Coast to Coast Across the USA - A Travelogue
August - September 2009
Personally, I blame Indiana Jones.
The whole thing started the same way that so many of my plans start. It started because of a movie.
The year was 1989 and an ungrateful kid was taken to see Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade at a cinema in Leicester Square. I was 11 years old, and I was in a huff about it. I didn’t want to see stupid Indiana Jones, I wanted to see Batman.
We were in London on holiday. This in itself was unusual; my family didn’t take holidays outside of Guernsey. We certainly didn’t go anywhere interesting to an 11 year old boy. But on this occasion the fates had decreed that we would go to London and that Batman would be everywhere. Tim Burton’s remake of the caped crusader appeared to taunt me contently – every market stall sold Batman t-shirts, the trailer was shown at every commercial break, and the symbol seemed to be on every visible billboard in London. We visited MOMI – the Museum of the Moving Image. In other words a museum dedicated to cinema. You can probably guess what film was being featured prominently as an exhibit.
The icing on the cake came as we strolled down the pavement outside Harrods. “That’s the Batmobile” cried my step-father excitedly. Sure enough on the back of a trailer stopped at traffic lights stood the Batmobile from the Adam West sixties Batman. Enough was enough, we were going to see Batman that night.
There turned out to be only one slight problem – Batman was the first film in the UK to be awarded a 12 certificate and I was not 12 years old.
I can’t remember if there were tears, but I can remember crushing disappointment. As a Spurs fan, it’s a feeling I’ve come to know well over the years and can remember it well.
So it came to pass that I sat down in a cinema to watch a film I didn’t want to see.
The house lights dimmed and the curtains opened to reveal a cinema screen so huge that I had to turn my head to take the whole thing in. We only had the one cinema in Guernsey, a single screen that showed out of date movies and its screen was tiny in comparison. Yet the curtains were still opening and that screen was still growing. My disappointment was being replaced with a growing sense of anticipation at the film to come.
The movie started and I saw the greatest film of my life. There was action, humour, Nazi’s, Knights, aerial dogfights, motorbikes, speedboats and even a lion. Then there was that theme tune, the one that still makes my hair stand on end. Surely this was the greatest film ever made. Indi rocked and Batman was forgotten.
My stepfather, a man who I despised was even momentarily elevated in my eyes by this film. He collected military vehicles, and told me that he had recently purchased a Kublewagon (the German equivalent of the Willis Jeep). Apparently it had been restored and had a little cameo in a recent film staring a fedora totting archaeologist.
Indi was tough, intelligent had a great adventures and to top it all off he’s even blown up my hated stepfathers pride and joy. A life long love affair was born.
19 years later
A very hungover man was standing, or more accurately swaying, in the sci-fi section of a Bournemouth bookstore. It was the end of a weekend stag do, and I was killing some time before heading to the airport. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was about to hit cinemas, and I was trying to avoid it like the plague.
Guernsey’s single cinema has long closed, and its replacement is barely worthy of being called a cinema. Four tiny screens, small cramped barely terraced seating and appalling sound and picture quality meant that I had long ago decided to stop patronising it.
This means that for any film I want to see, I have to wait until the DVD (and more recently the Blu-Ray) comes out, and boy did I want to see the new Indi film.
Other then the name of the film, I had steadfastly avoided any news of the film at all. All rumours, trailers, production photos and publicity. I wanted to watch the new film the way that I had first watched Crusade – with no expectations.
As so often happens when a major movie comes out, a flood of related merchandise was released alongside the film. So it was that when I rounded the corner that I was confronted with an entire bookcase of Indiana Jones books.
One caught my eye – ‘The Lost Journal of Indiana Jones’. A faux-leather bound diary of Indi’s adventures from childhood to the latest movie. I wanted to buy it, but I didn’t want to risk accidently learning anything about the new movie. Instead I committed the name to memory and bought a Robert Rankin novel instead. It wasn’t his best.
January 2009
I’d forgotten all about the book until I was looking at titles in Amazons sale. Having now seen the film, I ordered it.
The book itself was not quite what I was expecting. It could be better described as a scrapbook of Indi’s adventures rather then the written journal I was expecting. There are photos, sketches, newspaper clippings and such in the book and it is gives a nice sense of the life of the character. As I flicked through the book I felt a growing wanderlust.
Ignoring the more fantastical aspects of the Indi stories the character himself has travelled the world and experienced so much. Somehow I was finding myself a little jealous of a work of fiction.
The book did inspire me in one way. I bought a nice journal and vowed to keep records of my own life experiences. Amongst my own pages are photographs from my birthday, and a piece of foil from a champagne bottle and other little items that may be meaningless to anyone else, but tells a story to me..
As with the cinema in 1989, there is only one problem.
Indi’s journal spans 40 years and the globe. Mine has missed the first 30 years and currently spans four months and a trip to Jersey. It occurred to me that if I was going to keep a journal of my experiences that it will be a hell of a lot more interesting read in the years to come if I actually have some experiences.
Now my own experiences aren’t going to match Indiana Jones’. After all he was going to parties with Pablo Picasso when he was 11 but I can damn well try.
The Plan.
Around this time, another lifelong acquaintance made a reappearance, only this visitor was not as welcome as the return of Indiana Jones. Depression has rather unfortunately been a key player in my life. It is something that I have thought beaten many times, but it still manages to raise its ugly head every now and again. For the last few months of 2008 and start of 2009, I’d felt as though I had been on an emotional rollercoaster. I’d have the briefest, greatest highs always followed by crushing prolonged lows. At the start of the year these lows seemed to be more intense and longer then they ever had before. Something had to give and so I sought help.
“Well its pretty obvious to me that you’re suffering anxiety due to feeling trapped in Guernsey. What you need to do is have an adventure”.
Those two sentences from my Dr were both a kick up the arse and a blessing. The advice I was given was to create a list of things that I really want to do. Then pick something from the list, plan how to do, put it into action and do it. Then move onto the next one. The only stipulation was that for the first thing that I decided to do it had to be more then simply taking a week off work, but to take a decent amount of time and get away from everything.
When I looked at the list that I eventually wrote, I was actually surprised at how achievable the things I want to do are. The vast majority of my list is based on travel and I’m pinning that one squarely on the shoulders of Indiana Jones.
The First Adventure to come.
My eventual plan has actually ended up as a compromise between the two of the items on my list. The first: to travel coast to coast across the USA by motorcycle. The second: to tour Europe by train. The compromise was simple, I am now going to spend five weeks travelling coast to coast across the USA by train, and travelling Europe by motorcycle is now an entry on the list.
In August I will be flying from Heathrow to New York. Form there I’ll be making my way westwards by rail, ending my journey in San Francisco. Along the way I will be stopping off in major cities such as Washington and Chicago, as I head further West and that magnificent natural country opens up, I will be taking a steam train through the Rocky Mountains, standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon and standing in Monument Valley with its instantly recognisable rock formations. It will be journey that starts with my hand in the water of St. Peter Port harbour and finish with the water of the Pacific Ocean.
My goal is not to rush through, but to experience what is there. I also want to document this trip with photographs, and video. To record my thoughts as I stand in those places I have seen so many times in the movies I have watched. To journal my own, very real, adventure.
Then when the journey is over, it will be time to move on and plan the next adventure. It may be something that is not on such a grand scale as crossing a continent. It may be as simple as being one of 104,000 people in attendance at the Nou Camp in Barcelona, to something as magical as watching the Northern Lights inside the Arctic Circle but it will an adventure all the same, and it will be my adventure and I will record it so that I can say that I did it.
The whole thing started the same way that so many of my plans start. It started because of a movie.
The year was 1989 and an ungrateful kid was taken to see Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade at a cinema in Leicester Square. I was 11 years old, and I was in a huff about it. I didn’t want to see stupid Indiana Jones, I wanted to see Batman.
We were in London on holiday. This in itself was unusual; my family didn’t take holidays outside of Guernsey. We certainly didn’t go anywhere interesting to an 11 year old boy. But on this occasion the fates had decreed that we would go to London and that Batman would be everywhere. Tim Burton’s remake of the caped crusader appeared to taunt me contently – every market stall sold Batman t-shirts, the trailer was shown at every commercial break, and the symbol seemed to be on every visible billboard in London. We visited MOMI – the Museum of the Moving Image. In other words a museum dedicated to cinema. You can probably guess what film was being featured prominently as an exhibit.
The icing on the cake came as we strolled down the pavement outside Harrods. “That’s the Batmobile” cried my step-father excitedly. Sure enough on the back of a trailer stopped at traffic lights stood the Batmobile from the Adam West sixties Batman. Enough was enough, we were going to see Batman that night.
There turned out to be only one slight problem – Batman was the first film in the UK to be awarded a 12 certificate and I was not 12 years old.
I can’t remember if there were tears, but I can remember crushing disappointment. As a Spurs fan, it’s a feeling I’ve come to know well over the years and can remember it well.
So it came to pass that I sat down in a cinema to watch a film I didn’t want to see.
The house lights dimmed and the curtains opened to reveal a cinema screen so huge that I had to turn my head to take the whole thing in. We only had the one cinema in Guernsey, a single screen that showed out of date movies and its screen was tiny in comparison. Yet the curtains were still opening and that screen was still growing. My disappointment was being replaced with a growing sense of anticipation at the film to come.
The movie started and I saw the greatest film of my life. There was action, humour, Nazi’s, Knights, aerial dogfights, motorbikes, speedboats and even a lion. Then there was that theme tune, the one that still makes my hair stand on end. Surely this was the greatest film ever made. Indi rocked and Batman was forgotten.
My stepfather, a man who I despised was even momentarily elevated in my eyes by this film. He collected military vehicles, and told me that he had recently purchased a Kublewagon (the German equivalent of the Willis Jeep). Apparently it had been restored and had a little cameo in a recent film staring a fedora totting archaeologist.
Indi was tough, intelligent had a great adventures and to top it all off he’s even blown up my hated stepfathers pride and joy. A life long love affair was born.
19 years later
A very hungover man was standing, or more accurately swaying, in the sci-fi section of a Bournemouth bookstore. It was the end of a weekend stag do, and I was killing some time before heading to the airport. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was about to hit cinemas, and I was trying to avoid it like the plague.
Guernsey’s single cinema has long closed, and its replacement is barely worthy of being called a cinema. Four tiny screens, small cramped barely terraced seating and appalling sound and picture quality meant that I had long ago decided to stop patronising it.
This means that for any film I want to see, I have to wait until the DVD (and more recently the Blu-Ray) comes out, and boy did I want to see the new Indi film.
Other then the name of the film, I had steadfastly avoided any news of the film at all. All rumours, trailers, production photos and publicity. I wanted to watch the new film the way that I had first watched Crusade – with no expectations.
As so often happens when a major movie comes out, a flood of related merchandise was released alongside the film. So it was that when I rounded the corner that I was confronted with an entire bookcase of Indiana Jones books.
One caught my eye – ‘The Lost Journal of Indiana Jones’. A faux-leather bound diary of Indi’s adventures from childhood to the latest movie. I wanted to buy it, but I didn’t want to risk accidently learning anything about the new movie. Instead I committed the name to memory and bought a Robert Rankin novel instead. It wasn’t his best.
January 2009
I’d forgotten all about the book until I was looking at titles in Amazons sale. Having now seen the film, I ordered it.
The book itself was not quite what I was expecting. It could be better described as a scrapbook of Indi’s adventures rather then the written journal I was expecting. There are photos, sketches, newspaper clippings and such in the book and it is gives a nice sense of the life of the character. As I flicked through the book I felt a growing wanderlust.
Ignoring the more fantastical aspects of the Indi stories the character himself has travelled the world and experienced so much. Somehow I was finding myself a little jealous of a work of fiction.
The book did inspire me in one way. I bought a nice journal and vowed to keep records of my own life experiences. Amongst my own pages are photographs from my birthday, and a piece of foil from a champagne bottle and other little items that may be meaningless to anyone else, but tells a story to me..
As with the cinema in 1989, there is only one problem.
Indi’s journal spans 40 years and the globe. Mine has missed the first 30 years and currently spans four months and a trip to Jersey. It occurred to me that if I was going to keep a journal of my experiences that it will be a hell of a lot more interesting read in the years to come if I actually have some experiences.
Now my own experiences aren’t going to match Indiana Jones’. After all he was going to parties with Pablo Picasso when he was 11 but I can damn well try.
The Plan.
Around this time, another lifelong acquaintance made a reappearance, only this visitor was not as welcome as the return of Indiana Jones. Depression has rather unfortunately been a key player in my life. It is something that I have thought beaten many times, but it still manages to raise its ugly head every now and again. For the last few months of 2008 and start of 2009, I’d felt as though I had been on an emotional rollercoaster. I’d have the briefest, greatest highs always followed by crushing prolonged lows. At the start of the year these lows seemed to be more intense and longer then they ever had before. Something had to give and so I sought help.
“Well its pretty obvious to me that you’re suffering anxiety due to feeling trapped in Guernsey. What you need to do is have an adventure”.
Those two sentences from my Dr were both a kick up the arse and a blessing. The advice I was given was to create a list of things that I really want to do. Then pick something from the list, plan how to do, put it into action and do it. Then move onto the next one. The only stipulation was that for the first thing that I decided to do it had to be more then simply taking a week off work, but to take a decent amount of time and get away from everything.
When I looked at the list that I eventually wrote, I was actually surprised at how achievable the things I want to do are. The vast majority of my list is based on travel and I’m pinning that one squarely on the shoulders of Indiana Jones.
The First Adventure to come.
My eventual plan has actually ended up as a compromise between the two of the items on my list. The first: to travel coast to coast across the USA by motorcycle. The second: to tour Europe by train. The compromise was simple, I am now going to spend five weeks travelling coast to coast across the USA by train, and travelling Europe by motorcycle is now an entry on the list.
In August I will be flying from Heathrow to New York. Form there I’ll be making my way westwards by rail, ending my journey in San Francisco. Along the way I will be stopping off in major cities such as Washington and Chicago, as I head further West and that magnificent natural country opens up, I will be taking a steam train through the Rocky Mountains, standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon and standing in Monument Valley with its instantly recognisable rock formations. It will be journey that starts with my hand in the water of St. Peter Port harbour and finish with the water of the Pacific Ocean.
My goal is not to rush through, but to experience what is there. I also want to document this trip with photographs, and video. To record my thoughts as I stand in those places I have seen so many times in the movies I have watched. To journal my own, very real, adventure.
Then when the journey is over, it will be time to move on and plan the next adventure. It may be something that is not on such a grand scale as crossing a continent. It may be as simple as being one of 104,000 people in attendance at the Nou Camp in Barcelona, to something as magical as watching the Northern Lights inside the Arctic Circle but it will an adventure all the same, and it will be my adventure and I will record it so that I can say that I did it.