Voyage of the Suburban Valdez

Suburban Valdez

My friend Jim calls his car the Suburban Valdez and we used it this weekend for a road trip; really, a pilgrimage to Spokane, Washington to honor the late Reverend Walt Estelle and support his wife and family during a memorial service for him. Walt and Marlene had been adult advisors for our high school youth group and family friends of our parents. Jim and his wife Shirley later provided the same guidance for the Estelle kids. We felt it was important for us to be there; both for ourselves and the family and important for my own parents to be there as well. The expressions of gratitude and the depth of appreciation from Marlene in particular was all that was needed to make the journey worthwhile.

I left La Crescenta on Wednesday morning and drove the route to Walnut Creek in my ’98 RAV4, a tinny old rattle trap of economy, more or less. The next morning at four Jim and I clambered aboard the Valdez and left port for Merlin, Oregon where we picked up my folks and jumped right back on the road to Spokane. For Jim and me it was an 18 hour road trip to catch up with each other added to the chance for all four us to spend hours together; Jim is a bonus son for my parents and the time was well spent. The Suburban was the ideal vessel for this voyage as it was comfortable enough for the parental units, big enough for all us, and easy enough for us to hand off driving duties to each other along the way.

I’d never been to Spokane and the terrain was new to me; my driving stint along the Columbia River was especially fascinating as Jim serenaded us with facts along the way from his iPhone searches to gather info, including where we would stop for breaks, gas, and food.

I’d blown by the planned off ramp as it had gotten dark while tooling along the Columbia and there were no billboards or gas signs to mark it. We had to stop at the next place for gas or run out and it was Boardman Oregon or bust.

The first sign that we saw was a big bill board proclaiming C&D Drive-in-Bakery as the “Home of the Bozo Burger”. Jim and I found this outrageously funny. It didn’t take much to set us off.  As we topped off the Valdez and talked about where to eat we looked at the other side of the parking lot and found ourselves at the Bozo Mecca, looked at each other, and busted out laughing again.

We ate a passable burger and loved it for what it was, an iconic clown-named burger. My dad flashed some of his old form. While Jim was sitting there trying to pop the straw out of its paper cover without success. After several animated attempts my dad, in his deadpan demeanor, calmly reached across the table, took the straw, and peeled back the paper to hand it back to Jim. Jim and I were transported to our teenager years again sitting around the pool and being schooled by dad in the finer points of deadpan humor. 

The return trip the day after the service was no less entertaining. My mom, whom Jim and I, along with many other friends and family, feel would have been a fine female driver on the NASCAR circuit, took a couple of stints at the wheel. She was at home and into a driving grove that I envied. Her final lap through the Siskiyous was a work of art as she rarely hit the brakes to negotiate the curves. This is a woman who drives from Merlin, Oregon to our place in La Crescenta in a Nissan Sentra with a manual transmission in eleven hours. She punctuated her otherwise flawless passage through the mountains by reaching for the water bottle in the console to downshift as we left the freeway for their place. It was classic.

True to my rider’s mentality I drove and rode along thinking how cool many of the roads we traveled would be if I were on the bike.

The Voyage of the Suburban Valdez, a 2000 mile round-trip pilgrimage, will remain as a grand memory for me on all counts.

Y’all keep the iron side up.