Dave and Don's Cross Country Adventure, July 2007
A retrospective travel journal by David Minh
When I was a kid, my dad would ask me to write travel reports about our family vacations. These reports served the dual purpose of preserving a memory and being writing practice. I only did it a few times, but there's no reason I can't continue the tradition.
This journal is my answer to friends who ask, "What was your trip like?" If I wrote about you, I didn't think that you would mind. Feel free to browse.
How we found ourselves driving across the country
For most of my last year of graduate school, I was planning to go teach in China after I was done. When I went over to Maryland for a conference in March, I told potential postdoctoral advisors that I didn't need a job until summer 2008. Then, on one inauspicious Friday the Thirteenth in April, it all fell through and I was left scrambling. I sent an email off to some of the scientists I met with earlier and told them about the new circumstances. A few days later I was offered a job at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, which I soon accepted.
Unfortunately, Maryland is a long way from California. While I could have flown, I wanted to have stuff without buying it all again. So I bought a pickup truck (the most fuel-efficient model available) to drive across the country.
After I got my truck, Don and I helped my brother move some furniture into his apartment. Since there was a lot of traffic, we stopped for a bit and went surfing.
In a happy coincidence, my cousin Don was flying in from Australia for my brother Tim's wedding and wanted to go on a road trip. He read "On the Road" by Jack Kerouac and developed some romantic idealizations about sitting in a car for days on end. "Timmy's gonna wish he were with us," he joked. I think Tim preferred the honeymoon, however.
7/6/2007
From the developed to the undeveloped desert
As we hit the road on Friday night, Don asked me to set down the rules. Noticing a particular odor from the other side of the car, I started,
"1. Don must shower within one hour of David showering. 2. No recreational drugs. 3. No prostitutes."
I also reserved the right to make up the rules as we went along. I think he ended up obeying most of the rules except for number 1.
At 1 am we found ourselves in Joshua Tree National Park. As we were too lazy to set up the tent, I slept on top of the car and Don slept atop a table.
7/7/2007
Your friendly neighborhood cacti
I heard that this particular Saturday was especially popular for weddings, because triple seven is supposed to be lucky. No, Don and I didn't get hitched. (In this day and age that might need to be explicitly stated.) If good luck is waking up in the middle of the desert, though, I'm not sure what bad luck is.
Don's table/bed
Waking up, part I
Waking up, part II
We started our morning with a nice hike up a small mountain.
Yay for climbing up mountains in the middle of nowhere!
The sign says "Ryan Mountain"
The snake we saw on the way back
Then we proceeded to drive through the park. Halfway through Joshua Tree, the landscape becomes filled with these friendly fuzzy cacti:
Aww, how cute! Don't you just want to pet them?
That night, we ended up in Tuscon, AZ.
Our seedy western-themed motel
7/8/2007
On artificial tropical biomes
In the morning we explored the surrounding area and checked out the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum. It was nice way to learn about the area on short trails through the desert under the withering sun rather than long trails in the desert under the withering sun.
Next, we checked out, Biosphere 2, the biggest greenhouse in the world. In its heyday, eight "bionauts" were sent on a two year mission to the ecologically closed system. Now, however, tourists like Don and I were allowed to walk through it. We were led through by a gruff guide with a thick foreign accent recounting the glory days of past.
"It has an abandoned feel," said Don. "Some places are more interesting before you visit them."
"Sometimes our expectations are too outsized to be met by any reality," I explained.
Maybe I played Half-life too much as a kid, but parts of the facility reminded me of the game and I couldn't stop thinking about how we needed big guns to fight aliens trying to invade the earth.
Speaking of aliens, that night we made it to the U.S.-Mexican border, known for crossings of "illegal aliens." Thankfully few on the border patrol take a shoot-to-kill approach of the computer game.
7/9/2007
Texas is big
We left El Paso in the morning, drove all day, and at night we were still in Texas. One stop that was recommended to me was Fredericksburg, which is famous for its peaches and peach products.
A peach stand outside Fredericksburg, TX
Also, I saw this sign in a shop:
As the risk of offending her, I later emailed it to a friend as a postcard. She said she loved it.
In Austin, I was surprised to see a multitude of people gathered on a bridge. They were there to check out bats as they left on their daily nocturnal feeding expedition.
Don on the bat bridge in Austin, TX
View of the crowd from the bat bridge
The crowd waited for a while for the bats to come out. I heard rumors that the bats were coming out and darting back under the bridge, moving too quickly for the human eye to detect. The best way to observe these shadowy figures in the emerging darkness, I found, was flash photography.
Bats quickly dart from underneath the bridge and come back to safety
Eventually, after most of the crowd had dissipated, a steady stream of bats departed from their den, dark fluttering bodies contrasting with the pale Texas sky.
Don and I left towards Hutto, home of the Triple Crown Dog Academy.
7/10/2007
Our vacation has gone to the dogs
One of Don's friends from Sydney is now a certified dog trainer. She was nice and showed us some dog tricks and took us around the area. Predictably, in the compound, dogs are everywhere.
A well-behaved dog. She also took on the training of a crazy hyperactive dog.
I don't think I've walked a dog before. Good thing she's well trained...
Don throws a ball into the lake for Lexi to fetch.
Don pretends to be an Abu Ghraib detainee torturer. The dog doesn't care and happily sits there wagging her tongue.
After wandering around the compound, we then headed over to our cousin's place in Houston.
Our cousin's mischievous little kid
7/10/2007
It is nice to have relatives everywhere
My extended family is big and, as a consequence of the Vietnam war, dispersed everywhere throughout the globe. It means that there are many places I could visit and get treated quite nicely!
Our cousin Vien takes us out boating
And water skiing!
I've been snow skiing, snowboarding, and surfboarding, but today was my first time water skiing. The conditions were perfect. It was clear and sunny and the lake was placid (until disturbed by our motorized boat, of course). Water skiing feels less natural than other ways to ride the water or snow, but it is still a lot of fun!
Woohoo!
7/11/2007
It is nice to have relatives everywhere, part II
The next day we went south towards Galveston, making a stop at the Johnson Space Center.
Check out that rocket!
Randomly, a display of Texas Longhorns is also situated at the space center
"Hippie Summer Camp" was also visiting the space center
We also dropped by the Armand Bayou Nature Center and Kemah. Our trek through the nature center would be relatively uneventful except for...
Spiders!
To my great amusement, Don expended a considerable amount of energy trying to avoid them.
Don's spider dance
When we came back to the front office, he told the lady, "I've been to hiking in Australia and Southeast Asia, but never have I been on a trail as physically demanding or dangerous." She was also amused.
Don is holding up a map which he used as a napkin
By the time we arrived in Galveston and met up with our cousin Phu to go fishing, the sun was setting.
Out in the ocean, wind-swept hair and all
I was very awkward with the fishing apparatus and kept getting my lines tangled and losing my hooks on the ocean floor. I ended up catching a small catfish, which I had to throw back, and a small sand shark, which I caught accidentally. While untangling my line, I left my bait in the water and the ill-fated shark took an bite. Don, on the other hand, was a pro with the equipment. He ended up catching a small, but albeit bigger-than-mine, shark.
Don and his shark. A few days later, it was stinking up my car.
7/12/2007
The Big Easy
After an eventful few days, Don and I slept in long enough to have lunch with a crew of Vietnamese folk at Halliburton. Whatever you may think of the company's dealings with the Bush administration, you can't blame the ordinary middle-class workers trying to make a decent living.
On the road, I passed some time listening to an audio book of "The World is Flat" by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, which describes globalization and how it has been accelerated by digital technology that has enabled and facilitated new forms of long-distance collaboration. I felt that I was sitting in on a college class, and it sometimes inspired me towards the same state of consciousness I often found myself in during those courses: sleep. Friedman's description of outsourcing jived with my cousin's description of Halliburton and his assessment of the global situation was eye-opening in some places, but the unabridged and expanded form of the book was often long-winded. Moreover, his capitalistic focus on corporate work and technological progress as the means and economic prosperity as ends of human endeavor felt shallow and unsatisfying. After listening to so much rational analysis and hearing many vignettes about happenings in the business world, I craved a good novel.
By the late afternoon, we arrived in New Orleans and passed by this cemetery.
St. Louis Cemetery No. 1
I think the cemetery is a tourist destination, but we didn't stop by. However, Don said he saw it in a dream the night before. I don't know exactly what that means, but I've heard of stranger things. A UCSD biology professor once dreamed about a horse race in which the favored horse would break his leg and the eighth seeded horse would go on to win. It was so vivid that he told another professor about it. The next day, as they were watching, Barbaro broke his leg at the 2006 Preakness and the dream was fulfilled. They should have bet on it.
Enjoying a beignet and café au lait at the Café du Monde
I don't know if there's any philosophical significance to this, but a friend who's a philosophy graduate student strongly recommended that I have a beignet at the Café du Monde. Later I found out that she'd never been there. She was jealous that I'd made it there before her! She's also jealous that I graduated already, but so are all my colleagues. As Vonnegut would say, "So it goes."
A boat passes by New Orleans at night
Bourbon Street. I think it's safe to say that New Orleans has thrown off any post-Katrina sense of restraint
We didn't feel like staying in New Orleans that night, so we headed off to Pensacola, Florida.
7/13/2007
Homelessness
Around 2 am, Don pulled into the hotel parking lot. "Do you need to go to the restroom before we go camping?" he asked me in my semi-conscious state. I didn't realize that we were camping, but I played along. He wanted to go camping for a while so tonight could be his night.
Little did I realize that he actually had no campground in mind. He assumed that "Gulf Coast National Seashore" would have a place we could camp. Unfortunately, our GPS navigation system pointed us to the middle of a residential area. We drove around looking for a beach, but we could only find one in the midst of houses. Finally, we drove up behind a church and parked there.
"Nobody will bother us here," I figured. I was wrong, though. Somebody came through to take a shower at the church around 3 in the morning.
Stretching my legs after an abbreviated sleep in the car
Next, we drove over to the beach and took a quick dip. Don proposed that we swim out to the end of the pier. Once we saw some jellyfish, though, we changed our minds.
Pensacola beach in the morning
By the evening, our bout of homelessness was complete. We made our way to Atlanta and stayed with a couple who are my friends from graduate school. One is an assistant professor at a top research university - that's what I want to be in a few years. At 28, he's quite settled with a house and family and job that should last a lifetime. It's a good life, but he seems so young to be so accomplished and established. Would it have ultimately mattered if he took a few detours along the way? On the other hand, there would be few paths similarly suitable for him, and I think the same is true for me.
7/14/2007
Homes away from home
Some people have a bad experience with church and never want to come back. I had a good experience with my last church and fear that it will never be as good again. In retrospect, it was a rare confluence of events that led me, eager but inexperienced in any sort of leadership, to the nascent Ethnos Community Church where I bought into the vision of building a multiethnic faith community reflecting the demographics of heaven and was given the opportunity to serve in a myriad of ways. We grew together.
I went to church for the first time in a few weeks. Here, I was reminded that Ethnos was far from the first to have a vision of an integrated society where people are valued regardless of race.
Ebenzer Baptist Church, the spiritual home of Martin Luther King and the more famous Junior (this is a new building)
From the outside
I've been slowly reading through "The Audacity of Hope" by Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. While I don't agree with everything he says, I sympathize with his sentiment that in a pluralistic society, people can be motivated to action by their faith background, but must be able to communicate their desires for broad social change in more universal language. Martin Luther King, Jr. was the archetypal leader of faith-based social reform.
A nice homemade lunch at Kyle and Jessica's
The tomato and basil plants they're so proud of
After lunch, we left for the Great Smoky Mountains. It was the end of the road for Don's smelly shark. After we caught the creature, our cousin Phu filleted it and cut off its head, whose cartilaginous skeleton Don was going to keep as a souvenir. By the time we reached Florida, it had started stinking up the car. When we reached the Smoky Mountains, I told him to get rid of it; I didn't want to attract any bears.
Thus, while I browsed a nearby souvenir shop, Don gave the shark an elaborate funeral rite by the river.
Beware of flamboyant Indian-Pirates. Especially if you own a souvenir shop!
Not knowing exactly where to go, we ended up passing straight through the park at dusk and in the early hours of night, eventually setting up camp in a North Carolina rest area.
7/15/2007
Cheap and expensive homes away from home
Here's a cheap home away from home. Cost: $0.
After driving most of the way across the country, this was the first time we actually set up our tent
Here's an expensive home away from home. The Biltmore House in Asheville, North Carolina. Cost: $45 daily for rights to wander the grounds. I didn't succumb to the tourist trap, but Don insisted on going because his lecturer from Sydney talked about it a lot.
Don is frustrated by the ridiculous price he paid to check out the Biltmore House, and remorseful that he was a sucker
Oblivious, the cherub doesn't care
Before arriving in Asheville, we did make a quick foray in the Smokies.
Butterflies were everywhere!
A Californian caught by rain in Asheville, North Carolina
That night we arrived in Richmond, where our cousin Neil lives.
7/16/2007
Visiting the psychiatrist
I left Don in Richmond for a day and went over to Charlottesville to visit the psychiatrist (Okay, he's not exactly a psychiatrist. He's a medical student in psychiatry, which is close enough). We played music together in college and today we had an encore.
Recording two tracks of my long-delayed album
Sophie is miles away and doesn't care
7/17/2007
The End of the Road
For a place that's called the national mall, especially a country which is a beacon of consumerist capitalism worldwide, the absence of department store fixtures such as Macy's and Nordstrom's was disappointing.
Mere gates can't stop us
Plus, the crowds are terrible and parking is horrendous, which is why we ended up taking the metro. No wonder they don't get any business at Lincoln's and Washington's.
I asked Don to give a speech.
Don in front of Lincoln's
"I'm a scientist, and I always have equations and technical skills to fall on. But you're a law student, and all you have are words. You need to be eloquent."
Sadly, he didn't comply. But...
I'm glad we made it up here!
Thanks for reading this far. Hope you enjoyed it!