We arrived early in the evening. Highway 101 was slick as city lights began to appear on both sides through the pelting rain. We were finally in San Francisco and the long drive, a month of highways and little motels in strange cities, was nearly at an end.Cathi was driving Daisy, my trusty 1961 VW Bug. I was navigating, peering through the swishing wiper blades and sheets of water at the city that would be our new home. Forty-five minutes passed and the lights didn’t stop coming. This must be the largest city in the world. Here we were hurtling through the night and the rain, country girls in a light green bubble. We had arrived at our destination and it hit us both that we didn’t know what to do next.
Suddenly terrified, we spotted an exit sign for Airport Shops. Shopping we knew, so we took the exit. All was dark in front of us. Where were the shops? Instead there was a huge neon sign to the right that read UNITED AIRLINES. We couldn’t see shops so we turned left and drove over the freeway into the lights. There was a motel on the right with a little bear on the sign and we pulled in. Minutes later we sat on the bed and looked at each other. “What do you think we should do now?” I wondered. We cried all night.
A month earlier, on the very first day of 1967 to be exact, we had said goodbye to our families and our small hometown in rural Minnesota. Daisy was packed to the windows with everything we owned in the world. My father had shaken my hand. He had never done so before, and I knew it was a momentous occasion for which I had somehow earned his respect. My mother, for once abandoning her Norwegian stoicism, had cried. I drove away with a lump in my throat, not daring to look back for fear I wouldn’t be able to make my escape.
I was 20 and so was my best girlfriend Cathi, although she would turn 21 before I did. We were on our way to adventure in California. When we hatched this plan over the kitchen table in our Minneapolis apartment during a vicious December snowstorm, we had known the names of only two cities in California – Los Angeles and San Francisco. Everyone we knew who had left for California had gone to Los Angeles. We were not the same as everyone we knew, so we decided to go to San Francisco. We knew no one there. We had never been there, nor had anyone we knew. We were sure it would be a nice place, and warm.
It was winter, and we had to go south before we could go west in order to avoid driving over the Rockies. We chugged through the frozen snow-covered countryside to Nebraska, then Kansas and finally emerged near Oklahoma City, where we picked up Route 66. The sun at last warmed the earth. I sent my dad red dirt from Oklahoma in an envelope. We couldn’t stop giggling in Amarillo, Texas when a whole family came into our coffee shop wearing ten-gallon hats. We sang the Route 66 song until we were sick of it.
Every night we called home collect and asked for ourselves, somehow managing to say where we were calling from before the operator cut in, so our parents could chart our progress on a map they kept by the phone.
In the mountains at Albuquerque winter returned and we stopped in a garage to get Daisy’s heater turned on. Daisy’s heat was either ON or OFF – it involved connecting and disconnecting hoses. In Flagstaff we stopped again to get the heat turned off.
Las Vegas was out of our way, but the lure was too great. We had of course heard of Las Vegas even in rural Minnesota. It was a land of myth and glamour - movie stars and bright lights and all night partying. We left Route 66 at Kingman, Arizona and headed north. We said we would take a break at Las Vegas. Although we had been on the road two weeks, we had never stayed anywhere more than one night. We had avoided the cities and had stayed in small towns – it was familiar and we knew what to do. Las Vegas was so different – even as we approached it the brilliance of the light rising from the desert floor was amazing. As Daisy, Cathi and I tooled down the Strip we couldn’t believe we were here. We could hardly drive for looking in all directions at once. There was the brand-new Caesar’s Palace with its huge fountain and gigantic columns. Over here was the Elvis Presley Wedding Chapel. Up the street was the Sands, where we would probably run into Frank Sinatra or Sammy Davis Jr. Excited, we found a little cheap motel on a back street and settled in. We would stay a few days and see what we could see.
Almost immediately we ran into, not Frank or Sammy or Elvis, but Patty Boxcars and his buddy - another minor hood whose “name” is lost to memory. They took us to casinos and lounge shows. They bought us drinks and dinners – mind you, shows and drinks were free in the casinos and dinners were $3.99 tops, but we were still impressed. I poured dish soap into Caesar’s fountain and we all frolicked in the bubbles until the Las Vegas police came by. Cathi and I partied till dawn and slept all day. We did not call our parents. We felt sophisticated in that atmosphere, as if it was a semi-formal ball where we knew people and where we belonged. Stupid as we were, we were lucky. Patty and his pal were good-hearted hoods and must have had some mid-century aversion to harming innocent girls from the Heartland. We emerged unscathed after a week, a little hung over and on our way to L.A.
Since we knew people in Los Angeles – all those who had left Minnesota for California before us - we planned to stay with a guy Cathi knew in Garden Grove before the final leg of our journey. We had already experienced many firsts on this journey – our first time in the mountains, our first desert, our first Las Vegas. Nothing had prepared us for the freeways of Los Angeles. The speed. The chaos. All the lanes, and the freeway numbers crossing each other, and the exits. We were past the exits by the time we could read the unfamiliar Spanish names, not that we knew which exit to take anyway. Daisy’s maximum speed was 60 mph and cars were flying by all around us. We were confused and scared, so we took the next exit that appeared and pulled into a gas station at the bottom of it, partly to calm down and partly to ask for help. We had an address and there was a street map in the station. We were going in the right direction, but we had to change freeways in a few miles. We wrote down the number of the freeway and the name of the right exit, and got back on.
Twenty minutes down the road I realized I had left my purse in that gas station. Both of us frantic and screaming, Cathi pulled Daisy off the freeway and turned around, heading back through the chaos and traffic to the place we had been. We didn’t remember the name of the exit and we really had no idea where we were, but somehow we found it. My purse was still there where I had left it, on the floor near the counter. My money and my driver’s license and my photographs and all my precious little personal things were still there, and we realized once again how lucky we were and how far we were from home.
Cathi’s friend in Garden Grove had a wall of beer bottles. We added 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall to our musical repertoire. Garden Grove was no garden, far away from the ocean, dusty and hot. We stayed for a few days and left, very pleased with our decision to choose San Francisco over Los Angeles.
We completed the final leg of our journey in a day, traveling north on the King’s Highway, El Camino Real. For a while we had the beautiful beaches of the Pacific Ocean on our left – the edge of the continent. Then we turned inland to fields and small towns, a familiar reminder of the place we had come from except they were all called San-something or Santa-something. The rain began around King City and grew heavier as we labored north.
We arrived early in the evening. Highway 101 was slick as city lights began to appear on both sides through the pelting rain. We were finally in San Francisco. I had escaped.
