Go West, Young Man
From Florida we headed west to New Orleans. Up until this point I had driven the whole time because of her allergies. However she said she was feeling okay and agreed to drive for a while. I got a good two hours out of her.
We made it to New Orleans and spent the day in the city and stayed the night at a hotel. In the morning we checked out some of the famous cemeteries and then continued west to Texas. After Eric had graduated college he moved from Pennsylvania to Austin, Texas. We were going to spend a couple of days with him.
We had a really good time. At one point we met him for lunch at his job and a girl that he was interested in named AnnMarie. AnnMarie was an absolute sweetheart. One of those nice as nice could be type people. It didn’t work out between them because the first time he went to her place, it smelled like cats. A lot of cats, and not in a tolerable way. That was his reasoning at least, but they remained good friends.
Eric was funny because he wanted to show us and do everything, the problem was that all of these things took place at the same time. A show called Esters Follies, the ‘Bat Bridge’ of Austin, and a happy hour at his favorite bar.
We ended up seeing the bat bridge which was a pretty amazing site. Starting at dusk, bats start flying out from under a bridge down the street from the Texas Capital building. Then they start coming out by the hundreds for the next 45 minutes. You would think that it was physically impossible to have that many bats living under the bridge.
When we left Austin, our plan was to head west to see Melman in New Mexico, but when we called Matt to get his contact info like we were supposed to, Matt informed us that when Melman got to New Mexico, they didn’t like the way it smelled so they moved to Montana instead.
This left Chrissy and I at a crossroads. Where do we go from here? We decided to head north towards Colorado to drop some of the stuff in our car in the storage place, then head towards California. I had a friend I used to work with named Melissa that now lived in the Dallas/Fort Worth area.
Melissa had worked with George and I in our department at Penney’s for a year or so. The first day she worked there she made my go buy her cigarettes. I’ll always remember that. Anyway, she was dating a guy who got a football scholarship, so she moved to Texas with him. Their relationship wasn’t always the best when they were living in New York and it didn’t improve in Texas. When we got there, he was very hostile to her and she wasn’t much better towards him. It was great seeing her, but it was also very uncomfortable, so we didn’t stay. We spent another night sleeping in the car.
The next day we visited the Oklahoma City Botanical Gardens and because Chrissy didn’t want to drive the whole length of Texas we drove through the Oklahoma pan handle. She actually offered to drive for some of this leg while I took a nap. Unfortunately, she took a wrong turn and we ended up in Texhoma briefly. (On the border of Texas and Oklahoma).
Finally, we got to Colorado. We dropped of some stuff at storage and spent the night at my aunt and uncles in the mountain. My Oldsmobile, Snout, did not like driving up in the mountains. I was informed later that because it had a carburetor adjusted for sea level, the gas to oxygen ration was off and cause it to feel like the car was dying. Cars with fuel injection did not have this same problem.
Feeling safe about my car again we continued heading west towards California. Matt tried twice with this car to drive down the California coast and twice failed to make it to California. I was not going to fail. We still had two weeks before our apartment would open up.