The Road To…Somewhere Cross The Country In An Rv And You’ll Follow A Roadmap Of Emotional Hills And Valleys

I was miserable over my coffee, listening to the bleached-blond waitress telling another customer about her waitress jobs and her kids and a former life or two. The other woman, in the booth beside us at the Denny’s in Fallon, Nev., nodded knowingly.

My head was swimming. I was overwhelmed by America.

Three days out on our cross-country RV trip, and I was succumbing to the daunting vastness. I wanted to sit down with every gum-cracking waitress and ambling young gas jockey we met. I wanted to drive down all the Main Streets, smell the nuances in the air, and stare at the massive heavy skies and eat grits until I exploded.

But I had just two weeks left on my journey from Los Angeles to Atlanta, and a sneaking suspicion that two years wouldn’t be enough time.

I have several friends who say they want to buy an RV and see America - when they retire. I couldn’t wait. I was 40 years old and afraid if I didn’t put my foot to the floorboard now, I might forget to do it at all.

I was tired of trying to make sense of the illogical rut I had dug for myself in New Jersey. I didn’t need sense. I needed to rediscover abandon.

That was my goal, really - my grail, as we headed north out of Los Angeles, bound for Atlanta in our rented RV. I didn’t really care about the specifics of our itinerary. We decided on humble U.S. Route 50 east to someplace around Illinois, then south (somehow) to Georgia. This was more a sketch, a security blanket for my organized husband, Paul, than anything to which I was emotionally attached. Secretly, I intended to take full advantage of the RV lifestyle: Have home, will travel.

Circumstances did not permit an easy transition from our Toyota Corolla back home. We had been sucked unceremoniously into a maelstrom of traffic, heading north on Interstate Highway 5 - the Santa Ana Freeway - out of the Cruise America lot in Buena Park, Calif., where we picked up our Tioga. We were still trying to figure out how long it would take to stop a moving object this heavy and how far we were from the white lines and the semis howling by us on either side. I was glad Paul was driving.

And relieved when, two hours after we left Buena Park, sunset threatened and we agreed there was no way we’d be caught driving this thing in the dark.

We turned in at the gate of the Park Drive Mobile Home and RV Park, in Pixley, Calif., a sea of asphalt and crunchy white rocks. It had advertised itself as new; it certainly was more like a parking lot than a “park.” Only half a dozen of the 91 spaces were occupied.

Minimalism was helpful, though, for our first night in an RV. For $18, we got a map and a smile and a promise from the manager that she’d leave the light on at the pool until 10 p.m.

I knew I ought to cook. This is one of the advantages of RV travel; you take a whole kitchen, complete with stove, microwave, refrigerator- freezer and running water, hot and cold. But there was a minimart glowing in the darkness, so we went shopping for a suitable Road Food Feast: Doritos and salsa. We ate dessert first, polishing off the Twinkies as we picked our way through the moonless night back to our home on wheels.

I couldn’t get used to the idea that what we were doing was considered camping. We had a vehicle, not a tent. But our second day on the road crescendoed into undeniable wilderness, as our Tioga slowly climbed into the Yosemite high country, gulping in the cool alpine air at 10,000 feet. We pulled carefully into the campsite, our mirrors almost touching the pine trees on either side. A chipmunk stood upright on a log and noisily chided this forest interloper made of metal and glass.

But that’s RVing - roughing it without the rough part; enjoying the outdoors without rocks under the sleeping bag; having our nuked frozen pizzas and eating our campfire-roasted marshmallows, too.

We shivered through the Yosemite night, but the theme turned fast to furious, white-hot desert when we hit Route 50 - “The Loneliest Highway in America” - an hour east of Reno. Before us swept a moonscape of gray white dirt, hard salt bubbling to the top and baking in the 90-degree Nevada sun. Telephone poles marched off east and west along the road as far as we could see.

I had to stop not a mile out of Fallon to smell the dusty heat, to listen to the crackling of the salt. I sat in the middle of the near-liquid asphalt, right on the yellow line, and watched as no car or truck or bird or snake disturbed the shimmering horizon.

“Come on, honey,” Paul said as our hair began to fry in the sun. “There’re gonna be even lonelier places than this.”

Hard to believe, but there were. Outrageous expanses of nothing but dirt, sometimes flat dirt such as The Great Basin in Nevada, sometimes tortured red heaps of rocks as in Capitol Reef National Park in Utah, sometimes soaring precipices assaulted ceaselessly by rivers as in the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Monument in Colorado.

But always the loneliness was punctuated with remarkable evidence of human determination to conquer: falling-down barns with hay bales still waiting to be eaten; a bleached-white drive-in theater, swirling with the ghosts of Saturday nights; the lonely old roadside restaurant, which won’t be delivering on its promise of “All You Can Eat” until somebody takes the current owner up on the “For Sale” offer.

But Mom’s Cafe in Salina, Utah, hangs on; the truckers and the locals still come for Mom’s home-cooking. Its sign, painted on its brick wall, looks perfect in the late-afternoon light. In fact, the whole dusty, elegantly crumbling town, with its unlit neon and outdated graphics, is the pinnacle of evolution as far as The Romance of the Road is concerned.

The speed limit out here is 75. Apparently, they know how little time there is.

Paul did, too. His main task quickly became keeping us on some semblance of a schedule, a Herculean task when traveling with someone like me, who sees poignancy in broken bottles and exploded tire treads. Sometimes I had to close my eyes to stop my heart from breaking.

It was in the middle of Kansas in the middle of our road trip in the middle of the sunset. The field full of head-turned sunflowers was killing me with yellow as it whizzed by.

I couldn’t stand it anymore.

“STOP!”

Paul slammed on the brakes, sending pebbles spraying and dirt wheezing. We stopped as quickly as a house on wheels could. He looked in the rearview mirror to assess the damage this time.

“The puzzle’s on the floor,” he said.

Again. All 500 pieces of the jigsaw puzzle of America we’d bought in Utah were splattered everywhere but on the table where it had been a point of honor, after several such splatterings, to get the damnable thing together.

I decided, in Kansas, to let the pieces lie where they had fallen.

Somehow, despite my incessant requests to “STOP!” and conversations with countless waitresses, we arrived in Hutchinson, Kan., for the state fair - the centerpiece of our trip - as planned.

Saturday night, the big night. The RV campsite looked full, but gatekeeper Elaine Welch, the quintessence of maternal, told her husband to find us a place, with electric and water: 10 bucks. We couldn’t believe our good fortune.

Cleaned-up cowboys and their cowgirls streamed by between the rigs, on their way to the big Saturday night. We became part of the flow. Babies dozed in strollers; farm women toddled past, intent on their Pronto Pups, “best thing that ever happened to a hot dog.”

The sky was turning purple when we found the enormous Ferris wheel. For the price of five tickets, we were whisked away to our midway aerie, gazing down through the white marquee lights and pink neon scaffolding onto a river of people and a clot of sunset past a place called the Yellow Brick Road, somewhere on the way to Oz.

As we followed the road through Kansas, we found yet another heartland legend. The sign by the side of Route 50 near Newton proclaims, “Johnny’s Back,” with the coda: “Fresh Pecans.”

Where had Johnny been? A tall man with a road map for a face and a firm handshake, introduced himself as Johnny Jackson, and he told us. The county decided four years ago to widen Route 50 right here, and it took Johnny’s Legendary Fruit Stand out of business. Johnny thought he’d retire, but couldn’t stand it. Missed people. Set up again, 50 yards from the original site.

He moved a box of peaches off a pile of dusty photo albums and opened one to show me a page of the thousands of pages of Polaroid pictures that used to cover the walls in his old place. Polaroids of truckers; guys in feed hats, amazing beards; guys with big guts and flannel shirts; every once in a while a guy and his girl. Under them in faded writing was a name, a handle, any other pertinent information. He’ll never forget the truckers, he said. They made him what he is today.

Besides, it was truckers pulled him out of a plane crash in 1980, saved his life for sure.

“I’m a sentimental old cuss,” he admitted, brushing his eyes with the shoulder of his T-shirt.

Johnny looked off at a truck passing by.

“That’s Pridey. They haul cattle.” He waved. A roar of truck engine, then the sound of a horn sang through the air.

Before we left Kansas, we had one more argument about detouring to Cawker to see the Biggest Ball of String in the World, but I lost.

I did, however, persuade Paul to make a detour to another segment of civilization: riverboat gambling in Kansas City, Mo. The riverboats aren’t boats, necessarily, but buildings erected on barges. They don’t have to cruise anywhere and don’t even have to be on a river, just within 1,000 feet of the main channel.

The casinos had regular two-hour “sailings” for which passengers are boarded and allowed onto the gambling floor - deck, that is. At the Flamingo Casino, the newest of the “fleet” in Kansas City, there was little else in the way of pretense. Even the clerk in the huge gift shop admitted she never got seasick, even during the stormiest weather.

Another aspect of Americana awaited us in Nashville, Tenn., where we lingered for 24 hours because we’d met Eddie Thompson, a country singer, and Lila Hyatt, a waitress who fell in love with Eddie two years ago and moved back up from her home in Louisiana, “lock, stock and barrel,” after selling two homes in two weeks. Eddie and Lila work nights at Skull Schulman’s Rainbow Room in Printer’s Alley.

Eddie has the New Country Look down - big white hat and gold rings on his fingers, and eyes so sincere you want to offer him a record contract. That almost happened for Eddie, once. Almost. Still, Eddie can’t complain. He has a steady gig at the Rainbow Room, and whenever he wants, he can look across at Lila, who’s often leaning on her bar tray at the counter while he’s singing George Strait covers, looking at him like she could die right now and be the happiest woman on Earth.

“I ain’t got no money,” she explains, heavily mascaraed eyes squinting through her cigarette smoke. “But you couldn’t buy the two years of happiness we’ve had.”

East of Nashville was one more notable outpouring of commercialism: Pigeon Forge, Tenn., endless miles of outlet stores and fast food emporiums, crescendoing in Dollywood. Thankfully, the protected terrain of Great Smoky Mountain National Park was waiting on the other side.

Finally - inevitably - the end of the road. After 3,421 miles, our rolling home rattled a sigh of relief at its drop-off center near Atlanta.

We emptied its contents: socks, crushed pillows, the plastic, sparkle-laden Yosemite glass that had served as a bowl for my oatmeal, the remains of the roll of quarters left over after we’d gotten our “stanky britches” - one local’s epithet for laundry - done in Dodge City, Kan. And I grabbed the unopened bottle of white wine we’d bought at the Peaceful Bend Winery in central Missouri, where we’d spent hours talking to the streetwise winemaker.

We left a few pieces of the puzzle on the floor, on purpose. Then the attendant drove our Tioga away to make it presentable for the next adventurers. We watched it disappear into the car wash to obliterate 16 days of dirt and bug carcasses and memories.

Johnny Jackson had asked us: “Why are you in such a hurry?”

Maybe I was a little glad we had to keep moving. Maybe I just liked the speed, “the blur,” as Paul put it. The too-soon goodbyes, after all, did leave just a little more for next time. Not to mention that elusive ball of string.

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: IF YOU GO Getting an RV: Rental rates vary widely, depending on the company and time of year. The high season for most of the country is summer, while Florida’s high season is winter. High season rates average $125-$200 a day, $50 less in low season. Take advantage of multiple-night packages; they’re almost always more cost-effective. You’ll undoubtedly find hidden charges: daily rental insurance, (usually optional, around $12 a day; as with rental car insurance, check your own policy before buying theirs; you may be covered); additional mileage charges (29 cents a mile at Cruise America, for example); vehicle provisioning kits (household items, towels, etc., if you don’t want to bring your own); security deposits, taxes, refilling of propane tanks, etc. The average RV will get only 10 to 11 mpg, and you pay for the gas. Campsites range from free (some state and national park facilities, for instance) to $40 for the new, fancy RV resorts with all amenities (such as luxury places with the words “golf club” tacked on); most KOA and Good Sam Parks run $15-$18 with “full hookups” - water, electricity and sewer; again, prices will probably be higher in summer. Many don’t accept reservations; during high season, it’s best to arrive early, and call ahead. The Recreation Vehicle Rental Association has a directory listing more than 270 rental companies. The guide is available for $10 by calling 800-972-1074, ext. 3, or writing to 2023 Lucas Drive, Dallas, TX 75219. Cruise America is the largest network for rentals: call 800-327-7799, or fax 602-464-7321. Or write to Cruise America, 11 W. Hampton Ave., Mesa, AZ 85210; Internet, www.cruiseamerica.com. Another option is El Monte RV Center, with several locations in America and one in Vancouver; British Columbia. Contact the main office at 12818 Firestone Blvd., Santa Fe Springs, CA 90670; or call 800-367-3687; Internet, www.elmonte.com Hints: A one-way cross-country rental trip is cost-prohibitive for most people; drop-off charges for not going round-trip can run $750 or more. You may be able to cut your costs significantly by playing the role of a transporter, moving a vehicle from west to east in the fall (as we did) or east to west in the spring. Cruise America, for example, will give you 10 free days to transport a vehicle from one point to another. After that, you pay a per-diem rate. The catch is you have to be flexible in your plans, leaving on fairly short notice if necessary. This may involve last-minute purchase of airline tickets, which could eat up a large chunk of the savings you’re getting on the RV. Invest in a good campground directory. Woodall Publications has country-wide and regional directories, available in bookstores or call 800-323-9076; the company also has a helpful Web site at www.woodalls.com. We found the annual Trailer Life Campground/RV Park & Services Directory ($19.95) extremely user-friendly (it is, after all, the official directory of the Good Sam Club, available through them in Colorado). Members of KOA or the Good Sam Club get 10 percent discounts at participating accommodations, plus breaks on services and tourist attractions throughout their networks (both include parks in Canada and Mexico, and KOA also has member parks in Japan). KOA’s Value Kard is $10: KOA, P.O. Box 30558, Billings, MT 59114; 406-248-7444; Internet, www.koakampgrounds.com. Good Sam Parks memberships ($12 new members): P.O. Box 6885, Englewood, CO 80155; 800-234-3450; Internet, www.tl.com Many RV veterans trail cars or boats, or carry bicycles. Having another form of transportation, such as your own car, will enable you to remain mobile after hooking up your mobile home at a campsite. The Recreation Vehicle Industry Association offers a free video for first-timers, available by calling 888-GO-RVing. You can also write to RVIA, P.O. Box 2999, Reston, VA 20195; or phone 703-620-6003.