From Terrified to Here! The Road Trip, the Chaos, and the Floor of My New Home

The last days in Texas were quietly destabilizing in a way I did not fully expect.

When you are someone who runs on routine, who has a specific place for every medication, every journal, every charger, who knows exactly where everything lives and why, having all of that stripped away before the adventure even starts does something to your nervous system. Add in people that was crying almost every time they looked at me, the water going out on the ranch, and almost every piece of clothing I owned getting bleached on day two of being nomadic, and the in-between stage was equal parts emotional and deeply unglamorous. The goodbyes to the people who have become such a part of me that leaving felt like losing a piece of myself were the hardest part. My eyes were in genuine danger of leaking constantly and I am not, as you know by now, a crier.

But on the morning of July 11th we woke up at 2am and I wrote a goodbye note to my best friend inside a book I was forcing her to read. I had been warned by my cousin, whose lecture on not crying has genuinely shaped my life, that when she moved out of state she cried so hard she could not stop. I was terrified that the moment we backed out of my best friend's driveway at 3am I was going to fall apart completely and not be able to pull myself back together.

And then my kid put on the Shrek soundtrack.

Which is apparently the official theme music of every road trip we have ever taken and I did not fully realize this until that moment. And just like that we pulled out of the driveway and drove into the dark and I did not cry. Because it is very hard to cry while Shrek is playing. Bless that green ogre. He saved me.

Now here is the thing about leaving Texas that people who are not from Texas do not fully understand.

It takes forever.

We had two very medicated small dogs thanks to my best friend's recommendation and a second emergency vet appointment that added a bonus medication to the mix. We were stopping multiple times in heat that was sitting at 108 degrees and climbing. By the time we reached our first stop the heat index was pushing 112. We were both exhausted and ready to collapse and we had barely made a dent in the distance.

Our first hotel was in New Mexico. And I want to be very clear that I have had some genuinely spooky and unsettling experiences in New Mexico over the years, so I was already on high alert when we pulled into what I can only describe as a Texas Chainsaw Massacre-looking town. We stopped at the grocery store because we were both craving something fresh and healthy after hours in the car, only to be informed by a man in the parking lot that the grocery store was closed.

For a party.

The grocery store. Closed. For a fucking party.

So we went to the dollar store and bought dinner like the road trip royalty we are and arrived at the hotel ready to at least collapse with ice cream and a microwave pizza. Except upon arriving to our room two things were notably absent. The microwave. And the refrigerator. Both of which were listed in the room description. The room also had a distinctive smell that fed directly into my Texas Chainsaw Massacre fear that this was going to be the last place I was ever seen alive.

I went to the front desk. The single employee on staff, who was also the only person working the entire hotel, seemed genuinely shocked that these items were missing from the room, which led me to believe someone had simply stolen them at some point and nobody had noticed. She handed me what appeared to be the master key; I say this because she paused only to peel the label that said master key off of it before giving it to me. I, a complete stranger, now had the key to all the lackluster Investigation Discovery rooms at this, and I’m being so nice here, really I am, hotel. 

So foreshadowing, I spent the next several days of this trip fighting Expedia for a refund on a hotel room I did not stay in because I was not about to find out what happened to the microwave.

The executive decision was made to fuck off and on we went to Tucson, Arizona.

I handed my kid my phone and said pick any hotel, whatever you pick will be better than what I picked, and they delivered. An adorable hotel, a real bed, a working everything. The neighbors were having what sounded like either a very fun time alone or a very quiet fun time with company but honestly after New Mexico I did not care. I slept like I had not slept in weeks.

The next leg of the journey was supposed to take us through Barstow, California and thanks to BuzzFeed and my friend Lindsey I already knew that was not the move. So instead, as we drove up Highway 40 through the desert, the road trip started doing double duty.

Because I was still running a business.

Highway 40 through the California desert is a long stretch of very little except heat, sand, and the occasional patch of signal. And every time that signal appeared I was posting. Social media content for retainer clients, editing jewelry photos, scheduling, doing whatever I could squeeze into the windows where the internet cooperated. My kid has their license and would take the wheel while I worked, which is one of those things nobody tells you about being an entrepreneur, that you will be editing product photos somewhere outside of Needles, California at 113 degrees because the business does not pause because you are crossing a desert. Having my retainer clients set up the way they are meant that even from the middle of nowhere I could keep everything running without dropping a single ball. That is the whole point.

Then we picked up Highway 395.

If you have never driven Highway 395 through California I need you to add it to your list immediately. We were driving past Yosemite, past Manzanar, through mountains and rivers and towns that felt like they existed outside of time. We had planned to turn down into Yosemite to see the views from an entrance most people never use and I am genuinely grateful we did not because not fifteen minutes later the sky opened up and it started to pour.

What we got instead was the Twilight version of this drive. Fog rolling through mountains, rivers running alongside us, the kind of moody dark green atmosphere that made complete sense for why I was moving to the Pacific Northwest. It was stunning and also making me extremely sleepy, which is apparently what Twilight does to me in both the book and the atmospheric weather sense.

I needed coffee, specifically a lavender latte because I AM that girl, with the desperation of someone who was willing to possibly do deals under a highway overpass for it. We had a place pulled up about thirty minutes down the road. I was going to get my coffee. I reverse-parked in a move that would have made my POD driver proud into a spot in this tiny mountain town only to walk up and find the coffee shop closed.

I stood there for a moment in the rain processing this information.

And then I looked across the street at an old hotel with a bar.

I walked in with my kid and explained our situation to the bartender with the full unhinged energy of someone who has been awake too long and just needs caffeine to survive a mountain pass. They disappeared into the back and came out with the most caffeinated pot of coffee I have ever encountered in my life, the biggest cups available, and a full bowl of creamer. Plain black coffee with half and half that was not instant powder from a Ziploc bag and I have never been so cheered for plain coffee in my life.

The Starbucks chapter of this saga is its own little journey. One of my dear friends had given me a Starbucks gift card that had been burning a hole in my pocket and I was ready. A lavender latte. That was all I wanted. I handed my kid my phone and said please order it for pickup in fifteen minutes and they turned to me and said I already ordered it. I was devastated. It was going to get cold. I was going to be driving switchbacks in the dark with a cold latte and this was going to be the tragedy that broke me (yes, I’m a bit spoiled, deal with it).

We pulled up to the Starbucks. The latte was the exact perfect temperature to drink.

I took that as a sign.

We drove into the switchbacks as the sun was setting, dipping into complete darkness through the most winding twisted roads I have been on, mountains on one side and nothing on the other, sipping a perfect lavender latte. It was genuinely one of the most beautiful drives of my life.

We pulled off at a mountain rest stop around 1am to walk the dogs and brush our teeth and generally try to remember we were human beings. Now I want to be transparent about something. 

I have a deeply held fear of rest stops that I blame entirely on a television show from the early 2000s that covered murders at rest stops and has never left my brain. 

So I was already managing that as we walked the dogs around the dark wooded area, noticing a truck parked in the shadows where no one had gotten out, telling myself it was fine, people sleep at rest stops, it is totally normal.

And then my dog Dean stopped walking.

Turned toward the woods.

And started growling.

We heard a crack in the trees.

The speed at which we got back to that car was Olympic. We did not discuss it. We did not look at each other. And I left that rest stop like I was Paul Walker auditioning for Fast & Furious. Very awake now, no caffeine required, we drove into Eureka, California at 3am and collapsed in our Airbnb having promised each other we would sleep in and have a real day off.

And we did. Mostly.

We woke up, enjoyed the Redwoods, and then drove to Confusion Hill. The literal payoff of the entire Gravity Falls themed road trip. If you are anywhere near Northern California, I do not care how old you are, go to Confusion Hill, go to the gravity house, bend your mind around it, and enjoy every second. While we were there we met a family from Oregon whose son was moving to Texas and we had the most delightful conversation about both of us heading in completely opposite directions. 

Then the road trip gave us one last gift.

We woke up the next morning to a smell.

Strong. Distinctive. Either skunk or something I am not cool enough to be down with.

As a veteran of multiple skunks taking up residence under my house in Texas, which I eventually started calling the Skunk Hotel and developed an entire routine around, I knew very quickly which of the 2 options I was dealing with. My first concern was that our host was going to think we had hotboxed her guest house so I messaged her as politely as I could asking if she also smelled skunk. She was immediately apologetic and it turned out she too was a card carrying member of the Skunk Hotel Club. I aired out her home, doused everything we owned in Febreze, and we were on our way. 

Now there was 1 thing between me and my new home the lovely and epic Highway 101.

Along which we almost drove into a maximum security prison. We saw a do not proceed past this point sign and being the curious people we are we googled what was past it only to discover it was Pelican Bay State Prison. A place whose name I suddenly remembered from it hosting MANY notorious individuals inside its max security walls. So as we did not proceed past that point, I myself am not in jail, nor do I have a fun new prison daddy to write about.

Then we finally did it. The magic moment of driving over 200 thousand gawd damn miles. We entered Oregon.

With the Oregon coastline stretching out to our left, the Pacific Ocean showing up exactly as promised, the kind of scenery that makes you pull over every twenty minutes because you cannot believe it is real. We drove that coastal highway hugging the edge of the continent until we needed to turn inland toward Portland.

And now I am sitting on the floor of my new house writing this for you.

I am sitting on the floor of a house I have never been inside until today, in a city I have only ever seen the airport of, on the other side of the country from everything I have ever known.

I started writing this series sitting surrounded by boxes in a house I was leaving.

I am amazed that now here and I am just beginning.

I do not have a tidy conclusion for you. I do not have the lesson yet because I am still inside the moment. What I have is this floor, these dogs, this city outside the window, and the very clear understanding that something I was terrified of 6 months ago when I knew this year was going to be the year everything changed and then 3 months ago, when I learned just how BIG those changes would be, and this is now my life.

It is so much better than I even let myself imagine.

And I know I have a whirlwind of things to do because in less than 3 weeks I will be completely alone with only my dogs besides me.