CARS and Driver

[filkertom]

Pixar makes some damn fine movies.

Cars is out on DVD today. And I am hit once again with the same feeling I had when I saw it in the theater: the love of the open road.

When I took the trip out to Mom's in Arizona last February, I had car trouble... I had money trouble... and I had one of the very best times of my life. Nearly-empty highways with spectacular mountain vistas. Plants and animals I'd never seen before. Cities and sunsets and windmills and Americana. Actually being on Route 66 for a little ways was tremendous, and then I found out first-hand how it wound and twisted and crisscrossed all over the darn place.

There's about a ten-minute sequence two-thirds of the way thruogh Cars that sums up everything, everything about it -- the joy, the nostalgia, the ability to take back what was lost. As Sally puts it, "The road didn't cut through the land, like that Interstate... it moved with the land, y'know, it rose, it fell, it curved. Cars didn't drive on it to make great time... they drove on it to have a great time."

Two and a half years ago, my life took one hell of a new road. And, while there are bumps and rough patches, while not everything is what I want it to be yet, it's the best road I've ever seen. And I'm having one hell of a great time. And I'm so glad you're all with me, 'cause road trips are even more fun when you share 'em.

Oh, and... the rest of the movie's frickin' great, too. Even Owen Wilson. (Which is likely the last time you'll hear that out of me.)

-----

Have you been on any life-changing road trips, or at least really great ones? Or do you plan to take one soon?

Comments

[que-sara-sara.livejournal.com]

Does going back into self-imposed hibernation to work on me without distraction again count?? I'm intending to be "out of commission" from Turkey Day till some point in February with the short foray out for Fusion and a Chocolate Ritual.

As for this road so far; you've been reading my journal, how do you think it's been??

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

You, m'dear, have definitely fallen into the "what a long, strange trip it's been" category, which would get you many hugs even if I didn't already like hugging you. ;) And I understand the out-of-commission thing completely. I'm gonna be snuggled into the bedclothes a fair amount of that time myself, although I may emerge for GAFilk if it seems practical, and I will start up again after 'Fusion. (South of Michigan in February is A Good Thing.)

[que-sara-sara.livejournal.com]

Ah yes, there are more reasons than one that I am a true Dead Head. :) At the moment the trip might be half over. Maybe. And I would be thrilled if I could spend much of the next several months snuggled down in the bedclothes only worrying about a cat walking on my bladder. Nope, I get yet another learning experience.

Right now I will wish I was still working ren faires and could spend February in Florida again, instead I will have to settle for trying to convince our CEO that opening a Key West branch every winter would be a super amazing tax write off. I know that won't work either, but it will at least be entertaining when it's only 20* outside.

And for the record, I have now discovered that Newman's Own Organic Sweet Dark Chocolate is a very good thing. :)

[alicetheowl.livejournal.com]

I always wanted to drive across America. Hit every state, stop at all of the cheesy little tourist traps along the way, sleep in roadside motels, eat at roadside diners, and stop whenever I see a view I like . . .

My husband thinks I'm weird. I think I just take after my father, who drove to Alaska once, before he married my mother.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

Road trips were such an important part of my family culture that last year when my parents celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary they picked my song "My Summer Vacation" as their theme song. I dream of having enough unallocated vacation time to be able to do road trips again. (Although, of course, I will feel horribly guilty for consuming the gasoline and producing the extra air pollution.) I don't think there's any one that stands out more than any other -- the song pretty much speaks for itself.

[autographedcat.livejournal.com]

In May of 2002, I flew to Boston and spent a week with tigerbright, and teddywolf, and visited with browngirl and ladysprite. Then, on Friday, TL adn TW drove me to Northampton, MA where I met up with kitanzi, and Kit and I drove from there back to Atlanta, with all her posessions stuffed into the back of a Mitsubishi Mirage.

We're still living together, now married. So I'd say that was a pretty life-changing road trip. :)

[thatcrazycajun.livejournal.com]

The most life-changing road trip I can recall taking had to be the one I took with my Boy Scout troop out of Lafayette, LA back in the mid-1970s to the West Coast. Two solid weeks on the road, from Cajun country to Galveston to Amarillo to Taos to the legendary Philmont Scout Ranch in NM to Los Angeles, then back through Las Vegas and Ciudad Juarez (home of *the* pushiest tourist-trap salesmen in the world) and home again, staying on military bases (and eating their chow) most of the way. In between, nights spent in a condemned lodge inside a box canyon (and the thrilling bus ride up out of it each morning and back down each night), my first and so-far-only visit to the original Disneyland, the Universal Studios tour, a voyage through Carlsbad Caverns, the Painted Desert, camping on the lip of the Grand Canyon and Circus Circus casino (the only one in Vegas that allowed minors, back then). Still the longest one I've ever done...and the most memorable.

Road trips

[markiv1111.livejournal.com]

The American ones were the kind of little experiences that build up over time. My birth family (at that time my parents, me, and two older sisters, though my brother -- born when I was 3 3/4 years old -- figured in the later ones) drove across the United States a lot; we lived during the school year in Baltimore (first) then Endwell, New York, a Binghamton suburb (later) but had a summer home on Vashon Island, Washington. We eventually settled on Vashon, but the drives were really sweet, great family bonding times, singing rounds and listening to my parents sing harmonies, and playing the kind of little word games that are sometimes used to keep children busy.

But the really, really wonderful one came when we were living in Argentina. Our temporary home town was Rosario, population about 500,000; we took off with another carload of Americans, the Boones, and headed west across Cordoba (though we did not stop in the city of Cordoba) and over to the Andes. We stopped at the famous statue, Christ of the Andes, and I walked about 20 feet into Chile and back. We wound up (after a couple of days of only dirt roads) at a lovely little town called Bariloche, from which we did a lot of cruising of clear blue mountain lakes and other guided tours. We took an entirely different route driving back, on roads that were really just "trails" and were very, very bad on our tires -- in fact, at one point we had three flat tires in one day, and it's a lot harder to find gas stations that sell tires (or any gas stations at all) in rural Argentina than in rural USA. We spent about 36 hours in a town called Coronel Dorrego, where a hotel keeper named Romanelli was very kind to us and where we could get the family Jeep repaired and re-tired. We swam in the ocean at Necochea (a lovely town of about 20,000 people) and checked out the sea again at the noted resort town, Mar del Plata -- overcrowded and dirty, despite the rep. I don't remember clearly how we got home, save that I think it involved Buenos Aires (where the Bucklins had spent a lot of time, but we usually hopped the excellent train down there and back). This was just marvelous, and I will never forget it. My first wife and I driving to Toronto for the 1973 Worldcon, and then from there to Hartford, and from there back across the country to get home, was also pretty marvelous, but I'm spending more time right now than I actually have, writing here at work.

Nate B.

[janet-coburn.livejournal.com]

Dan and I had a real blast one time driving a big honkin' Cadillac to Boca Raton and back. We put together a tape of every Cadillac, car, or road song we could find and let them wail. While on that trip we learned one of the Mystic Rules of Life: Sometimes if you postpone having an argument about something in the future, the problem will go away before you get there.

[unclelumpy.livejournal.com]

If you think I'm going to have anything to do with a movie starring "Larry the Cable Guy", you're screwy.

And I DO mean YOU!

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

Your loss, Lump. I admit that I've heard much about LTCG's standard shtick, enough that I've never bothered to subject myself to it -- doesn't seem like my cup o' curare. But in Cars he just plays a character, quite an endearing one at that. And, just like Owen Wilson in this, and David Spade in The Emperor's New Groove, he just seems... right.

[jmthane.livejournal.com]

Actually, yeah, I'm just starting one of those life-changing road trips. The stage is mostly set for leaving Illinois and moving to Michigan. And changing careers. And going back to college. And actually trying to make music (performance, recording, something) my day job.

Just the latest in a few life-changing road trips this lifetime.

[mbumby.livejournal.com]

Back in 1988, not having been (to my memory) further west than Chicago I took the month of July off and drove to California. Wanted to watch the sun set into the ocean. Visited friends along the way. Picked up 7 hitch-hikers -- including one who was old and I think a little crazy and whose first words to me were "You are a Christian, aren't you?", one who was, I'm pretty sure, drunk, but at whose direction I drove off the beaten path in order to see the redwoods that I knew were there ... somewhere but HE knew where they were, and one whom I let drive my car while I slept. (It was that or kick him out at midnight, a couple of hours from his home.) Every single one of these people was a great rider. Every single one, while I was filling the tank and paying (this was before pay-at-the-pump) was out of the car and visible when I wasn't there -- something I'd not even thought of, but it made perfect sense -- I had after all hidden money in various parts of the car just in case my bags were taken. On the way, I stayed in a youth hostel -- sleeping in the cedar building that was partially constructed in Bourbon, Mo., worked in the corn-field to help pay for that (the price was money plus time), lost my water pump in St. Louis, Mo -- on the 4th of July -- as I was driving back to find the store the Youth Hostel folks had pointed me at (I tried to call using my MCI card to find out if they'd be open on the 4th, and after dialing all my numbers, the operator came on and asked me what number I was dialing from... small town, Bourbon!) Replaced the pump in the street in front of the house of some people I'm still in touch with. Made it from St. Louis at about 10pm to Boulder at about 6pm the next day.

I was VERY lucky and I grew a lot that year.

[desert-dragon42.livejournal.com]

Have you been on any life-changing road trips, or at least really great ones?

In 1996, Jay and I drove from our home in NC to LA Con III. We took I40 and drove on Rte 66 whenever we could. We stopped along the way to play tourist. When we hit the Southwest, I fell in love. I had not ever known how beautiful the desert could be. I knew that I wanted to live here one day. And so we do. After a detour through Denver, we ended up in the desert. At the moment, I am surround by beautiful high desert scenery. 3 hrs from the Grand Canyon, 20 minutes to Meteor Crater, and 30-45min to the Painted Desert and Petrified Forest.

[james-rayner.livejournal.com]

*Sigh*
..Someday, tom. Someday, I'm going to take my trip. I've got my map, all penned out and with marker all over it, all the little places I want to go eat, all the stuff I wanna see, my 300$ that I've been saving for Vegas for the past four years....Someday, I'll go do it..

[ruisseau.livejournal.com]

There are three road trips that changed my life.

The first one took me from the (relative) safety of my home state, near all my established friends and my family, to Illinois, where I knew exactly one person.

The third one took me and my then-fiance to South Carolina where we began an adventure we're still living.

The second one was probably the most altering. In July of 1999, my then-boyfriend and I took a trip to Nashville, TN, to attend the Nashville Annex of Callahanicon. The trip, our first major one together, went off with nary a hitch. Any problems we encountered were dealt with patiently and with a brand of teamwork that we still use today. It was on the way home from that trip that my now-husband realized he wanted to marry me.

[shockwave77598.livejournal.com]

Just a short bit away from New Braunsfels here in TX, is a road known as the Devils Backbone. Most roads strive to be level and flat, going around hills and trying to keep a reasonably even pitch.

To save money a long time ago, the road builders simply built in a straight line, from the bottom of the gullys to the peaks of the hill, rather than "wasting" all that material on going around the obstacles. It is widely known as a fun drive if you are not prone to seasickness and your car is powerful enough for the inclines.

[kestrels-nest.livejournal.com]

Life changing? There are four. The drive from Champaign, Illinois to New Orleans, helping Eric Truax move was incredible, simply because I had, at that point, never been south of Louisville. I watched as the climate changed, and the vegetation, and the mannerisms that people didn't even notice. I knew, in rural Georgia, how much I stood out, but no-one made me feel it. It would have been bad manners. That trip brought home to me just how huge, and how diverse, this country really is.

There was a drive my family took up the California Coast when I was 10, up Highway 1. Most of it was pretty standard touristy stuff, but there was a point at which I was tired, lying down in the back seat and watching the reflection of the ocean below in the car window. By some trick of reflectivity, the horizon reflected as a curve. I had been taught that the Earth was round, of course, but seeing it reflected in that fashion, with the slight but clear curvature from one edge of the horizon to the other made visible, gave the concept a reality I have never forgotten.

Years later, between graduating law school and being admitted, my best friend and I went from Evansville, IN to Pennsic and back together. We took the direct route out, but coming home we took every back road we could find, going through West Virginia, Ohio, and Kentucky on our way. If it headed in the right general direction, we would follow it. As we went, we let our imaginations run wild in ways I, at least, had never done before - and sang, and talked endless hours - I have not words to describe it. It was a freedom neither of us had ever permitted ourselves before. It's over 20 years past, and we still talk about that trip.

And the last was the shortest, and changed our lives the most. Twenty miles out, through a kaleidescope of changing color of an Indiana fall, and twenty miles home. But at the far end of it we picked up the newborn baby that became our son. Need I say more?

[msminlr.livejournal.com]

I can't find the pictures now, but somebody here on LJ posted photos of a Hallowe'en costume that was done for a child in a wheelchair, of Mater from CARS. The "truck body" completely covered the wheelchair.

[r-caton.livejournal.com]

I saw Cars in the cinema with my (26 year old) niece and had a ball.
We have to wait in the UK for our Region 2 DVD....but I'll be buying it.

[msminlr.livejournal.com]

I've been doing roadtrips as family vacations as long as I can remember. I grew up on the Texas gulf coast (Baytown) and my dad's parents lived in northern Indiana (Valparaiso). We'd go visit them every couple of summers, and took slightly varied routes each time.

I've crossed the Mississippi and Ohio on the bridges at the Joining of the Waters just south of Cairo, IL (we only went far enough into Kentucky to find a place to turn around), and the Mississippi on the old Chain of Rocks bridge in downtown St.Louis...the one with the dogleg halfway across. I watched I-57 get built; each trip there was more of the Interstate and less of US-51 and US-45. Same thing for I-30 across southeast Arkansas. We took US-67 from Texarkana cattycornered across the state and every trip there would be a little less of the old 2-lane road to drive. After I got married, we lived in Memphis and MY folks still lived in Texas, so I got to watch I-30 get finished across Arkansas.

Once we got into fandom I'd grin as folks at places like Rivercon or ConFusion boggled at us DRIVING from central Arkansas.

Our retirement plans include a LOT of roadtrips, to visit far-flung family and friends, and some just to follow the pavement to the ocean (or the border).

[bald-ruminant.livejournal.com]

I've had a few great road trips, but I think the one I liked best was the one I took back in May of 2003. Freshly unemployed, I headed back from Houston to visit friends in Los Angeles, then went through Las Vegas, spent a night in Utah (a state I'd never been in before), then spent two nights in Denver (and another new state for me) visiting two friends I hadn't seen since 1986 and 1988, respectively. After that, I set my personal single day solo driving distance record: Denver to Houston, via Amarillo, TX and Ft. Worth.

[fireskin.livejournal.com]

Life changing road trip... a long stretch of I5 in Northern California has a sign for a place called "Zamora". For years every time I drove that stretch I said to myself or my kids "Someday we're going to go see what Zamora is". Finally, one year as we were driving I finally took that exit. Zamora was a cute little town with one church that was also the school and town hall. One store that was also the gas station and about a gazillion cattle. As we sat at the little playground/churchground there I realized I didn't want my life to be making do. Not taking time to really live. And I finally gained the courage to get that divorce.

[peachtales.livejournal.com]

This actually makes me want to watch "Cars", which I missed kind of mostly on purpose.
I'm lucky enough to have very recently been on something that turned into a road trip that was beautiful. I flew to Sacaramento, CA to attend a friend's wedding in Paradise, CA, further up the Sacramento Valley. I spent 3 days there and got to be at a really special wedding ceremony that kinda made me believe again that love does really happen.
From there I drove on over to the Pacific Coast, through valley, across mountains and along some of the curviest roads I've seen since the alps. Along the way to the b&b the one night (and the whole time, really), on my way through the mountains, I came upong this gorgeous area around a lake. It was just so beautiful.
I spent the night at the mouth of the Russian river with the luxury of a hot tub. Sitting outside, in the dark, looking up at the stars after all the birds got quiet was magical.
After all of that I drove down to San Francisco and spent a couple days with friends (and also eating excellent food ;) ). At the end of this the fly hit the ointment - after flying out of San Jose, I got stuck overnight in O'Hare in Chicago due to American Airlines' coporate bs and greed. Got home a day late and a suit case was missing for a while, but it's still one of the most beautiful drives (mostly) I've taken in a long time. It gave me a lot of time to not constantly think about what I have to do and instead gave me lots of space to dream (not at the wheel, though, I promise). The trip also let me handily leave ehind all the stress I had been dealing with, which I sometimes have trouble doing. Just beautiful.
Before that, I couple of the road trips I took with my dad and my sister to the South of France in my teens when I lived in Switzerland.

[anansi133.livejournal.com]

I've noticed that the higher gas prices get, and the more people are killed for the sake of cheap oil democracy in Iraq, the more I hear in the media about NASCAAR and other 'fun' attributes of car culture.

The other day (driving alone in my car) I looked at the river of headlights and imagined how many train cars it would take to move that many commuters. For every human moved from home to work and back again, ten times that mass in metal have to be transported as well.

I do enjoy driving. The more expensive gasoline gets, the less I take it for granted. But it will be a relief, I think, when the culture as a whole admits to the full cost of this oil addiction. Car chases are going to be as rare in movies, as glamorous smoking has become.

[shinymarigold.livejournal.com]

I love to drive. Which is good, because where I live, every trip is a road trip. And there's not a single road in Northern Michigan that doesn't have something bizarre, spectactular, or at least interesting along it, if one pays attention. Even I-75 is beautiful, especially in the fall.

As for life-changing road trips, they're a mixed bag. The long out-of-state road trips I've been on took place in my early teens, when I was too young and self-centered to appreciate them; however, I think they did help develop my wanderlust. The road trip in the moving van to Chicago was full of promise and terror, but the road trip back home two years later had a tail-between-legs quality that was deeply depressing.

I think maybe I need to do another road trip, a real one: something that takes more than a day, crosses more than one state, and doesn't have a particular destination. Something to think about.

[tomreedtoon.livejournal.com]

Well, I've told forever the story of what happened after Dragon*Con 2004, with my car almost blowing up on the way up, and really dying on the way back to Florida.

I was stuck in this little town called Locust Grove, Georgia. It was a nothing little town. I was stuck in a teeny hotel room (but with microwave and fridge, meaning I could live and eat cheap). I was there three days, while the mechanics installed a used transmission and apparently rigged my engine to catch fire.

But while I was there...

I didn't have the worries of work, or taking care of friends, or doing anything. I was the freest I'd been in decades. I sat in my room, enjoying the air and the cable TV (with, thank God, Cartoon Network), repairing a desktop computer I'd brought along, walking to the supermarket and the liquor store and a few restaurants and an old shopping plaza for tourists...

And off in the distance, the continual hum of I-75, the lifeblood of the world.

It reminded me that sometimes, you have to take the world off your shoulders, even if it rolls off into the ditch while you massage your own shoulders.