To & From Oregon, Searching For What It's Worth: Sat. Aug. 27, 3:15 AM

 Whenever I get home, I'll go into more detail about this. Hold me to it. We'll see if there's a narrative that comes out or if I just get in the mood.

 For the time being, here are my Instagram & Twitter accounts. The long & short of it is, I left my home in Peaceful Valley in unincorporated Itawamba County on Wednesday, April 24, heading west. Eventually, I will stop for few days, a week in Western Oregon to visit my brother & sister-in-law & their dogs. I ain't going to lie. Depending on how I feel, I'll head south to visit a cousin a couple, three days in Ventura, CA, & make my way back to to New Orleans for a couple, three days to visit with my friends there.

 I started out driving through Arkansas to Tulsa, OK. I did this primarily because the old Don Williams song "Tulsa Time". That, & it was far away from being unable to turn back without it being a hassle. I spent an afternoon in Dodge City, KS, because of my partiality towards the old TV show Gunsmoke & general interest in the Wild West, as it were. It's a tourist town, now, & why not. It sort of reminds of what the Mississippi Gulf Coast was, except tastefully, focused & well-done, back before the casinos moved in.

 I've pushed on through to Parachute, CO, via Pueblo. I've driven through Alma, Breckinridge, Frisco & Vail, & Colorado fulfilled all me expectations & then some, & the country is beautiful. Coming up & down that mountain is something. That's a bit too much, & there was at one point a heavy downhill  run, the speed limit said 75 & it was raining fairly heavily. Wind was blowing, too, but the bottom end said I could do 40 & that's what I did.

 I'm comparing all this to the first time I went to Memphis by myself. It completely rewrote my conception of reality, expanding & demystifying it. It becomes familiar. It becomes someplace I could call home, for a little while, anyway. That was a buzz, even if I'd been there before. Traveling to Europe, some place where I'd never been &, quite frankly, would've been seven levels of screwed had things gone south on me, was a buzz.

 I like to travel & I prefer to travel alone. I can come & go as I please, within certain limitations, & I control the soundtrack. It's very important to play the proper music &/or podcast-type thing to maintain the correct road rhythm. Sometimes silence is nice. Sometimes it's necessary. For what it's worth, going up the mountain at it's steepest was Michael Martin Murphy, coming down the steepest was white-knuckle silence, it flattened out with Digable Planets, & once the Rockies got back to reminding me of the Smokies, it was the comfortable, old country music mix. Salve to the frayed soul. That's a whole lot of fierce hills & consuming curves.

 Spent the second night, & the first decent rest, in an old-school motel in Lamar, CO, which reminded me of Amory or North Florida/South Alabama, but added with the vastness of Oklahoma or Kansas. Those states once you get away from towns of any size (Tulsa or Wichita), every place has plenty of elbow room. I'm sure there's an experience I'm missing, but I question calling damp ditches "rivers".

 Anyhow, from there I stopped in Pueblo for a very nice clerk named Patrick at Maggie's Farm. He was very informative & the visit was illuminating & educational in general. I had planned on going up through Denver & stop in Boulder or maybe Laramie, WY. However, as I left out, I got the idea to drive to Woody Creek, CO, where Hunter Thompson made his home. I am a fan.

 So I drove through the part of Colorado is either national park or ski park, & that was after the somewhat mind-blowing drive down from the Great Divide in the rain. Be damned I drive 75 miles per hour at this angle, even if it wasn't raining, honk your damn horn. I made it to the Woody Creek Tavern, which Thompson wrote about so much. I took a picture of the outside, Googled up the closet gas station, filled up & sat to get over shaking coming down that mountain.

 My sister-in-law's been booking my rooms via her being really good at shit that working out in her favor. All I need is a bed, WiFi & to spend no more than what bourgeoisie as hell. It has been an up-&-down thing, but mostly okay. I should go to bed, it's 3 a.m., but here I am as inspired as I've been in months. It's a shame it's this pseudo-Gonzo horseshit is all I can muster. I still have 17 hours to go, I have no idea what there is to see in either Idaho or Utah I care anything about seeing. It's nobody's fault but mine, but I don't really have really positive outside views of either state. However, my brother says I can keep my mouth shut & my head down, so don't complain.

 I may find some nice place about seven hours away from Parachute, hole up for a couple days before making the final push to the West Coast of Oregon. If I was younger, it'd be no thing, but I kind of want to take the rest. Not Salt Lake City, though. I don't really feel like it, though I'm told it's lovely & I can keep my head down & shut up. Hell, I may try to stay here just 'cause Colorado's cooler. I may stay up too late to need to.

 Anyhow, we'll see.