Keeping a journal while travelling: A chance to travel through time

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This was published 5 years ago

Keeping a journal while travelling: A chance to travel through time

By Barry Divola
Updated
You take the Greyhound buses if you are poor, mentally ill, on the run from the law or just out of jail. Or if you are an Australian on a budget with romantic Kerouac-ian notions of discovering America.

You take the Greyhound buses if you are poor, mentally ill, on the run from the law or just out of jail. Or if you are an Australian on a budget with romantic Kerouac-ian notions of discovering America. Credit: Alamy

I find it while unpacking boxes after moving house. It's a red Europa spiral-bound A4 notebook. On the cover it says "USA 1991" and inside it's filled with page after page of tiny, neat block-lettering in black ink.

It's my handwriting. It's my travel journal from 28 years ago, when I did a solo circumnavigation of the US over the space of 10 weeks, stopping in 23 cities. It didn't disappoint. And rather than sating my desire, it ignited a long-term love affair. I've returned pretty much every year since then.

I just read that journal from cover to cover, and it proved to be an occasionally toe-curling experience, but mostly it was wonderful, nostalgic, illuminating and surprising as it transported me back in time.

The journal opens in London. I spent a couple of weeks there at the start of the trip, attending the Reading Festival and staying with my old friend and fellow music journalist Andrew, who – foreshadowing alert – was entrusted with looking after my leather jacket until my return.

I was barely off the airport bus in New York at Port Authority Terminal when a kindly black man wearing some sort of laminated card on his chest asked if I needed help finding accommodation and transport.

Who realised the MTA hired helpful folks to assist travellers?

Of course, they don't. And within three minutes, I'm bilked out of five bucks by a Manhattan conman after he gives me three pieces of advice, the last one being that this is not a safe part of town at night. And it's night.

I spent my first night in a coffin-like room in a nearby YMCA. The following night I progressed/regressed to a Chelsea hostel where the foyer smelled like stale urine and there were six bunks to a room. But it only cost $19 and I was on a budget. I was obsessed with making my money last back then, but reading about my spending habits makes me sound insane.

I would stay in hostels ($12-$19 a night) or cheap hotels ($25-$30) and spend a couple of bucks on breakfast and maybe five or six dollars on lunch and dinner. But then I'd go to the Museum Of Broadcasting and spend $80 on the Complete Encyclopaedia of TV Shows, books on The Brady Bunch and Gilligan's Island, a CD of TV theme tunes and a Rocky & Bullwinkle T-shirt.

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You see, I had priorities. And my priorities mainly involved the US pop culture that I loved. Subsequently my road map looks totally screwy to someone who is not into television or music.

Most of my time in Seattle, for example, was devoted to tracking down all the sites where Twin Peaks was filmed in nearby North Bend. I wandered Boston going to places mentioned in Jonathan Richman songs – the Fenway, the Gardner Museum, the Museum Of Fine Arts, the Government Centre. In Boulder, Colorado, my first stop was the local newspaper office, where I asked, "You wouldn't happen to know where the house from Mork & Mindy is, would you?" The receptionist didn't miss a beat, casually flicked through her Rolodex and said, "Sure, 1619 Pine Street."

I stayed four nights Athens, Georgia – a place normal people could exhaust in 24 hours – because that's where R.E.M. came from. I adored R.E.M. and I found everything from the old church where they used to live to the record shop where guitarist Peter Buck met Michael Stipe. And when I saw Buck and bass player Mike Mills at a show at the 40 Watt Club, I walked straight up to them and started a conversation. They bought me a beer. Well, Buck's wife owned the club, so he just grabbed me a beer.

In each city I visited, I spent a lot of time in cafes, bookstores, record shops, collectibles stores, and bars where bands were playing. I entered some sort of pop culture vortex in Los Angeles, from seeing a live taping of Married ... With Children to tracking down the homes of Elizabeth Montgomery, Shirley Jones and Sonny and Cher.

Some months earlier I'd done a phone interview with June Foray, who did many well-known cartoon voices, most notably in Rocky & Bullwinkle. She said I should call her when I was in LA and she'd take me to lunch. On the appointed day, a black Jaguar with a tiny 74-year-old woman behind the wheel pulled up to the fleapit of a Hollywood hostel where I was staying – $15 a night, including free breakfast and dinner, plus a free beer keg every second night.

"Why on earth are you staying in this place?" June squeaked in her Rocky the Squirrel voice. "This is a terrible area! Jump in and let's get out of here!"

We'd been driving no more than three minutes when I saw my friend Andrew from London walking along Sunset Boulevard. And he was wearing my leather jacket.

"Would you mind pulling over here, June?" I asked.

"Are you all right, dear?" she said, looking concerned. "Are you going to be sick?"

She veered across two lanes of traffic, the car coming to screeching halt in front of my surprised friend. I opened the door and said, "I believe you're wearing my leather jacket."

He was unexpectedly in town to interview Courtney Love. Her band Hole was supporting Nirvana that night. Nevermind had just been released four weeks before and Nirvana were suddenly the biggest band in the world. Would I like to come?

I would. I did. I passed Axl Rose in traffic on the way there. Courtney Love shook my hand and looked right through me. Keanu Reeves held the door for me as he was coming out of the bathroom and I was going in.

I'd start up conversations with anyone on that trip. Like the guy at the bus station in San Antonio with the picture of Jesus in an intricate frame made out of hundreds of toothpicks. "Must have taken some time," I ventured. "Well, I've just got out of jail, so I had plenty of time," he explained.

Which brings us to buses. Apart from a road trip from Colorado to Las Vegas via the Grand Canyon with an old US buddy and later hiring a car to drive solo up the west coast, I was "riding the dog". That means I was taking the Greyhound. You take the Greyhound if you are poor, mentally ill, on the run from the law or just out of jail. Or if you are an Australian on a budget and you harbour romantic Kerouac-ian notions of going off to discover America. And man, does my travel diary reflect that.

Here's my description of a Sunday afternoon in Central Park: "Girls skip the light fantastic through blurred double ropes while boom boxes blast dance rhythms and beautiful young things in Lycra zoom across the tarmac on roller blades and skates."

On a bus from El Paso to Albuquerque, I write: "There are two nice looking German girls on the Greyhound but today I just feel like looking at the scenery, doing some thinking and reading Hunter S. Thompson's The Great Shark Hunt."

Someone get that guy an editor. And a girlfriend.

"I passed the puke-worthy Trump Tower today," I wrote on September 11, disgust dripping from my pen, little realising that a) exactly 10 years from that day, two planes would bring down the World Trade Centre, and b) in 2017, the guy whose name is emblazoned on that gaudy building I passed would become president.

A lot can change in 28 years. You could say I now travel "better" than I did back then. I write travel stories for magazines and newspaper travel sections, so I usually get airfares and hotels covered, plus I get the best advice on where to go, what to see and what to do.

But reading that travel diary made me yearn for the US I experienced 28 years ago. And it made me yearn to be a bit more like the guy who took that trip – wide-eyed, open, a little naive, stupidly romantic and willing to talk to anyone who crossed his path.

When I travel today I still spend an inordinate amount of time in cafes, bookshops, record stores, collectibles stores and bars where bands are playing, but I'm glad I don't watch anywhere near as many TV re-runs as I did in 1991. These days I never even turn on a hotel TV when I'm on the road.

But do you know what I'd do if I was ever back in Boulder? Go directly to Mork and Mindy's house. Some things just don't change. Nanoo-nanoo.

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