Seattle to WV in a Friends Car

This trip is the first time I ever went to West Virginia. Back in 2016, I decided to help my friends move from the West Coast to the East Coast. It was a long trip from Seattle all the way to Berkeley Springs, West Virginia. Needless to say, plenty of driving was involved. I was nervous because I had to keep myself safe, I had to keep my friends car in one piece. Because of the time of year, I had to get South and fast. I was driving a 2004 Subaru Outback that I barely fit in. My car was a 2001 VW Bug, which was somehow more comfortable. It also got way better gas mileage. I almost ran that car out of gas on multiple occasions. This trip also would feature me visiting my Father in Alabama for the first time. 

From Seattle, I made my way south and drove all the way down to Sacramento in one day. Terrible mistake. It was 12 hours of driving, which was fine, but with the frequent gas stops, it ended up being 14 hours, and I pulled into the cheap downtown motel around 11 pm that night. The drive down the coast on I-5 is quite pretty. It’s not as picture post-card perfect as the train journey I had taken a couple of times, but booking a motel in downtown Sacramento was less than a smart idea. My friend had given me some money for the trip, and to stretch it as far as I could, I saved money on hotels. However, staying in sketchy motels does leave one worrying about your car’s safety, especially when the car is not yours. Driving down the highway with plastic over the window is no fun at all. The car survived the night. I got tired of looking for radio stations, so I decided to pull into a store and get a Bluetooth speaker to listen to music off of my phone. The car’s header was original with no functionality beyond CDs. 

Having gone a little south, it was now time to get West. However, I did not go far enough south because I still ended up going across Wyoming. Wyoming is as easier drive across the Rockies because it is a flatter transit than Colorado, where you are in the high mountains. Going down to New Mexico and coming up I-25 was no good either because that drive has its own hills to get over. I still ended up in the snow. They were closing exits behind me as I was going along, which delighted my Dad, who was following me. Driving across I-80 in the blowing snow at 20 mph is not an experience I want to replicate any time again soon. This was March, and I thought I might get a break in the weather, but I had blown my break in the weather by stopping in Salt Lake City to see my friend and now business partner. I could have made it before the snow, but instead, I saw him and ended up in the snow. The sad part is I saw him for one hour. It wasn’t worth it. It was my first time driving across Nevada and Utah. I got to drive across the desert and the salt flats and pull through the magical Mormon playground of Wendover, Nevada. It’s a city of lights right over the border from Utah, so the holy can be sinful in another state where gambling and prostitution are both legal. I made it to Denver in one piece after much stress and snow.

After a few days with my parents, I kept easing eastward. The weather was now in my favor as I made my way across Kansas. This car did not get great gas mileage, so I was constantly stopping for gas. I don’t quite remember the exact route, but I believe that I stopped outside of Kansas City and then dropped down through Arkansas. I had to get to Alabama, and going south would mean more favorable weather. Driving across Arkansas was surreal. I had been there so often, and it was nice to see how the place had changed. I hadn’t been there since 2010 when I attended a funeral for my Grandma’s husband. I’ve written about my many trips to Arkansas in this series before. It is the “natural state” and incredibly beautiful. There isn’t much else in the country like the Ozarks. The way highways are built around the rugged environment is its own art form. They have done a good job of making them fit into the landscape rather than plowing the mountains to fit the highway. I stopped outside of Memphis. I don’t stay in cities if I can help it. I like to either stop before a major city or stop on the far side and get ahead start on the next day’s driving. In 3 days, I was pulling into Northport, Alabama, on the other side of the Black Warrior River near Tuscaloosa and the University of Alabama.

My father was living in an apartment at the time, and I pulled into his driveway and knocked on the door. He greeted me right away. That night we talked for the first time in person, and he offered me cooking sherry. He had the bottle out and was drinking it. As I said in another story, when your father you haven’t seen before offers you cooking sherry to drink, you drink it. I’ve had $400 bottles of wine and Veuve Clicquot champagne, but that cooking sherry was special because I was drinking it with my father in his town, in his apartment. My life had come full circle. I spent a few days with him in the warm weather. He showed me around town and talked about what it was like during Jim Crow. He showed me around to some family, and I met many people whose names I struggled to remember. I saw a picture of my grandparents, who had died when I was in high school. My grandfather was a sharecropper who was lucky enough to get a good crop in 1946 and actually buy land. He bought quite a bit of land, which had been slowly sold off as the years had gone by. I learned a little more about the relationship between me and my Mom and how it started and ended before I was conscious enough to know what happened.

A few days later, it was time to meet up with my friends in Atlanta finally. They were driving up from Florida, and I was driving over from Alabama, and we were set to meet in a hotel parking lot near the airport. Now Atlanta has really screwed up how you get to Hartsfield-Jackson. It’s easy enough if you’re taking MARTA, but on I-75, the terminals’ exits are right off the highway, which means you have through traffic and airport traffic all passing around in about a 5-mile stretch. It’s traffic chaos that could only be designed by the City of Atlanta or Grand Theft Auto designers. I managed to navigate it in one piece and deliver my friend’s car to her.

They had driven a rental car, so our next task was to deliver their rental car back and then start our journey up to West Virginia, which we were planning to do all in one day. It is important to understand that my friends are very proper people. The husband is from Scotland, and the wife is from the midwest but would fit into 1870s England with almost no interruption in her life. So bear that in mind. We’re packed into a 2004 Subaru Outback with a cat in a box, a bunch of luggage, and we have a 12-hour drive to Berkeley Springs, West Virginia.

For this next bit, you’ll need to recall the Boaty McBoatface scandal. We had been making fun of the sense of humor of the British public for the whole drive we had started to call out everything in the same format, “Signy McSignyface” and our ultimate accomplishment, “Shitty McShitface.” I was in a jolly mood as we stopped for gas yet again because of the poor gas mileage.

We had stopped at some roadside gas station, possibly in North Carolina. We’re all tired, we’re wired, and getting a bit punchy. Remember that I said they are proper people. I’m tired, and I’m thinking of an old Benny Hill sketch where he parties with a bunch of sexy women in sexy clothing. Walking along, my friend (the husband) looks like Benny Hill, and I start to laugh as I think about him popping out of the gas station with a bunch of sexy women. I tell this to my friend, his wife, and she gives me the look of death. I had gone too far. I was too punchy. I sat quietly for a while.

We finally pulled into Berkeley Springs with only a few more Boaty Mcboatface jokes, and we tried to get our bearings in this small, historic spa town. Berkeley Springs was a long-time getaway from the well-to-do of the 18th and 19th centuries in Washington D.C. and the areas surrounding it. It sports natural hot springs, and the town has made a good deal about every founding father who had visited the town to take the waters. Back then, the old roman baths were still open, and we made sure to soak in the mineral waters. We decided to bathe separately so that we could all be as naked or not as we wanted, which was fine with me. If I’m going to be in 90 degrees or hotter water, the fewer clothes I have, the better. The town is small and quite frankly dying out. The heyday of its years as a getaway has long passed. Now small shops are selling various gift goods, a few restaurants, and an excellent antique store. It would like to be a tourist trap, but it just hasn’t gotten off the ground.

Because of the lack of hotel rooms, I ended up bunking up in a Motel 8 just over the river in Maryland and commuting to my friend’s new home for about a week until my flight back to Seattle. Rather than drive me themselves, they were kind enough to hire me a car to get me to Baltimore so that I could fly home. There was a terrible accident on the highway. I was delayed but still managed to catch my flight, despite being accosted by the Lyndon LaRouche PAC guy in the terminal hawking neo-liberal economic messages. As I recall, I landed in Seattle and had a voicemail that my cousin was pregnant with her son on that trip, which, at the time, was big news.

Overall, it was an amazing trip with amazing people. I saw much of the country, and it would be the first of a few cross-country trips that I would take. Donald Trump was a thing at the time, and we had no idea what the next 4 years held for us. In some ways, it was a more innocent time. Certainly, this trip would have been downright dangerous with the pandemic, but it is one of my most memorable trips.