Coast to Coast | Stories

Letters from the Field

Jude Tibay — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 06:57:00 +0000

Email from my dad in response to having seen a photo of my henna tattoo:

Jude,
Did you actually got a real tattoo? I don't know, honestly, I don't like you having one. Nobody in our family or your Mom's have one. In the Philippines, only ex-convict wears them.
-Pa

My email response:

Hahaha, of course I didn't get a tattoo.. It's an ink originating from India, which is only temporary but lasts about 2 weeks. It's almost gone now.

Email response from dad:

Thanks God!
- Pa

Exit Arizona

Jude Tibay — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 21:16:00 +0000

I spent all morning pathetically hunched over my laptop in my hotel room in Williams, Arizona taking advantage of the internet-oasis – free high-speed internet access! I organized, caption-ized, backed-up and uploaded about 3GB of digital photos. You’re welcome.

I finally pulled myself off the internet around 2PM and went into town to replenish some of my desert-survival supplies – water, ice, bananas and cookies. OK, there aren’t really “survival supplies”, but they are pretty handy stuff to have while car camping in the desert. I finished up around 3PM and was ready to go to Joshua Tree National Park with an expected arrival of 8PM at the park. This would leave me enough daylight to setup camp and scout an ideal star-gazing spot.

I looked at my phone. It was not turning on and no amount of charging or power-cycling was getting it to respond. I had 2 choices. I could either risk venturing into the desert without phone-service until I reached San Diego, or backtrack 40 miles to Flagstaff where the nearest VerizonWireless store was located. I chose the latter.

As I walked into the store that was an hour in the opposite direction, my phone magically turned on. Totally unexplainable, and at that point I would have preferred it be broken. Murphy’s Law strikes again. I walk out of the store half-embarrassed, half-annoyed. I change my route to accommodate the sitch-ee-yay-shun: No back roads. All interstates. My visit in Phoenix was like suspicious Indian food through an un-inducted American tourist: it was new and exciting going down, but I went through it way too fast to appreciate it. (Explosively fast.) When I exited the bowels of the city, the stretch of I-10 between Phoenix and LA was surprisingly backed up. Don’t tell me the traffic in LA is this bad! Thanks to the jam, I make a pit stop just within the city limits at an In-and-Out Burger. (Be jealous.)

Two hours later I find myself approaching the Arizona-California boarder at 90mph. The speed limit is 75 but everyone else is doing it. A sign greets me “Welcome to California” in the most generic way – small green sign with white letters. Yay. Next sign: “Prison Next Exit… DO NOT PICKUP HITCH HIKERS”. (Comforting) A few miles later, a car fire on the left shoulder with flaming tongues whip the farthest right lane. Now this is what I’m talking about.

OhMahGah, Omaha!

Jude Tibay — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 05:11:00 +0000

Cross Country - New Jersey to Denver

Hundreds of corpses – limbs, eyeballs, guts – dot my bumper and windshield. I step out of my car to pump gas at the “World’s Largest Truck Stop”. I’m definitely in Iowa. As I squeegee away the residue of Massacre from my windshield, something smells like fried shrimp. It’s the bug guts roasting on my warm engine. I’m glad I’m in Iowa. I won’t be eating seafood for a while.

Just moments ago, I torpedoed down I-88 at mach 5 when a couple of crows dangerously glided across the highway just 2 feet off the ground. I hit the brakes gently with a sense of mercy. The first crow made it across without losing any feathers. The second, however, met my right passenger-side door with a thud. I looked in my rearview mirrors only to see his crow friend land at his unconscious side. As my friend Ryan said: “survival of the fittest”… or in this case, smartest. If you’re a bird and have the power of flight, don’t fly 3 feet above a highway.

Packing

Jude Tibay — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 19:00:00 +0000

I've started packing for my roadtrip to Colorado and hopefully California. Check out my packlist at: http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pyytsSWxTqpSDq7BX4s2qYQ&hl=en_US