My Trip Home

Ok. So admittedly I wasn't the best student back in Elementary school. If I remember being classified as any one thing, it would be "unorganized." I don't think I am in posession of a single vintage report card that doesn't make note of this flaw. Sure, my dad always called me "creative." But what do dads know? The problem, I've always thought, with my education is that few of my teachers ever actually answered my questions. Most of them just told me the answers to the questions I was supposed to ask. Admittedly, at the time I was also entering into the formative years of my budding feminine sexuality and easily excited by the prepubescent little boys who irritated the hell out of me. I was taught at some point that if they picked on you it meant they liked you, and so I figured I'd let them know I liked them back, and ended up getting sent to the principal's office more than once for drop kicking some innocent 4th grader in the junk. The point is, I was distracted. And let's face it, some things never change.

Still, it's easy to see how the basics of US Geography were never fully grasped by my surprisingly inqisitive little mind. I remember, of course, memorizing the names and capitals of all 50 states. I was never an A student; I had better things to do. Don't get me wrong, I knew my shit.

Yet somehow the system failed me.

As many of you know, I recently made the long drive home to Kansas City from Los Angeles where I spent the past year observing the society and culture of the Damned. While my research was not funded by any scientific foundation, I feel I walked away from the experience better and more cultured person. Also, 5 pounds lighter, addicted to whole foods, and with sand in my shoes.

The drive home was longer than I had anticipated. This is probably due to the fact that I slept through the majority of the drive out there and thereofore had little experience to base my assumptions on. To my amazement we kept ending up in wierd states that were way off the route, or so I thought. For the majority of the trip I was certain I was in some sort of magic car, and I kept hitting my dad up on the walkie-talkies asking "Are you sure we're in Arizona? I thought we were just in Vegas?"

Unfortunatly, the cause was not a magic car. The cause was my inability to properly identify my location on a map, which in turn was caused by my not knowing the actual layout of the United States on a map.

In order to best explain this I have provided pictures as reference for those who learn best with visual aids. Below we have a map of the US, slightly adjusted to adequately display my ignorance, the route I thought we were taking based on the states we were going through (I didn't have a map or directions. I was following the mattress on the back of my Dad's truck), which corresponds with where I thought I was on the map at any given time.

As you can see, we started out in LA. I know this, because that's where I lived. From LA, we took a slight detour to Nevada, which for one reason or another I was positive did not border California. I was wrong. The first clue should have been that I didn't drive through any other states to get to Nevada. So from Las Vegas we drove a couple hours and passed through Arizona. I thought we were making great time because I thought Vegas was located in the middle of Nevada. It's not. Then we ended up in Utah a few hours later, which again confused me because I thought Utah bordered California (which sounds really stupid now...) and that we had driven through it on the way to Nevada. Then suddenly, we were in Colorado. The route from there to Kansas City needs no explination because it mostly looked like this...

Or like this.....

...for 15 hours straight. Which, dont' get me wrong, is really cool for the first ten minutes. And then you realize you just drank a gallon of Diet Pepsi and passed the last rest stop for 40 miles two minutes ago.

Now that I've throughouly confused you, below is the actual route we took home.

In my defense we were driving for periods of 7-10 hours at a time.

Yeah, well, of course it's easy when you have a map.

But considering the fact that 1/5th of American's can't locate the United States on a map, I think I deserve points for actually displaying pictures of the right country.