Bert's Bohemia: The Cowgirls from Bohemia

(House in Bisbee, Arizona)

The first shower since Wednesday (and first motel for the trip) and how does it happen that you get soooo dirty? Hmm, well. We've been sleeping wherever we can find, first at a friend's in LA but then on the side of a desert freeway and next in a wilderness area, also on the side of a road, both of which of course have chaparral as your vanity, and a bottle of water as your sink. Dirty, yes. Awesome, also yes. We drank beer and slept under the full moon and listened to the last truck drive down the freeway for the night. A lonely cow came and found us and mooed when she heard our voices.

Our air conditioner, which we weren't using in the first place because the jeep is Nicole's moving truck and loaded down like you wouldn't believe, officially stopped working on us at all somewhere in New Mexico. We are hot and with the windows rolled down, I've got trucker's tan/burn on both arms. Most of what we've driven through on this trip is desert. It's been 80 and 90 degrees the whole way. It's nice, for a change. The landscape is shocking. We can not imagine what it would have been like to be a pioneer and not driving 75 through three states of desert. We have decided that the Oregon Trail game was probably accurate concerning how often people died. At least the way I played it.

We've seen a lot of rabbits, a roadrunner (!), a ton of deer in Texas, an ostrich farm, and lizards. We've stopped in LA to see a band with my friend Andy, Joshua Tree to see the wildflowers blooming and one (and only one!) Joshua tree. We've been to Tombstone (yuck), Bisbee, Arizona (randomly great hippy community, where we saw the most amazing couple--a cat leashed to a dog that would jump on its back and ride), and all sorts of wilderness areas characterized by Saguaro cacti and cholla bushes (my mortal enemy, stemming from an unfortunate brushup in the mojave desert during high school--they shoot their barbs). We drove past the metal fence lining the US/Mexico border. Yesterday we went to White Sands Monument, an expanse of white sand dunes composed of gypsum, right in the middle of a US missile range. The road to White Sands is often closed to move top secret weapons. The place was mind-blowing. The roads through the center are cleared with bulldozers like snow plows. We made angels in the powdery sand and ran up and down the dunes. I took a lot of White Sands with me to Texas.

We're outside San Antonio now and have sang the few lines from the Texas song featured in PeeWee's Big Adventure about 50 times. Nicole and I got over being sick of each other on the second day. We have not run out of things to talk about. And when we have, a cop wearing a cowboy hat or a billboard reading "Take someone else's name in vain --God" fixes that right up.

We see fewer and fewer California plates and I'm definitely starting to feel different. And lucky. Oh, so lucky. To grow up and go somewhere like Tombstone high school surrounded by open desert must be quite a different experience.

We leave for New Orleans today.

Some photos:

Gas station in California. The sign says, "This recreation area is for the enjoyment of our customers." We enjoyed that tire, buffalo, and cop car to our heart's content. Nicole humped the cop car.