I wished I could stay at the hotel longer. So big! Such good coffee in the lobby! So tired of portaging my bags in and out and up and down, getting stuck in doors, making …

I’ve found on these trips that biting off a big mileage chunk on a weekend day is a mistake, so I decided to take it easy today, a Saturday — stop and browse around where …

I got a perfect country night’s sleep and woke up at 6:30 AM, unprompted. I actually swung my feet to the ground, yawned, and stretched. I never do that. I’m out of bed with my …

Jay told me the day before about a little Siamese that wandered into his room a few times. When I got up and pulled my curtains back, I saw her in a sunbeam in front …

There are two kinds of women in the world: the kind who are like, “Sam Elliott? He’s a pretty good actor, I liked him in that Cher movie,” and the kind who would knock you …

Couch Baron and I parted ways at around 10:30 AM, he to the airport, I to find a post office that, if it exists, is in a Macy’s and I never found it. Back to …

I hadn’t let myself dwell on it, because what good would it have done except to paralyze me, but a part of me believed I wouldn’t get to California, that I would end up towed …

A man from Fresno quizzed me in the parking lot, not about the car, but about whether I’d come all that way by myself. “Courage…courage,” he said. I hadn’t thought of it that way…or not …

I stopped at a CVS on the way out of town to restock on sunscreen and snacks — a warehouse-size store with slot machines by the checkout. At ten in the morning, most of the …

I began the day in a mood of grim exhilaration: the route promised the most daunting driving yet. The locals have accustomed themselves to it, no doubt, and developed methods of timing their drives and …