Home.

Ten days, four hotel rooms (all with curved shower rods, so that was cool), three freeloading stays with family, countless roadside religious icons and porn shops and 3,726 miles (including side trips and driving around places we stopped) after leaving my old home, I'm in my new one.

There are boxes and piles of crap everywhere, but all my clothes are put away and the fridge is stocked with groceries. One of the local weeklies just published its best-of list, so I'm armed with information about how not to look like a tourist.

Yeah, I think I'm gonna like it here.

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Let's light this candle

I've always wanted to be a free spirit – a devil-may-care, hears-only-the-call-of-the-road, get-off-the-motorcycle-without-a-trace-of-helmet-hair kind of girl. Someone who sets out for an adventure not caring that she might be in Belize when the rent money runs out. Who could really live the "it's the journey not the destination" kind of life without sounding like a complete jackass. You know the type: Thelma, Louise, a young Che Guevara and Ewan McGregor all contained in a curvy package that looks good in well-worn leather.

I'm not. I like a certain amount of order alongside what could only be described as semi-controlled chaos. I'm not a big planner, but my need for some kind of control has driven me to obsessively vacuum, purge clothes and trash and rearrange furniture for the past few weeks despite the fact that a) Clean is a relative term and b) Rick's idea of clean probably doesn't extend to washing the shower curtain (by the way, the vacuum motor burned out last night, so we gotta stop at Target during the Ikea run, Rick). It's all part of my not-so-subconcious attempt to anticipate at least part of how this next phase of my life – our lives – will unspool.

As a newbie to the cross-country trip and a believer in the Springsteen-fueled open-road-as-savior, redemption-beneath-this-dirty-hood poem, I'm buying in. In the hopes of not becoming Clark W. Griswold, I will not keep one eye on the clock hoping to beat the estimated drive time on Mapquest. I will embrace road snacks, sample a few of Texas's 63 greatest tacos, decide which state has the worst drivers, and take a step toward satisfying the wanderlust that I sometimes wish I lived by.

Mostly, though, I'm ready to start this adventure. For months Rick and I have been jaunting back and forth across the country, counting days between visits, scouring travel web sites for the best fares, and racking up frequent flyer miles. And for months we've been talking about this trip – this big move. Up to now, time together has meant a few blessed uninterrupted days absent concerns about work, then returning to the place where my job is and my stuff lives, a couple of hours away from most of my friends. This time, when we get back, I'm – we’re – coming home.

Rick's leaving Los Angeles, even for a set duration, is a big deal. Even with the things he says he won't miss, it's a hard place not to love – and it will be tough to be away from his amazing friends. Reading his posts the past couple of days, I realize that I have no tearful goodbyes. Sure, I’ll miss being able to wander around the house wearing embarrassing T-shirts and having unbrushed teeth, and regularly staying at the office until 8 pm. But these are small sacrifices. What I’ve really got is just a hopeful hello. And a promise to come back.

My road songs playlist is assembled; my boarding pass is printed.

In the words of Mercury astronaut Alan Shepard in The Right Stuff (played by Scott Glenn, who incidentally, I'm ashamed to admit, rocks a mesh T-shirt in Urban Cowboy), let's light this candle.

It's time to hit the road.

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On the other hand

I know I bitched and moaned about L.A. not more than a couple days ago. And there really are some things I'll be only too glad to leave behind (see below).

But I've also lived in Santa Monica longer than anywhere else in my adult life. The last seven years have been some of the best of my life, and I'm only leaving for Virginia because the best thing of those years is there (yeah, that was tremendously shmoopy. I apologize for nothing). So there are certainly things I'll miss. To wit:

Random celebrity sightings. I think my two favorites are my first-ever, when I was in town for a friend's wedding -- Fletch co-star Larry "Flash" Jenkins at Jerry's Deli by the Beverly Center, and the time a couple years ago when Donald Sutherland walked into the mailbox place up the street from my apartment to pick up a package.



The tremendous burgers this town has to offer. I had me a double-double, animal style, the other day, and also love Fatburger, Big Tomy's on Pico and Sawtelle and the fancy ones at Father's Office and The Counter. If you haven't spent time here, chances are you don't know that for all the hippy-dippy stuff that filters back to the rest of the country, this here is a burger town.

This guy.

Average February temperature: 57.6 degrees.

I can walk to the beach, and to get there I descend a cliff and walk over (or under, if I go a little out of the way) one of the iconic roads in America. That is pretty cool.

And, of course -- and here comes the shmoop again -- the tremendous friends I have here, both ones that were already here and those I managed to make after I arrived. Five months after I moved here the job I moved here for evaporated. Had it not been for the likes of them, who took me to my first Comic-Con and got me the job I'm taking east and hung out at Jumbo's Clown Room that one time, I'm not sure I would've lasted this long. So thanks.

(A version of this post, along with the one below it, also appears on Big Action!)

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Things I won't miss about L.A.

It's six days and counting till I vacate the premises in Santa Monica, for the greener ('cause it actually rains there) and more humid (but air-conditioned!) pastures of Charlottesville, Va., where there's no beach but where the coolest girl in the world lives (that's her over in the right-hand column. So I'm starting to look around, think about my time here and whatnot, and I realize that, for all the cool stuff that's here, there are certain things I really won't miss a whole lot.

Such as:

Pizza. I've lived here seven-plus years and never found a really, really good local pizza within delivery range of my apartment. I like Dagwoods, I like Bravo on Main Street, I like a couple other places just fine. But I've been to C-ville once and have already had better there.

Traffic. I know, duh. My ultimate L.A. traffic story: The night we all were going to gather to toast the life of Hunter S. Thompson at the Marmont, I left here about an hour before the appointed time. Forty minutes later, I had reached Bundy -- which is a little over 2 miles from me. I turned around, came home, poured myself a bourbon and toasted over the phone.

The fact that I know the names of people who design restaurants and clubs -- not just chefs, not owners, but people who decide what colors the walls are. There are many aspects of the cool-chasing douchebag culture of this town that bug me, but that I might be as interested in the person who hung the lantern above my table as the person putting the food in front me is right near the top for me.

Frozen yogurt wars. I will leave Los Angeles never having tasted Pinkberry, not caring whether it's really yogurt, not having entered any of the other places with names that sound sort of like they're translated from another language and definitely not having ever stood in line for frozen fucking yogurt.

The possibility that an addled starlet might run me off the road, and that it would lead the local news if she did.

This guy.

Stories like this in my local paper. Love that subhed -- "You needn't have just emerged from a rehabilitation center or a jail cell -- or both -- to dress like you have." Just ... I don't ... seriously? ... because ... oof. I really, really hope this is tongue-in-cheek, because otherwise I just might have to cry.

The deeply annoying tendency of businesses around here, whether radio stations or car dealers or beachside eateries or cheesy tourist traps, to call themselves "world famous."

This isn't a complete list. I could go on at length about, say, hipsters or how many times I've almost been struck by cars when I was out running, because people don't seem to realize Cher's "I totally paused" line from Clueless is not, in fact, the rule of the road. But that's enough for now.

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