A Lap Around America

by Shawn Inmon

  A laundry room, somewhere in Louisiana

  I opened the door and got a blast of heat in the face. It was sweltering outside, but add in the washers and dryers running in an enclosed room, and you end up with a near-sauna. I got to work separating clothes, getting the machines started, and mostly doing a lot of sweating. I decided to risk someone stealing our clothes and head back to our air-conditioned room. I reached for the door, and it didn’t open. I twisted, I turned, I pushed, I pulled. It wouldn’t budge. I felt the walls closing in. The room felt even hotter, and more oppressive.

  Saying a silent prayer of thanks that I had brought my cellphone with me, I called Dawn and asked if she would run down with her room key and open the door from the outside. A minute later, she was there and inserted her card. It didn’t budge.

  I envisioned a small article in the Lafayette Advertiser tomorrow: Travel writer saunas himself to death.

  Dawn made an “I’ll be right back” motion and disappeared. I hoped that she had gone to get help, but as the will to live slowly faded from me, I realized she had probably gone back to Galveston to see if Bruce, the eight foot tall shark with the great abs, was single.

  Bruce

  After about six hours, or five minutes, depending on how you measure time, she brought the desk person with her. A lovely woman with a sadistic sense of humor, she couldn’t contain her laughter upon seeing me, now weighing sixteen pounds less than I had at check-in.

  She managed to stop laughing long enough to put a firm shoulder into the door, popping it open. It wasn’t locked, it was just stuck. Dawn and the desk clerk were having a wonderful time, laughing so hard tears were running down their legs. I was just trying to determine if I’d actually suffered heatstroke or not.

  I took a moment to wonder, How did I get here?

  Have you ever wanted to quit your job and drive off into the sunset with the person you love the most?

  Yeah. Me, too. We all have those little bursts of “I should just up and quit!”

  In August 2016, I did it. So did my wife, Dawn. (Spoiler alert: she’s the person I love the most, which is a good thing, right?)

  We both quit jobs we liked. For me, it was a job that had paid very well for more than twenty years. We packed up our house, got into our car and drove around America. Beyond deciding to drive the country in a counter-clockwise direction, we didn’t plan anything out. We just drove.

  It was scary, of course. Who quits a good job these days?

  Our Lap Around America began in August, but the adventure really started months earlier.

  It was the last day of March, and I was six miles above the earth, somewhere over Oregon, on a half-empty flight with a row all to myself. My Kindle, loaded with a movie and more than a thousand books to read, remained tucked into my laptop bag. I spent the flight staring out at the clouds.

  I had just spent three days at a writers’ conference in Austin, Texas, called the Smarter Artist Summit. Yeah, with that title, I was a little surprised they let me in as well. Those three days were spent hanging out with kindred spirits—people who got my most obscure pop culture references.

  I didn’t completely escape the responsibilities of my real job during the conference. I was the Designated Broker for a real estate firm in the small town of Enumclaw, Washington. A few of my agents had called, looking for help on difficult files and transactions, but I didn’t mind. I had also heard from the firm’s owner a few times, wondering why we didn’t have more agents, why our revenue was behind the previous year. Wondering, wondering.

  I loved my job. I’d been selling real estate since 1993, managing this office since 2002. I really did love my agents. I even loved the challenges of the job, and representing clients.

  At the Smarter Artist Summit, I had talked with a lot of successful authors. In some ways, I was one of them. I had four well-received books out, with a fifth due to be published in the next few months. In the arena of indie publishing, though, putting four books out in four years puts you in the “tortoise” category. Almost all the authors I had met who were writing full time published more than that every year. I knew the only way I could increase my output that much was to say goodbye to real estate. That was crazy, though, right?

  Real estate had provided a very good living for more than two decades. I had survived the Great Recession and come out healthy on the other side. It would be crazy to give that up now.

  Right?

  But then, there’s that pull: That need to create. To make something where nothing existed before. My hands are inept. I can’t sculpt, paint, build, or craft. I can’t even pound a nail straight most of the time. But give me a keyboard and I can create a world. Better still, I love doing so.

  These thoughts were still dancing around my head an hour later when we touched down at SeaTac. Dawn would be waiting for me there, with our two chocolate Labs, Hershey and Sadie. We were going straight from the airport to Long Beach, Washington, to spend a couple of nights.

  As soon as I took my phone out of airplane mode, more than a dozen messages popped up. That wasn’t good. It was highly unlikely that a dozen people had called me to just to say, “Welcome home.”

  I began sorting through my voicemails; just another office crisis. A check hadn’t been deposited correctly. A commission check had bounced. Three calls were from my boss, increasingly urgent.

  I called Barb, my office manager, and by the time I got to the luggage area to claim my bag, we had the check problem solved.

  The last message from my boss asked me to call him as soon as I touched down, so I did. I went into his voicemail, explained the problem and told him everything was handled. As my suitcase appeared, a text popped up. Not from my boss, but from his friend.

  D wanted me to tell you that he’s getting into vacation mode. That’s why he didn’t pick up.

  I stared at the message in disbelief. He had called, texted, and messaged me the whole time I was on vacation. He had left me three messages, asking to be called back. When I did, he not only didn’t pick up but asked someone else to call me to tell me he didn’t want to be bothered.

  I grabbed my suitcase off the conveyor and turned to find Dawn. Life always gets better when she is near, but I was still steaming.

  “I think I want to quit my job.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  The perfect response. Very Dawn. Not saying, “Yeah, let’s quit the job that supports us!” but not killing the idea, either.

  “Let’s go. Got the dogs?”

  “Of course.”

  Ten minutes later, we were in our Subaru Outback, Hershey and Sadie wagging their approval of the situation, and everything seemed better.

  Still.

  D wanted me to tell you that he’s getting into vacation mode. That’s why he didn’t pick up.

  That night, sitting on the couch in our little condo at The Breakers in Long Beach, I said, “Do you think we could live in a place this small?”

  Since our home in Orting was about 2,400 square feet, and the condo we were sitting in was just 500 square feet, it was a valid question. Dawn looked around at the small kitchen and living room, tiny bathroom and bedroom, and said, “I’m not sure. Maybe. Why, are we thinking about that?”

  I was. I was thinking about chucking it all and moving into a tiny place at the beach.

  By nature, I am a slow-to-react kind of guy. I’m pretty good to have around in an emergency if you need a cool head to analyze the situation. Less so if you need someone to act first and ask questions later.

  We pondered our options for months after that return flight from Austin. I knew I could continue doing what I was doing. That was certainly the safest option. Or I could step down as Designated Broker but continue to sell real e
state. That’s where most of my income came from, anyway. Or, I could make the big jump—quit altogether, move somewhere cheaper than the Seattle area, and survive on what I could make as a writer.

  We were only renting a house at the time, so we didn’t have to worry about selling, but our lease gave us a drop-dead decision date. It expired in July, and we were renting from a large corporation that didn’t let you slide on renewing. By June, we would need to either extend for another year or move out.

  By May, we had decided. We would follow my favorite aphorism: Jump, and a net will appear.

  We knew where we wanted to go—Long Beach, where we’d first hatched the idea. As a tourist area, it was an expensive place to stay short term, but long-term rents were about half what we were paying farther north. I’ve been going to Long Beach on vacation almost since I was born. After several hundred visits to the Long Beach Peninsula, though, I knew what year-round living there would entail.

  Quiet in the off-season. Good. Storms, mostly wind and rain, with some freezing temperatures from October to May. That’s good or bad, depending on how you look at it. For a writer wanting to spend endless hours hunched over a keyboard, looking out at howling winds and sideways rain is fine. For my housebound bride, we weren’t so sure.

  So, we made the decision to rent for a year before we bought a home, to make sure we would both love it there after surviving a full year of unpredictable weather. The primary problem was, there were next to no rentals available.

  I crawled every website, constantly harassing—umm, I mean, staying in touch with—a real estate agent in each office on the peninsula. Nothing. As May turned to June and we had to give notice on our lease, I grew increasingly concerned. Dawn, who is a little less devil-may-care than I, was several notches past that. She was slipping into panic mode.

  What do we do if we quit our jobs, give our notice, and have no place to go?

  That’s when the idea hit me: Why not take the time we would be homeless to drive all the way around America?

  Of course, it didn’t work out quite that way. Like the couple who adopt a baby and then immediately become pregnant, a week before we were to leave, we got a lead on a house. We had planned to put everything we owned into storage, so we didn’t have to pay rent on the road, but I knew Dawn. She is a nester. She would feel much more comfortable while we were gone if she knew where we would be laying our heads when we returned.

  So, we looked at the little house in Seaview, right next to Long Beach. Of course, it was perfect. I don’t mean perfect in an “OMG, this house is gorgeous” sort of way. No, it was perfect for us. The outside was covered in weathered shingles that screamed, “We’re living at the beach!” Inside, it was a funky little beach house. Nice kitchen and living room, with one tiny bedroom on the main floor and two more up a twisty little staircase. (We didn’t dare to stop and think how we’d get any mattress bigger than a twin up the stairs.) There was even a nice little alcove with a window that would be a perfect writing den for me.

  Thus, just a week before we were supposed to leave on our trip, our agenda changed to a complete house move. Luckily, we were almost all packed, but everything else—renting a truck, loading it, driving and unloading it, then cleaning our big house to turn it back over—was draining. I desperately looked forward to our trip just so I could quit lifting boxes. I immediately missed my job in the real estate office, where no one ever asked me to move a box.

  Once we got everything offloaded into our new house, we turned right around to make the three-hour drive back to our old house. On the way, we stopped for gas. I slid my debit card and put my wallet on the roof of the car. Please don’t ask why I did that. There is no good answer. You can probably guess the rest of that little story.

  I didn’t realize I had lost my wallet until the next day, a Saturday. So, we were leaving on Monday to set off on an eight-week trek, and I didn’t have my driver’s license, debit card, or any credit cards. I stayed behind and continued to clean, while Dawn made the seven-hour round trip to that gas station, hoping to find my lost wallet lying on the side of the road.

  No luck. No wallet.

  I am an idiot.

  We decided to stay one extra day to give me time to at least get a replacement driver’s license and ATM card. It didn’t seem like a great idea to risk getting pulled over in some little town in Alabama or Michigan with no driver’s license.

  “Really, officer, it’s a funny story…”

  So, Monday was spent scurrying around from the bank to the Department of Licensing, sometimes referred to as hell. After a long wait, I got a little paper license just before the DOL closed at 5 p.m.

  We went to the first of many, many crappy little motels we would stay in over the next two months, and collapsed.

  Day One

  Because I am not content to do anything the easy way, I came up with a series of rules for our trip:

  1. Stay off freeways whenever possible. This is a trip through small-town America.

  2. Stay in mom-and-pop motels wherever possible. We want to avoid corporate America.

  3. No eating in chain restaurants. We want to sample the real cuisine wherever we go.

  There were a few cities we wanted to hit, so we knew we couldn’t avoid freeways altogether, but we intended to spend most of our time on small back roads, driving at 45 mph wherever possible.

  Dawn Adele was up early, showered, packed, and ready to roll by 8:30. Since Dawn strongly falls into the “night person” camp, I knew that meant she really was excited. Part of it was the allure of adventures to come, of course, but I suspect much of it was the joy of having the drudgery—packing, moving, cleaning—behind us, and only the open road in front of us.

  We drove to our hometown Safeway to pick up some last-minute reinforcements for our cooler. Sitting in the parking lot, with everything we were going to need for a two-month journey tucked into our trunk or nestled on our backseat, we paused and looked at each other.

  We had talked about it, planned it, argued about it, and waited for it to arrive for so long, it was surreal that the moment, the trip, was finally upon us. We took our first picture of the trip—a shot of our odometer, reading 12,313 miles—and turned right, onto Highway 410, heading east toward Greenwater, Crystal Mountain, Eastern Washington, and beyond.

  I’m happy you are coming along on the trip with us. If you’re wondering who we are, and why you want to travel all the way around the United States with us, here’s the condensed version of our story.

  I grew up in a small town called Mossyrock, Washington. Dawn’s parents moved her there from Southern California in 1975, much to her chagrin. Dawn is almost four years younger than me, so when she first arrived, that age difference meant that she and I were friends, nothing more.

  My senior year (Dawn’s freshman year), we became more than friends. We fell in love. Things happened, yada, yada, yada, and Dawn’s parents decreed that we wouldn’t see each other for three years. Those years stretched from three into thirty. Then lightning struck, we found each other again, and we got married October 16, 2010.

  (Shameless plug: if you’d like to know all the good stuff that I skipped over in the yada, yada, yada, you can buy my books Feels Like the First Time and Both Sides Now. End shameless plug.)

  Six years later, Dawn and I were still finding happiness with each other and living our happily-ever-after. It’s a bit of an odd experience, having chronicled your most intimate thoughts and experiences and shared them with the world. For example, Dawn was once in having a mammogram. She had assumed the position when the X-ray tech looked at her chart, recognized her name, and told her she had read all about what she and I had gone through. From her vulnerable position, I think Dawn just wanted to focus on the mammogram.

  All of us have a specific worldview that informs how we see things and everything we think and believe. Ours is that we are Westerners. We’ve both lived in Washington state most of our lives. We think it is pretty close to perfect, b
ut we’re willing to keep an open mind.

  Dawn and I were the sentient members of our traveling party, but we were relying on one mechanical member—our 2016 Hyundai Sonata. It had been Dawn’s Christmas present eight months earlier, and we were about to give her a real shakedown cruise. For purposes of the trip, we named her the Silver Bullet. Mostly because of her color and the fact that we love Bob Seger, not because we were sponsored by Coors Brewing, although I think they totally missed a bet there.

  Washington State is divided by the Cascade Mountains. The parts east and west of that range couldn’t be more different. The western half of the state, where I was born, is green, with plentiful lakes and rivers, and trees as far as the eye can see. Western Washington is also where the businesses and most of the people are—Boeing, Microsoft, Starbucks all have headquarters there. Politically, this side of the state leans far left.

  In Eastern Washington, the prevailing color palette is brown, with a little beige and tan thrown in for good measure. Summers and winters can both be harsh. The primary businesses are farming—growing hops and wheat, and raising cattle. The political bent is decidedly conservative. However, since the bulk of the state’s population is in the west, the state always skews blue on national issues. It’s got to be frustrating to be a conservative in Eastern Washington, as the immense population of the west always drags politics in a different direction.

  As we drove along Highway 410, slowly gaining elevation, I thought of the road ahead.

  “Better drink these trees in. I don’t know many other parts of the country that are going to have greenery like this. Upstate New York and the rest of the northeast, maybe.” At that moment, upstate New York seemed very far away. A dream for another day.

  “I miss them already, and they’re not even gone yet,” Dawn said.

  Dawn loves three things above all others: animals, greenery, and ocean water. It was our goal to get her plenty of all three on this trip.

  We entered the Mount Baker–Snoqualmie National Forest. Hills rose above us on both sides of the highway, densely packed with fir trees, undergrowth, pines, and the occasional glimpse of the gurgling White River.