I’m just subjecting the world at large to them:

Grand Canyon from Cristin Stickles on Vimeo.