Sunday, September 17, 2006: Carson City, NV to SF Bay Area

Nothing much left to say. I'm happy, as I'm sure Terrie and Laika are, for the short drive home. I've taken SO many pictures (some worth keeping), I'm pretty much camera'd out for these last several hours.

We stop at a truckstop-kinda-place near the Nevada/California border. We try to walk Laika, but she can be a bit of a pee snob and the bare dirt doesn't suit her as much as a nicely manicured green lawn. When I come out of the gas station, I find that she's made yet another good friend, a young girl who evidently lives here. She's happy to hang out with Laika (and Laika is happy to hang out with her), and Steve and I leave, a little concerned that someone would let their kid hang out with strangers in the parking lot all day.

Near Davis, I hand the wheel over to Steve again so he can bring us on home. I forget that this can often be the worst stretch of the trip along I-80, but there is only one minor slowdown, and all of us take it pretty well. Laika whines a little, but she eventually settles down. We head through Vallejo, over the causeway and onto Lakeville Highway, 101, and then home.

So, how do I bring this thing full-circle? I didn't recognize a single spot from my hitchhiking days: I-80 is complete through Salt Lake City, where I spent hours more than once with my thumb out watching shiny happy Mormons drive by; same with I-70 through Green River, Utah, where I spent a night dodging bats with breakfast in view at a diner and no money in my pocket. Nevada and Wyoming are much more beautiful than I remember them; but I've learned to see a lot more in the intervening 30-plus. America has fared somewhat better over the years than the Oakland Raiders, but even in the small human contact we had in our self-contained traveling family unit, we saw a little hint of the good old jingoism and racism (and speciesism) of Inner Red-State America—and we also saw a great deal of simple decency, friendliness, and goodness (always less glaring than the bad). We felt uneasy in some places, but never as entirely unsafe as I felt a few weeks later, when I was driving my regular route to lunch and passed a platoon of cops with two alleged gang members pulled over and all guns drawn, on D street in Petaluma, CA.

I'd do this trip again in a heartbeat. There is SO much beauty in backroads America—especially the U.S. West—I would love to have a free month (and a couple thousand dollars) to spend in Utah alone... Stay tuned for that trip!