Superkids!

If you pay any attention at all to what I'm up to here, by now you know that in the Kickstand world, nothing is considered more fun than cramming too many people in a car and driving someplace far away, preferably someplace you've never been before. This summer's big jaunt was driving North up the coast from Santa Cruz, where I live now, to Seattle, where I still sometimes think I live.

We set out in the evening on a Thursday and decided to drive up Highway One. Okay, okay, I admit it was my fault that we ended up taking the longest possible route up there (aside from picking the shortcut through Alaska), but I just wasn't thinking about how the highway traced every curve of the coast and wound slowly up, down, and around hills. So everyone told us it took about twelve hours from the bay area to Seattle, but it took us nearly that long to get up to Eureka, which is still on the southern side of the Californian border. Dirty looks were shot in my direction, yes.

In retrospect, though, I'm sure they're glad we went that way (guys? guys?), because cool things happened, and we discovered that we were superheroes, blessed with roadside powers that will be discussed later.

So, of course the three of us didn't all fit in Alarma. It's fine for a quick ride to the grocery store, but try twenty hours nearly nonstop. Chris was fine; he had a seat of his own and a seat belt. Shoshanna was fine for the same set of reasons. What about poor Arianne, you ask? Well, I was squished in between them, sans seat belt, with one leg on each side of the gearshift! There's fun for ya! "Ooh, shift into reverse again, baby!"

After about nine p.m. Shoshanna developed a penchant for dropping her head with a heavy thump on my shoulder and staying asleep until Chris' penchant for being pesky would kick in and he'd set off the car alarm while we were driving.

Around eleven p.m. we needed to stop for gas, so Chris had me pull the road atlas out and tell him the closest town that didn't look impossibly small. "Well, it looks like it's Willits," I said. We got to the exit and pulled off. Lo and behold, there was Willits, in all its glory, sporting a huge sign arching over town saying "Willits" in gigantic letters (in my mind, it had flashing lights, but that's probably just wishful thinking). I elbowed Shoshanna and she woke up and then my penchant for getting hysterical popped up and I kept poking her and saying, "Ooh, we're in Willits!" in different funny voices and finally cracking her up by saying, "Whatchu talkin' 'bout, Willits?" over and over. Chris jumped out and pumped gas and Shoshanna and I stopped giggling as we gazed awe-struck at the biggest stop sign we'd ever seen. It was seriously twice as big as normal ones. "STOP." Okay, if you insist. How weird. The Willits joke lasted for miles and Chris didn't even pretend to humor us.

So at two in the morning in Eureka we stopped at a Denny's. Shoshanna and I were still nursing our residual hilarity and Chris had turned into something much resembling a zombie. Looking at the dessert menu revived him a bit and he caught our contagious insanity and showed us how the menu said "pick the fruit!" Oh, the fruit jokes that were made! Unfortunately, they were all of the you-had-to-be-there variety, so I'll keep them to myself.

After a couple more hours of driving, we pulled off to the side of the road by the ocean, stumbled to the back of Alarma, crawled in and unrolled our sleeping bags. Once again, I was in the middle and for some reason, both Chris and Shoshanna felt the need to sleep on their backs, so I ended up sideways in a hot, crowded sandwich. After a few hours we woke up groggily and tried not to hit our heads on the ceiling and then suddenly we were on the road again, as if we'd never gotten off.

Friday is what made the trip up Highway 1 worth it, 'cause as we were trying to cross over to I-5 so that it wouldn't take all summer to get up to Seattle, we came upon a wondrous sight. "Babe!" Shoshanna shouted; "Pull over!" I yelled; "Screeee!" Alarma said, as we whipped into the parking lot. We jumped out, and looming over us were Paul Bunyan (standing 49 feet tall and weighing in at 15 tons) and Babe, his blue ox (34 ft, 17.5 tons), massive and brightly painted. We marveled at the girth of Babe's blue balls (try saying that five times fast), and suddenly Paul started waving his hand and talking to us.

"Hey there, you in the blue jacket!" he boomed (okay, I'd like to say he boomed, but his voice was disappointingly normal-sounding), and Shoshanna jumped as Chris and I snickered. "He's talking to you, Sho! He loves you!"

The conversation was okay until he winked and said, "you can come sit on my toe if you'd like," whereupon I hollered and started running for the car. After that harrowing, yet fondly remembered experience, we drove over a bridge that had golden bears at each end and shortly thereafter we were in Oregon.

Nothing happened in Oregon at all (except for on the way back home, when we stopped at some small town to get gas and we were hit with a plague of bugs and Shoshanna and I were safe in the car watching them run into the windshield and hit the windows until Chris opened the door and brought them all back in with him. It was like Bugtown. We didn't shake them until we got on the freeway again), and I think the same goes for Washington, so there you go. Since this is an intensely anticlimactic ending, you can call this the end of part one and you can wait anxiously for a part two. Don't say I never did anything for ya, kid.