Day 1 - Oatman, Arizona after dark...

Los Angeles, CA to Winslow, AZ

Last night Brendan called, sort of out of the blue, and asked if I'd ever been to the website www.nuclearterror.org. You can enter your zip code, and the site will tell you how close you live to the nearest likely nuclear terror blast zone.

Yep, we're leaving town. Kinda creepy that Brendan would call the night before our mad dash out of TARGET LA to hep us to a site that sort of CONFIRMS OUR WORST FEARS.

Left Los Angeles, a little later that we wanted to, around noon.

Is the 15 to Vegas always just messed up? It always is when I want drive on it...

Got to Oatman, AZ after dark- everything was closed. Except for the bar at the Oatman hotel.

Had a Bud and Wild Turkey shot. The bartender was wearing her "Bikers Against Terrorism" t-shirt. Someone has kidnapped a baby burro from town.(The town is known for its’ pack of roaming burros, the descendants of the mining burros left to fend for themselves when the mines were shut down.)

From what I could tell in the dark, Oatman is an old ghost town that is now a tourist destination- lots of gift shops and such. Reminded us Mendocino. Looks like the kind of place long-haired freaky people of all different stripes end up, mingle, mate, shoot at each other, and know each other’s business.

But it was mostly shut up tight as a drum, so I didn't get to sample the Freedom Fries at the Olive Oatman Restaurant. And I didn’t get to explore all of the strangeness of a tourist trap named for a woman whose claim to fame is her unique tragedy and suffering.

We'll have to return and see the place in the daylight.

It was this time of year that we were refugees from Manhattan in 2001. Our 9/11 story involved having to drive to Texas during the no-fly period for a family emergency. We left New York and headed out into America.

Here we are now, dodging the end-times, during the heated last phases of the election. Again we're getting our news from right-wing talk radio. Somtimes I get a shudder of that feeling right after 9/11. What's next... what's next... what's next...