We drove straight from San Francisco to Sacramento. In Sacramento, Ali and John dropped Peter and me off at the airport so we could fly back to Connecticut.
We both wanted to stay longer, but it was time for us to go back to engaging with the real world again. Peter had mandatory training for his job as an RA at Easter Connecticut State, and I needed to go apartment hunting and find a job of my own before the school year began.
Unfortunately, Ali and John’s journey on the bus ended shortly after Peter and I left. Just a week after our departure, the bus broke down again in Elko, Nevada. A tow truck took her to the town of Wells, where John and Ali learned that the repairs would cost nearly as much as the bus itself. The flew back to Connecticut. Anne Marie stayed behind–at least for now.
But just because the trip came to an early end doesn’t mean it wasn’t worth it. Any single moment of the trip was better than anything else I could have been doing with my summer. As trite as it is to say that I “discovered myself,” there’s no questioning that I’m more comfortable with who I am now. I’ve seen a lot of America, and I’ve figured out where I belong in it, at least for now. I’ve learned how I deal with stresses I would never have been subjected to otherwise, and I’ve experienced types of joy that I’ve never felt before. I know the euphoria of coming out of a sweat lodge, the rush of seeing the entire Grand Canyon laid out beneath you, and the relief of a shower after a week straight of marinating in blinding heat. I don’t know if it’s made me a better person, but I think so. At the very least, it’s made me better at being okay with myself.
Young people of America: travel. Do it before you have kids and a mortgage, or a career that you absolutely can’t take two months off from. You don’t need a school bus to do it. Just one or two very close friends and something with wheels. You can even convert it to run on vegetable oil, like ours; I’m told it’s not hard, and a friend of the bus from back in our hometown just did that with his own VW bus.
Don’t just go to one place and stay in a hotel. Couchsurf. Get a rail pass. Talk to strangers. Sleep in bus stations. Just get out there, and stay out there for as long as you can.
It may be uncomfortable, at times. You might not get much sleep, and you’ll probably smell bad. But the things you’ll see and feel, the people you’ll talk to, and the camaraderie you’ll experience with other travelers will more than make up for it.
One more thing: Thanks to the Center for American Progress and the wonderful Kay Steiger for giving me the opportunity to write about this trip, and supporting me. I was extraordinarily lucky to have their confidence, and I wouldn’t have had the resources to spend those nine weeks on the trip without them.
San Francisco is an interesting town to say the least. The term “San Francisco values” has become a favored shibboleth of the right, a rallying cry meant to allude to all sorts of perversions that need to be stopped. But speaking as someone who had been there a few times before (besides Austin, that’s the only major stop for which I can say that), visiting once again only confirmed how much I liked San Francisco values.
This bastion of gay pride, sequestered within a state where marijuana is decriminalized, is obviously nowhere near the hotbed of iniquity that Newt Gingrich would have you believe. The appearance of a few gay erotica stores on Castro Street hasn’t caused a devolution into anarchy. And more to the point, it’s part of the open, accepting vibe of the city; from the dude in line to the bathroom to the guy at the train station who gave us a free pass because he liked the idea of our road trip, everyone we spoke to was friendly, helpful, and comfortable around people from different backgrounds.
The city also has an admirable dedication to promoting education and the arts. Its extensive public library system includes 27 branches and 4 roving bookmobiles. The downtown area, particularly around Yerba Buena Gardens, is packed with museums and art galleries. When we visited, the gardens were also the site of a Latin Music Festival.
Obviously, the city is not without its problems. The whole state of California is in very hot water right now; plus, San Francisco has a fairly large homeless population. Stratospheric housing prices and an absurdly high sales tax (8.25 percent) probably aren’t helping too much with that, either. But I don’t think that has anything to do with this supposed moral deficiency amongst the city’s residents. In fact, our stop there on the tour only convinced me that the other 49 states could only benefit from importing some more San Francisco values.
The bus got some strange reactions in Claremont—in fact, I would say that the reactions we got ran the entire gamut of possible emotional responses. Most of the people we encountered were, of course, friendly, and some of them were really enthusiastic about the bus. One guy that comes to mind is Harry Barnes, a talented photographer who stopped by on his bicycle, hung out on the bus for a while, and get very excited about photographing as much of the bus as he could.
Most of our exchanges were like that. But we also had some profoundly odd ones that we haven’t had anywhere else. We had parked the bus in the parking lot near some dorms for Harvey Mudd College, and our friend, Charlotte, had gone to the administration and received assurances that we didn’t need a parking pass to be there. But within an hour of us arriving a security guard had arrived on a golf cart and sheepishly said he had to ask us to identify ourselves because someone had reported suspicious activity in the parking lot. Then, the next day, a man who identified himself as one of the associate deans of Harvey Mudd stopped by to remind us in a mock-friendly, vaguely threatening tone that we were guests there. He suggested that he had seen a bong through the window of the bus, to our amusement; it goes without saying that we don’t actually have one.
Shortly after he left, we noticed that we were missing some of the trinkets we had collected over the course of the trip, such as a vanity license plate and a painting we had found in a dumpster behind Wesleyan University. Later we found out that some drunk students had heard about a hippie bus parked outside their school, and decided to investigate. One of them must have gotten a boost and been able to reach through one of the cracked windows to grab at some of that stuff. Fortunately, one of the people who was on the campus who knew us found out about it, and got the stuff returned.
No harm done, but it was still a strange experience; even in the reddest of the hippie-bashing red states, we had never once been threatened or stolen from. Perhaps it’s the weird environment of small colleges, especially during the summer when there’s practically no one around. In a strange way, a sparsely populated college campus is a distant cousin of the frontier town, with its own culture, laws and tribal politics.
Our first stop in California was Claremont, home of the five Claremont colleges (and, on a geekier note, home of the late David Foster Wallace, grandfather of this summer’s most essential online book club). We were visiting our friend from high school, Charlotte (pictured), who now attends Scripps, the all-girls school in Claremont. The plan was to hang around Claremont a little bit, then go into Los Angeles, CA to visit some other friends and see what the whole fuss was about.
Alas, transit in LA County is notoriously difficult even with a normal-sized automotive vehicle. There was no way we were driving the bus into the city to deal with what we’d heard was a nightmarish parking situation, and there was no good public transportation system to get us where we wanted to go. Gradually, we relinquished the idea of ever going to LA; we felt bad about not seeing our friends there (and about not ever trying to meet Gary Oldman, which was sort of a half-joking mission of ours), but from what we’d been told by locals, we weren’t missing a great deal from the city itself. We were all sort of stunned by how hard pressed everyone we talked to was to come up with anything to actually do in Los Angeles.
So we ended up staying in Claremont for three days, and it served as a pretty good substitute. The campuses (including Claremont McKenna, Scripps, and Pomona) were absolutely gorgeous, and the downtown area was nice as well. It might not have been the Walk of Fame, but none of us were particularly interested in the obligatory sight-seeing stuff anyway.
It still feels kind of odd to have missed out on what is the major city of the West Coast, but perhaps it’s not a bad thing. We were eager to check out LA more out of a sense of obligation than anything else, and my curiosity still isn’t sated; but for this particular road trip, I’m going to trust the judgment of Claremont residents that it wouldn’t have been worth the effort.
I'm Ned Resnikoff, a writer for Campus Progress. I, along with some of my high school buddies, will be driving a school bus turned veggie oil-fueled makeshift RV across the continental United States over the summer. We'll keep you updated on our trip and what we see along the way.
Pretty amazing that whoever wrote my FOL textbook doesn't understand the difference between "as large as" and "at least as large as."
about 3 hours ago from Brizzly
Someone good at that sort of thing should remake Nosferatu, package it as a Twilight ripoff, and traumatize a generation of filmgoers.
about 6 hours ago from Brizzly
