How's it been? Um...

I know I haven't written very much about the road trip so far, a combined result of laziness, lack of internet time, and just the sheer fact that it hasn't been all that great.

Just kidding! But I'd be lying if I said it hasn't been hard. Two months of constant every-breathing-second togetherness with anyone is a great recipe for tension and conflict, and attempting to execute a road trip like this comes with all kinds of built-in challenges.

So yeah, it's been hard. It's been getting lost, it's been camping in the rain, ten thousand smelly bathrooms, a leaky cooler soaking the floor of the car, it's been chasing off raccoons, cramming night after night on a twin-bed sized foam pad, the ever-present stench of campfire smoke, broken flashlights, duct tape and tarps and improvised protection from the rain, it's been paying too much for poorly equipped campgrounds and bad food, going several days without a shower, more peanut butter and jelly sandwiches than a person is meant to eat in a lifetime, running out of propane before our dinner is cooked through, constant wrestling with all the stuff in the car, it's been cold and wet, it's been exhaustion and stress, it's been yelling and it's been fighting and it's been hurt feelings.

I can't deny any of those things. And many of you may wonder why even bother? Why spend time and money putting ourselves through all this crap? Why not just stay home?

I have to wonder the same things myself sometimes, but then I remind myself that it's also been pure bliss, light as air, clear as water. It's been falling asleep to the sound of the ocean or a river falling over rocks, it's been seeing things we've never seen before, it's been hiking through lush forests, cooking meals that are simple but to us they are feasts, playing and running wild like children in the sand. It's been the whole luminous world contained in our little old tent.

It's been a misty Redwood valley, rounding a corner and coming face to face with a herd of elk, it's been reading by the fire, watching the sun go down over the Pacific, counting stars on the beach, it's been the new Avett Brothers album so loud on the car stereo that any level of thought is impossible, only feeling.

It's been coloring in our route on Jordi's big map, sketching a little tent in all the many places we've slept, it's been new surprise and thrill every time we turn another bend on the Pacific Coast Highway and see the great endless ocean in the distance, it's been the windows down, the wind in my hair and the sun on my face. It's been laughing and growing stronger and figuring it out. It's been freedom. It's been ours.

We've let the mileage on the odometer run since we set off for Yosemite on September 29th, and since then it's been 3,534 miles of everything, the good and bad, the awful, the helpless, the tired, the so ready to go home, the last straw.

But hey, that's travel sometimes and that's OK. Because what it's really been is 3,534 miles of love. And we still have a couple more weeks to go.

...Toes? Or, fun with language.

I'm in Santa Cruz sitting at a coffee house trying to write, but an old white-haired local won't let me. He's here "doin' lap top" today with an iBook G4 that looks like it was buried in mud and then tied to the back of a truck and dragged down the road. One of these Berkeley graduates from the '60s who's lost a few screws and now blurs the line between the derelict and the tax-paying.

He just won't stop talking, and I don't even know what about. In the last 10 minutes he's mentioned, among other things, running for president, "mythic government," Bhutan, hitch-hiking, earthquakes, and smoking his pipe by the river. Luckily, he's now talking to another old man/veteran/vagrant named Jimbo and giving me a break.

I bring him up because he reminded me of how easy it is to mix up two languages when you spend all your time with a bilingual. When I sat down next to this old fellow, he smiled and said, "we'll be neighbors" and I very nearly said "wat gezellig!" Roughly translated, this means something like "how nice!" in Dutch. I caught myself, but here are a few mix-ups and mistakes that have slipped through over the last few months.

Going from English to Dutch to English to Dutch isn't always easy, after all, and especially hard for some. Take my mother, for example, who, on her visit to Amsterdam, raised her beer for a toast and accidentally said "Probst!" for cheers instead of the Dutch, "proost!" Probst, incidentally, is the name of her gynocologist. She also tried to say something was gezellig once and instead said, with great exuberance, "gefilte!" which is a Jewish fish cake.

At a dessert bar in Portland, Jordi politely asked the waitress for an "ice sandwich." Mmm! In Dutch, ijs (pronounced 'ice') is the word for ice cream (and for ice, and popsicles, and frozen yogurt), so naturally he forgot the 'cream' even though he knows ijs from ice.

Dutch prepositions give me a lot of trouble, and as Jordi and I were conversing in his native tongue one day, I was trying to say something like "I was talking to her" but I couldn't think of the word for "to" in that context. I started listing prepositions until I landed on the right one, "Naar? Met?...Tenen?" He laughed. Tenen, it turns out, means toes.

When my siblings visited Amsterdam, they asked Jordi and I how we met, so over Thai food Jordi explained to them how we were at a party and got to talking about the weather in California (what every Dutch person I met wanted to talk about), but we couldn't get very far because neither of us could convert Celsius and Fahrenheit. Some light chuckles around the table. "So then," Jordi went on, "we were talking about my length..." There were a few seconds of confused silence, everyone hoping he didn't mean what it sounded like. What the tall Dutchman meant, of course, was his height. In Dutch, lang (pronounced 'long') means tall. An honest mistake, really.

Luckily, after 6 weeks of essentially spending every waking (and sleeping) moment together, Jordi and I still haven't run out of things to talk about, so as I continue to practice my Dutch, and as Jordi continues to pick up more and more lazy idiomatic American English, we're sure to confuse ourselves and each other countless more times. Wat gefilte!