We slept in the car the night we arrived, Texas still a warm still of a night kind of place and Tristan was already asleep when we got there, so why bother with the hassle of waking him up only to sleep in a similarly uncomfortable cheap motel bed. My eyes closed somewhere just before midnight.

6am, Texas time. I wasn’t trying to adjust to the time zone, my old time zone but somehow Texas didn’t feel like home at all anymore. I thought of the brief moments, maybe only days or maybe a month or so, when I thought I’d be a Texan. Austin maybe, or Marathon, complete opposite sides of the big state and completely different lifestyles but the desert, the hill country, it was all so pleasing to me. Finding myself pleased, I laughed, was probably my downfall in that whole situation. Comfort is comfortable, sure, but complacency is dangerous and I’ve worked too hard to dodge it to allow it to suck me up into it’s too easy to do belly at this point.

We saw Olivia, the wonderful woman still filling what was once all of our old RV. She’d decorated it up to suit her exactly, ribbons and bells and post it notes reminding her to drink water and everything about it was dripping with who she was, both who she’d always been, even if it had been on hold while we were all together, and who she was becoming. She came walking across the Marathon Motel and RV Park dirt lot wearing a short skirt and high boots, looking like a desert child. Tristan beamed and the two of them walked around the sleepy, miniature version of what modern America would consider a small town, this more of a wide spot on Highway 90. I tried to fit our old life into as few boxes as possible, the KIA had great trunk space but whatever I took would eventually need to be slimmed down again, and probably again, Goodwilling the excess. But I wanted to complete the task, get a few minutes of Marathon in for myself, and get back to Colorado.

Prior to buying our bus, I had never had a real desire to get to Colorado before. It’s one of the most gorgeous, lavish states but I always saw it as a drive through on my way to other destinations. Under that beating, suntanning desert sun though, it was the only place I wanted to be.

My scooter, Stella, had blown over in a wind storm but was more or less fine, save for a busted reflector on the front tire well. I started her up and the one mile ride into town was over in only a minute. Marathon was awfully sleepy for noontime, only a few locals were wandering the streets and barely any of them the more socially open types I’d come to find as more friends than acquaintances. A good friend who makes tacos at the only coffee shop in town was in Austin sorting out some new venture, but the shops owner, a woman with many names of which I prefer “Boots” the best, came out to chat and fixed us up breakfast like I certainly couldn’t complain about. She offered to let me park Stella at her place for a couple of months until I could sort out what I’d do with the old blue girl.

And then it was over. Tristan and I were back in the KIA, 90mph back up empty West Texas roads, through Balmorhea’s lush green hills with black pitch night rock cliffs peaking out, my favorite drive perhaps in all of America, through the Pecos, New Mexico’s long endless desert stretch (something about New Mexico just doesn’t sit right with me…). A $25 motel room, a few hours sleep. A phone call from my lady in Colorado assuring me that everything was grand, good and going as planned. Wake up, drive some more. A phone call reveals that my laptop, a MacBook Pro which serves as the bread winner in our little bus living, was too broken to fix at the Mac Shack, a local Apple IT type fix it shop, and would need to be sent in to Apple proper to get the repairs done. Five to seven days around the holidays means I won’t see my computer, or a paid work hour, until 2010. I panicked for a moment, stopped in at the first Apple Store I could find on my way home–Colorado Springs in a massive, busy-as-the-holidays mandate strip mall–and applied for credit. Denied. Damn medical bills and my inability or lack of inclination to pay them.

No big deal, though, I thought. In an hour we’ll be back in Loveland, back at the bus. In four hours we’ll be up the mountains and Tristan, myself and our lady friend sitting around a pot belly stove of a fire sipping Stone IPAs and smoking cigarettes over detailing the every minutes of the last three days of our lives spent apart.

The bus keeps warm though, plenty of blankets, body heat. In the morning the million star gazer sky and tree fur silhouettes were replaced by a calm still lake, perfect for sipping coffee, smoking a morning cigarette and watching a punk rock blue bird of some type hop around stealing whatever breakfast scraps made it onto the forest floor.

Before making it to the coast there would be hitchhikers in the bus, showers taken at a random park and sitting on the Trinidad River a massive 3 foot salmon would leap out of the water in homage of this spectacular roadtrip. I had been to California before, but never this way, it had never seemed like this before. I was desperate to live it more and simultaneously never wanting it to end.

When the repairs had been explained, the credit card details exchanged, and the bus fired up beautifully purring I asked the mechanic his name.

“Jesus,” he said. I smiled, as this bus has given me so much over the short time I’ve lived with her, wandering random friends, a warm place to live, steady transportation around Colorado and now so far beyond. It only made sense that Jesus would fix my bus.

We climbed fast and hard out of Carson City, never really looking back and a guy passed us beeping his horn and waving his hands. A fellow Pennsylvanian, representing the Steeler Nation all over the back of his little Subaru. The mountains went up and up and soon we were overlooking the forest cliffsides that we would then disappear into the canopies of, but nothing beats the feeling of first seeing the great big blue Lake Tahoe peeking through those conifers.

To say that Lake Tahoe is crystal clear would be a horrible understatement. You can see the shimmering reflection of the sun, for certain, but the depths of which you can look down through the water and see the giant tan boulders, the smaller gray stones, fish swimming, sands replacing other sands; this lake is clearer than transparent, it’s almost telescopic in it’s visuals.

My dear friend Matthew has lived as a snowboarder on the lake’s various shores for nearly a decade now and he showed us back into the mountain forests to a hidden lake where the snow was still clinging from a dumping the previous week, where eagle’s nests sat at the top of beautywoods and a broken raft, unsunk but not quite floating, hovered in the water. We talked of camping here for a summer, how easy it would be to live off the land or even just the beauty of the land and I thought, for the first time, about moving here for a minute.

But that was the previous night and in the aftermath dear Champ, that old VW bus cruiser so dedicated to making this trip, began the long stretch to Lake Tahoe, through Ely – an old west casino town, mining town and frequent cowboy movie set – through Austin – a half-horse town at the bottom of a corkscrew winder of a stretch of the highway – through Carson City – where the poor good bus died, after choosing not to do so in a dozen quaint small towns that would have been a joy to explore while waiting for her to get reworked – and on to Lake Tahoe.

The Carson City setback proved less painful than perhaps it could have been. Though stuck in what might be Nevada’s most horrible city, a small capital wrapped in the expansion of modern suburbia mixed with strip mall America, the sun poured a perfect purple set and a bike trail lead from the garage where she so conveniently died to the Gold Dust Casino which would serve as home for the night. Lake Tahoe taunted just over the mountain skyline, promising the glory of that crystal blue lake in the morning.

I disappeared into my own head and watched all of the gorgeous sites, inside and out of the old metal mother girl, snacking on grapes and peanut butter M&Ms.

Salt Lake City was drab, a nearly lifeless city even on a weekday downtown, and when ordering mimosas for an afternoon happy hour the waitress made it known that no fewer than two of the tall, pulpy drinks could be ordered per customer. Luckily Utah waters down their alcohol bigtime and so we remained roadworthy as our route went more southerly to connect with my favorite highway in all of America: The Loneliest Highway, Route 50 through Nevada and Western Utah. The sun set for hours over the mountains dividing the Silver State from the Beehive State and I’ve never melted over the sun’s dipping descent more than that day.

What better time to head for the coast?

There is an exhilaration to constant change, and the fact that it exists at will any time the world grows a little stagnant is a piece of magic in and of itself. For those of us lucky and willing enough to make wherever our home, we begin to rely on the new, to succumb almost addiction-like to needing to keep the starting over started up. I can’t tell if that’s a bad thing, because it does at times feel like an addiction, and life, nature and society has taught me that addictions typically leave you sweating cold and shaky coughing over long airplane rides.