Tales of a vagrant ant

I’m nearing the end of my tale, finally… And only 362 days from when it actually happened! haha
As I’ve said before, the photos started to peter out right around now, so it’s going to be much more text heavy, these posts…
anyways, here goes:

Days 9+10: Montana to Washington

July 22 The calm before the storm

Today was a relatively short drive, from Butte to Spokanne. Lunch was in Missoula, a cute little down with a fair amount of hippie/West coast influence. Lunch was served by a girl who was either high, or just ridiculously overfriendly. It was a cute little town, but we had to continue our journey. We took another break in Coeur D’alene, ID. A really pretty resort town, with some rad public art, and killer waterfront and beachiness. It was so busy its parking lot entirely thwarted us. All for the better, since we arrived in Spokane early afternoon for once, as opposed to midnight. We decided to splurge and unwind at the Red Lion Inn by the River, where they had a fluffy bed, a pool and a hot tub.

We had a fantastic afternoon just hanging out in bed, resting our bodies in a soft bed. After a restful afternoon of doing absolutely nothing, we moseyed to a fancy dinner at the Steam Plant Grill, a electric steam plant that had be converted into a restaurant.
You could even eat inside a giant boiler! Amazing! And they even had a dessert stylized after its name: The Smokestack.

After dinner, we explored the expo site a bit, where they had some cool fountains, as well as this amazing carousel, which was handpainted/carved by a famous carousel maker, with an interactive ring collecting game.

July 23 The end of the beginning

Morning had us scammed for our continental breakfast. We were in the midst of getting our first serving when they took the food away! So we hit the fucking road through the Cascades, winding through the mountain forests until we drove over a hill to the sight of the largest city of the whole trip: Seattle.
It was only early afternoon at this point, and we went to the University district for a casual lunch, and this was when the trouble started going down. After we parked, we forgot the map to the place we wanted to eat at, so we wandered into a cafe where the food didn’t satisfy (for me, the small portions, and for Katie, the presence of mayo).

Katie was beginning to feel a bit stressed out at finally arriving our destination, and realizing that she was going to be calling this place home for the next while. This stress led to a lot of tension, but we were able to make it through in one piece. After lunch, we decided we had better start finding a place to stay for the night. I was leaving the next day, so she needed somewhere until she found something. For some strange fucking reasons, EVERYWHERE was booked for the following week. Everywhere not entirely swamped was either entirely sketchy & out of the way (Marco Polo Motel, Hacienda motel) to the point where Katie didn’t feel comfortable going by herself (which was entirely reasonable), or they were ridiculously priced ($209/night). By the time we found some place decent, it was almost 9/10pm, and we had ended up driving across most of South Seattle, ending up in Bellevue. It was a travesty. We were hungry, tired, cranky and frustrated, Katie was super stressed about finding a place to live.

A most unpleasant predicament, that we tried to escape by going to a decent Italian place for dinner. It worked, as we came back to good news!! A sublet had contacted her about a room for the week! So that was a tremendous relief for her, as even the current hotel was booked solid the next day.

Day 11: July 24 New beginnings

So today, we were going to move into the sublet, but communication mishaps pushed it back to 9pm, since the girls who had contacted us were at work and school until the evening. Instead, we did some driving practice to the Pacific Science center, and hung out at Pike Place Market, until I needed to catch the quickshuttle home. All of that went smoothly, and I arrived safely at the holiday inn, where I was picked up by my mom. And that was the end of my journey.

This trip didn’t end up being the transformative journey I had wanted, but I DID learn lots from it, at any rate. Whether it was about our travelling potential, our approaches to travel, or even our general compatibility (& where we required changes to be made), I felt like we were able to learn a lot of valuable insight into each other.

One thing that really struck me about America was the degree of visual pollution, at least in the sense of signage. I don’t know, somehow when I’m in China, it’s almost expected, surrounded by skyscrapers, but not so much if it’s along a strip of tourist traps with no buildings higher than two stories. Is this holding two cultures to different standards? Perhaps. I need to think on this one a bit more before I make up my mind.

The trip also opened my eyes to America and the people that comprised it, the landscapes that shaped the people on the land. Visiting these places can help you understand the people there, and just the way they think. It makes you see how the shape and textures of the and can play a role in determining one’s world view.

The greatness of these landscapes had me in awe, but when you only know a certain place, all you can do is to just live with what you know. What I find is that it feels like so many people have lost their sense of place. With the Internet and the convenience of travel, people are not bound to a place, with its set of rules to play by. If travelers don’t like a place, they can just change the channel and leave. What’s why so much of today’s traveling crowd just pisses me off. They take and take and fucking take, and give nothing back. They don’t hear the lessons that a place has to offer. For the most part, that’s all that human settlements are, an artificial construct created by humans that hides us from the true landscape. And just how “Cosmos” is all a big hoax, distorting our perceptions, our human landscapes obscure us from our land, and the horizon that orients us. Something else that lay bare the artificiality of humanity is in the way we perceive time. I suppose that I understand the necessity for the proper function of human society, but my mind cannot fathom the arbitrary delineations of time on a landscape (i.e. time zones). How and where one place might be at one time at a given coordinate, while across the road, it would be a hour later. I guess the point was reached long ago when we could no longer afford to live by the cycles of the sun and moon, but by strictly regimenting the flow of time into discrete, quantifiable units that we could manipulate for our own uses. While I was on the road, we did use the clock in the car to have a rough sense of the time we had, but at the same time, it was meaningless. The days existed by themselves, our movement dictated by the light of the sun, and not governed by timepieces.

A simpler way to look at life, and one that I hope to be able to recapture somehow.