It took me five days to negotiate a circuitous route coast to coast from the northeast to the southwest of US mainland. I left New Haven early Thursday (September 6, 2001) arriving Chicago the following morning where I made a two-day stopover. Departing Chicago Sunday I arrived at Shinar’s place in Sweet Springs, Missouri in the afternoon of the same day where I stayed for the night. I resumed my westward journey in the morning of Monday and finally reached Ate Jed’s place in Colton, California in the evening of Tuesday. It was a long and lonely journey with an epic proportion of adventure replete with mental images of what I saw and experienced along the way. That journey is worth remembering for a lifetime. All in all, I traveled 3,236.5 miles and spent $150.00 on gas.
I chose the longer route suggested by Dave for its simplicity. The internet-directed route was shorter but it made a lot of switching from one highway to another that it is almost impossible for a first-time long-distance driver to follow unless he has a full-time navigator by his side. From New Haven, I drove north along the Wilbur Cross Parkway that soon converged into I-91 until I reached Springfield, Massachusetts where I made a few wrong turns and got disoriented in the process. After asking directions from some helpful and friendly people, I hit I-90 West which would bring me all the way to Chicago. I was in the vicinity of Niagara Falls as I passed by Buffalo of upstate New York. From there my route followed the shoreline of Lake Erie passing through Pennsylvania until the evening hours caught me up somewhere in Toledo, Ohio where I passed the night in a rest area. Having been refreshed with a few hours of sleep, I started early the next day to finish the last 300-mile lap to Chicago passing through northern Indiana.
Reaching my exact destination in Chicago was my greatest challenge during this trip. I was reminded of our experience with BJ Quirante two years ago when he met me at the Midway Airport together with another MSUan Malou Lustre, we lost our way in going back to their apartment. BJ was already 6 months in Chicago during that time and was very confident that he already mastered the highways and byways of this vast metropolis but made a wrong turn as we approached Polaski Road and went the opposite direction. The supposed 15-minute drive to their apartment became 45 minutes and we were already in the boundary of Indiana before BJ conceded that we were lost. This time I was determined to find my way.
The day before I left Connecticut, my brother sent me an e-mail giving me his apartment’s address. He proposed that I will just stop in some familiar place in Chicago and he will just meet me there. I told him not to bother and suggested that he just stay in his apartment for I just go directly to his place. All the while he was worried that I might not find my way but he did not know that I have at my disposal a high-tech navigational tool---the Internet---which can pinpoint to you the exact location of any address in the US and Canada and the driving direction on how to get there.
The following day I attended church at the Chicago Fil-Am SDA Church and it seemed like home to me. BJ was the Sabbath school superintendent while Adam Cabantac offered the closing prayer. There were other people who knew me like Jun Bello and his wife and another lady named Queenie. When I asked Queenie where did we meet before, she told me that they came from Ozamiz and they remembered me as their divine service speaker one or two times on invitation of Pastor Nelson Paulo. During lesson study, we were divided into three classes: one class was conducted in English, another group discussed it in Tagalog. BJ, Adam, myself and the rest of the Ozamiz and Dipolog people belonged to the Visayan class. We had our buffet lunch at a Chinese Restaurant on invitation of Jun Bello in celebration of their wedding anniversary. While we were enjoying our meal, I saw Malou Lustre at a far table together with another MSUan Jo Paradero (BS Biology, 1972).
My driving towards Missouri was straightforward. Although the route that I followed was different from the one that Shinar took when we went to the Great Lakes two months ago, the topography of the land was familiar to me having crisscrossed Missouri during my one-month stay there. When I arrived in Sweet Springs nobody’s home and so I just waited in the car and slept. Shinar and Manang Vi arrived later in the afternoon with Shinar’s parents and a sister together with her sister Ining and nephew Svend from Denmark and a cousin named Rene from Singapore. They just came from Arkansas where Shinar toured them during the weekend.
Before I departed Monday morning for the final leg of my journey, the ever-thoughtful Manang Vi hastily prepared a baon for me: two sandwiches, half dozen apples and a box of juice packs. Cruising along I-70 that cut across the three midwestern states of Missouri, Kansas and Colorado was far longer than I thought. My only entertainment was a stream of classical music and some oldies coming from the FM radio.
The Colorado landscape has dual profile. Approaching from Kansas, it is a wide expanse of farmlands and rolling grasslands. But as you pass by Denver the topography suddenly changes into high-rise snow-capped mountains. The I-70 was transformed into a winding road that dwarfed the Kennon Road to Baguio. After passing through a number of tunnels darkness compelled me to make a stopover at a parking area in a small mountain city of Silverthorne. I decided to sleep in the car but the cooler temperature in the early evening was ominous. And to think that summer has not ended yet I could not imagine how cold it would be here during winter. Since I was just wearing shorts, my lower extremities were now beginning to feel the cold. I closed all windows allowing only a very small opening at the back for a steady supply of fresh air.
A few hours later, the coldness became unbearable that I had to retrieve the woolen blanket that Dave and I bought at a mall in New Haven. It has never been used during my entire stay in Connecticut. For a while, it gave me a comfortable warmth. But by midnight, the law of thermodynamics finally succeeded in attaining thermal equilibrium and the woolen blanket was already icy cold both inside and outside. I had no other recourse but to turn on the car engine and switched on the heater. It was a blessing that the car that Dave lent me, a black 1998 Nissan Sentra has this feature.
It was still dawn when I resumed driving with the eagerness to go to the lower elevation to escape the coldness. But after crossing the Colorado River several times, the Eagle River once and a few more tunnels, the desire to sleep came back to me and I have to stop at a rest area in a place ironically called No Name and returned to sleep for about an hour.
Daylight was beginning to peep in the eastern horizon when I started driving again and I could now see the silhouette of mountain walls reaching up to the sky that I realized how much beautiful scenery I have missed while I continued driving the evening before. For the first time in my life all those sceneries of nature’s forms and shapes sculpted by time and glistening against the golden sky which I only saw in the western movies and magazines now flooded my eyes in living color.
I was at this near-reverie state of leisurely driving along the canyons of Colorado when the morning music from the car radio was suddenly interrupted as the first news of a commercial jetliner slamming into the World Trade Center broke out. I kept monitoring the news as it further developed to include the smashing of another jetliner into the second tower, the crash in Pentagon of still another jetliner and the fourth hijacked airliner that crashed in Pennsylvania. When I made a stopover in one of the towns of Utah for breakfast, I saw the CNN live coverage in TV of the burning WTC towers.
I continued driving but my thoughts were now diverted from the magnificent scenery before me to the on-going turmoil in New York which is just an hour away from the place which became my home for more than 2 months. I almost ran out of gas as I traversed the vast deserts of Utah and Nevada consisting of about 200 miles of uninhabited wilderness. I cut across the heart of Las Vegas and I was almost tempted to stop there for a while. By sunset, I was already blending with the other motorists along the multi-lane freeways of California. By 7:30 PM, I gently parked the car just outside of Ate Jed’s beautifully manicured lawn and my tired body breathed a sigh of relief.
