I have been completely awful about writing up what's gone on each day since I last posted. I'm so tired of being on this trip, and I'm just plain tired.
My mom has a snoring problem, which wouldn't bother me if I weren't sleeping in the same room with her. It's unbelievably loud, like my grandmother's, and it's just something I'm not prepared to deal with. I bought earplugs before I left Pittsburgh, and some nights they've helped, others not so much.
On top of this annoyance, I'm sleeping in the bed with Aaron, which is not the most comfortable thing either, since he flails about when he sleeps, which doesn't bother me unless he actually hits me, which has happened a bunch of times now.
I'm in Pocatello, Idaho right now, staying in yet another Best Western. We're in a B&B tonight in Boise, then a motel near the airport, and that's it for the trip. I get in at 345p on Wednesday, and it will be none too soon.
All of us are feeling it, I think. We're getting a little more annoyed with each other at stupid things than we were at the start of the trip. We all just want to go home, I think.
All in all, it's been a good trip, we haven't had too much bickering, and we did see the highlights of all of the places that we've been. This superficial treatment of the national parks is good and bad, because I know where I really want to revisit but I'm so tired of living in the car that I have little desire to get out of it (oxymoronic, I know, but spend a couple weeks in the car and I promise you'll have little desire to do anything but stay in one place for a while, even if it's still in or near the car).
If I could go back in time, would I change how things went? Yes, most definitely. Either not going at all, or making sure Sarah came with. I would also prefer a trip where the dogs went (though that would have been tough on this trip, because of the flying). I think having the dogs along would have been a blast at so many of the places that we've been (though particularly the beach).
I'm still gonna try to write up what happened on the rest of the days, I'll post that when I do, but I have a feeling that's not really gonna happen until I get on a plane on Wednesday, or I get home.
Monday, August 16, 2004
Tuesday, August 10, 2004
I'm up to date.
Here's the rest of the trip, thus far. I've also put up some pictures:
Aaron in the Cascades
Deer in the morning at the Fisherman Cabin
Tree in the Hall of Mosses in the Hoh Rain Forest
Aaron next to a redwood on the first day. That's him at the base of it.
Sunrise on the first day
Interesting tree, somewhere on the Olympic peninsula. "He went thataway!"
Trees at Paradise on Mt Rainier.
I haven't photoshopped any of these, they'd probably look a little better with more contrast (I talk about my camera problems below), but I don't have time or photoshop with me to make those changes.
Here's the rest of the log.
Tuesday August 3, 2004
Wednesday August 4th, 2004
Thursday, August 5th, 2004
Friday August 6th, 2004
Saturday August 7th, 2004
Sunday August 8th, 2004
Monday August 9th, 2004
Aaron in the Cascades
Deer in the morning at the Fisherman Cabin
Tree in the Hall of Mosses in the Hoh Rain Forest
Aaron next to a redwood on the first day. That's him at the base of it.
Sunrise on the first day
Interesting tree, somewhere on the Olympic peninsula. "He went thataway!"
Trees at Paradise on Mt Rainier.
I haven't photoshopped any of these, they'd probably look a little better with more contrast (I talk about my camera problems below), but I don't have time or photoshop with me to make those changes.
Here's the rest of the log.
Tuesday August 3, 2004
My sleep was a little more fitful than I would have liked, and on top of that, I had my sister telephone. At 6am. "Did I wake you up??" "Um yeah, it's 6am here, we're 3 hours behind, remember?" "Oh, right. I forgot." Then a little while later, Aaron, who shared the bed with me, managed to punch me in the face, apparently unintentionally (he said he was stretching, a likely story). I ended up waking up for good at about 7am, we got on the road by about 830am. My dad drove most of the day, which was fine with me, I was still a little tired, but more importantly, I wanted to look out the window as we drove up the coast. I'm fine with driving and looking around, the only problem is my mother's sound effects and comments about "watch[ing] where you're going!" as I drive along.
We didn't have to drive all that far today, only a couple hundred miles, but it was still a long day. We stopped a large number of places, probably 12-15. I'll have to check with my mother, I think she wrote them all down.
Our first stop was about 20 minutes from the (m|h)otel. There were lots of gulls and pelicans on the beaches here, and the rock formations in the ocean were very nice.
Later, we tried to see the sand dunes along the coast, where they're supposed to be hundreds of feet tall, but we apparently missed the right turnoff, so we ended up going to a different part of them, which weren't very extraordinary at all. Along this side trip, however, we did manage to see a couple of quail and take some pictures of them.
At one of the places (images 303-321), there was a wall that was built to keep people from falling off the cliff. In order to try to get a better angle for pictures, I got up onto the wall. Now, there was a ledge about 10 feet down, but apparently my mom didn't see it. She got so completely freaked out by my standing on the wall that she started crying and just saying, "Jeremy get down!" My dad's only comment was, "You act like you don't have a couple to spare." It was here that we saw a sea lion down in the ocean. There were also a ton of cormorants roosting on the rocks below.
We also stopped at a place where there were rocks containing little tidepools (images 322-350), containing sea anemones and starfish. We ended up spending a while there, since it was a small trek down the beach to the tidepools, and there was a bunch of stuff to check out there.
Our last stop of the day was at Agate Beach. Supposedly at one time, there were lots of agate rocks on the beach, but the beach looked pretty much picked clean when we were there. We did go down to the surf and Aaron found some sort of goo on the beach (it seemed organic, but we weren't sure what it was from). I also tried to get Aaron to pick up some dessicated dog crap partially buried in the sand, but he recognized what it was before he picked some up. (images 358-398)
When we checked into the BW, we asked if there were any palces to eat in the area. It was about 850p, not exactly dinner time, but hardly late. The womean behind the desk looked at us incredulously and said, "I don't think you're going to find much open this late..." Gotta love little towns.
We checked into our (m|h)otel, the Best Western Landmark Inn in Lincoln City, Oregon. Dinner at Burger King (ugh), pool and jacuzzi, then downloading pictures and typing up this stuff until 1230a. Time for bed.
| Day: | 2 |
| Miles Driven: | 200 |
| Total Miles Driven: | 800 |
We went white-water rafting today. It was funny as hell seeing my mom wearing a wetsuit and 2 pairs of glasses, since she was wearing her regular glasses and a pair of sunglasses on top of that. She didn't want to lose her magnetic clip on sunglasses, so a pair on top of her glasses was the way she went.
We went down a tributary of the Columbia River, the White Salmon River. It was a very scenic river, very pretty. Of course, since we got soaked and everything, I didn't have my camera, so I couldn't take any pictures (though given my camera problems, it wouldn't help necessarily). Our guide's name was Terie, at the start of the trip, my dad felt it necessary to point out (quietly, only to me) that I have bigger boobs than she does. I guess I can write that here, she's unlikely to read this. :)
I sat up front, so did my dad, and we got soaked. In the boat, I mean. There was a part of the river that we had to get out and hike a bit, since the rapids were a little bit too difficult. At the end of that, there was a 15 foot cliff we could jump off, and to my surprise, all of us did it. I got to the cliff and reconsidered...it looked a shitload higher when you were actually considering jumping off the thing.
| Day: | 3 |
| Miles Driven: | 350 |
| Total Miles Driven: | 1450 |
When we left this morning, we ended up stopping at a couple places in and around Yakima, to get cherries at the one place, to get bread and jam at another place. We got the latter items at a little grocery store called "Slim's". When we were about to leave Slim's, my dad and I both decided that it was a good idea to hit the restroom before we left, so we asked where it was, and we got pointed to the right aisle, and sure enough there was a sign that said, "Restroom/El bano." My dad motioned for me to use it first, so I went back there (through part of the stockroom), and I opened the door. Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness. Someone had done something most awful to that bathroom. It was filled with diarrhea, so I just turned around and walked out. As I passed my dad, I said, "I'll pass." I walked to the front of the store and waited for him to come out, and to my surprise, he was out immediately. He too had passed. I told the woman at the front of the store, "Someone did something bad to that bathroom back there. I wanted to tell you so that you wouldn't think it was us." She had a horrified look on her face when I said that, but we left. As we were driving away, I thought I could hear a faint shriek coming from the back of that store...
Not much to write about today. We went to Mt Rainier and drove around it, then drove on to Aberdeen, where we are staying for the night. The hotel actually has internet access, which is good, though it's only a modem.
Mt Rainier was in the clouds, so we didn't get many pictures. We hiked up the mountain a bit when we got to Paradise (where the visitor center is located).
My dad hit another animal today, a bird, actually. It was sitting in the middle of the road, and it started to take off, but we definitely hit it. My dad said it was a "junco" and I think that's the correct spelling of it. Maybe if I'm feeling energetic I will put a link there to wikipedia. It reminded me of the Seinfeld episode where George hits them ("We overlook the pooping everywhere, and they get out of our way when we're driving").
I'm getting frustrated over a lack of ability of my camera to take a decent photo. I certainly don't know everything about using an SLR, but I've never had a problem with a film camera in taking decent shots. All of my shots are getting overexposed, and it's really pissing me off. The real problem seems to be when the white predominates the picture, the camera's whitebalancing just doesn't seem to work quite right. I'm gonna try to use the internet access to figure out what the hell I can do to fix this problem.
| Day: | 4 |
| Miles Driven: | 300 |
| Total Miles Driven: | 1450 |
| Animals run over: | 3 |
We left Aberdeen a little later than we wanted to, around 945am. We didn't want to leave too late because our trip today consisted of driving around pretty much the entire Olympic peninsula and back to the Southern end of Puget Sound, to Olympia.
On our way to Olympia, we saw a "scenic overlook" sign for Mount Walker that my mom suggested we take. We should have realized that this was a mistake when we turned onto a gravel road. Several miles later, up the side of the mountain we finally decided to turn around, but not until my dad had scared my mom half to death (and the rest of us too) by driving up this gravel road, along a cliff, at 25-30 MPH. It was definitely too fast to be driving up the road.
Also, a few hours before, when driving on the highway, though there were a few curves, my dad said, "Can you do me a favor and slow down a little bit?" though I was doing about 60 in a 60 MPH zone. Big mistake for him to say some shit like that to me this early in the trip. And you'd better believe I broke that out when he was tearing up the side of the mountain.
| Day: | 5 |
| Miles Driven: | 350 |
| Total Miles Driven: | 1800 |
| Animals killed: | 3 |
Oh my goodness, is this trip over yet? We didn't drive all that far today, but I'm beat. I'm ready to be home, I'm ready to not be living out of a car, I'm ready to be on solid ground for more than an hour at a time.
This morning started out in Olympia, we went to the capital building for a few minutes, and then drove up to Seattle. It took just over an hour to get to Seattle, where we were pretty much only going to the aquarium. We went through the aquarium, it was a nice aquarium, but it was pretty small.
I stopped at the help desk in the aquarium to see about a camera store, since I wanted to get an LCD cover for my camera, and I wanted to talk to someone about the overexposure/whitebalance problem that my camera seems to be having. We walked over to the camera store, the girl behind the counter talked to me for a little while, but the end result was that she said to contact Canon about service. She said that it sounds like something that's wrong with the camera, not with how I'm using it. Which is somewhat of a relief, but leaves me in a quandary about what to do about my camera situation. Buying a new one and returning it when I get home seems like a less than satisfying solution.
After going there, we went to meet one of my college roommates, Andrew, who lives in the Seattle area. Andrew's always been a little odd (not that I'm not), but I wanted to see him, it had been 4 years since we had seen each other (at another roommate's wedding). I had called him Friday night to see where he thought would be a good place to meet, he suggested a Vietnamese place. I was thinking when I agreed to that, that my parents and Aaron would be at the aquarium or something and wouldn't be around. My family isn't exactly the most diversified of families, so I wouldn't generally think to take them to a Vietnamese restaurant. As it turned out, though, they went with me. I was somewhat worried about it.
We arrived a little early and waited for Andrew, and during that time we ended up talking to the guy watching the parking lot, this little old Vietnamese guy. Apparently it was his job to make sure that people who parked in the parking lot actually went into the restaurant. He and my dad talked a bit, but we were all standing there under a tree, and during this conversation he (the Vietnamese guy) felt it necessary to point out that I'm "handsome." I finally get hit on by someone on this trip, and it turns out to be a little old Vietnamese guy. Just my luck. Andrew eventually showed up, we had a pretty good lunch, talked about what we're both up to a little bit, and both went our separate ways. We probably spent 45 minutes in total having lunch, and I think both of us said what we could say in that time, so it was a good thing we didn't setup more time than that to meet.
As it turned out, I needn't have worried about my family. They have all been raving about how good the food was at the Vietnamese place. We all got beef pho (Aaron got meatball instead of beef), and they all really liked it.
We drove out to bumblefuck today, to stay at "Ovenell's Heritage Inn" in Concrete, WA. It's pretty close to the Skagit River, but we didn't actually go down to the river while we were there. It's a nice little place, they have a bed and breakfast, and they have a set of cabins you can stay in. We stayed in one of the cabins. The cabin (which I forgot to take a picture of) was called the "Fisherman" cabin and was probably 200 square feet, had a bathroom door that didn't quite shut, and the water in the place tastes and smells like iron. So I ended up not showering while I was here, the water was just nasty. But other than that, it was a nice little place. I am sleeping on the futon here, Arn is on the floor, and my parents have the bed.
After we had checked into the place, and after we had dumped off most of our shit at the cabin, I decided that I'd like to go look at this trail that the innkeeper had told us about that was on the map of the Cascades. Big mistake. The road, once we found it (it wasn't well marked, a common theme on this trip), was a dirt road. Which would have been ok, if it hadn't been turned to mud by precipitation. So the first bit was mud, and I could definitely feel the car sliding about a bit on the mud. It shortly thereafter turned to gravel, but then again, it added switchbacks to the mix as well. The trip up the mountain ended up being about 9 miles of gravel and switchbacks, though thankfully it wasn't usually a cliff along the side of the car. We actually had gotten close to the top and had decided to turn around, as we didn't know how much further it would go. When we did that, there was a pile of snow where we were turning around, and we had gotten out of the car to take some pictures and look around. My dad started throwing snowballs at us, which we found amusing, and something to tell Aaron, since he had decided to stay at the cabin. A car was coming down the road, and we flagged it down and asked how much further it would be to get to the top, and he said, "you're there," as it was only about 250 feet to the little parking lot (though it wasn't clear that it was a parking lot until you got there, pretty much). We got out, took some pictures, and started down again. Not quite as harrowing as yesterday, when my dad was driving.
| Day: | 6 |
| Miles Driven: | 200 |
| Total Miles Driven: | 2000 |
| Animals run over: | 3 |
We got up early today. Really early. 6am early. Jesus are we dumb. None of us slept well in our little cabin, my parents because the mattress was apparently really bad, and me because I kept on getting woken up. My dad woke Aaron up to go outside and look at the stars at 1215am, my mom's snoring woke me up a few times, and then I woke up again when it became freezing in the cabin because we had the windows open. The benefit of getting up as early as we were was that we saw 5 deer outside. I even got a shot of the one taking a dump.
Then it was on to driving through the Cascades. This is really a part of the trip I could have done without. It was beautiful, yes, but it just wasn't as special after the stuff that we have already seen. We only stopped twice, both times for small trails. The one stop was an overlook, where I took a bunch of pictures, and that was cool. We were high enough up that my dad and I both were talking about vertigo, something that neither of us are particularly prone to. It was extremely high up. Aaron and I took to trying (and suceeding, of course) to freak my mom out by going close to the edge, or just climbing up rocks that they had there (at no point were we in danger of falling). She went nuts of course, so it was mission accomplished for us.
We drove on and eventually came to the Coulee dam, where we stopped at the visitor information center. It's beyond me why the dam even has a visitor information center, as they don't charge for any of it, and they don't even have any merchandise to sell, really. What they do have is a movie that you get to watch, which seems like propaganda for wanting to build the dam in the first place. It includes such musical interludes as "Roll On Columbia" and the propaganda songs written in the early 40s. I guessed that the movie was from the early 70s, though my parents thought it was older than that, even. In either event, it was a worthless movie to watch. It didn't help that we missed the first couple of minutes of the film, but I think that we got the overall feel of the experience. Apparently the Coulee Dam is the largest concrete structure in the world, which I found surprising, but that's what they said.
After Grand Coulee, we went through the last of the Cascades and broke into big sky country. We eventually hit the interstate and drove the rest of the way in to Spokane on that. Finding the hotel turned out to be no big deal, it was called "The Davenport."
The Davenport is a nice old hotel in Spokane, and my mom insisted that we tour the building and take some pictures. Aaron likewise insisted that we use the pool and hot tub, after having a night without such amenities.
Later, my mom had another "Ginny" moment when Aaron was taking the shower. Now, before I say what she did, I will say that there are a number of things my mom yelled at the rest of her kids for, and we resent almost all of them, just because they're so fucking stupid. This is one of them. She banged on the bathroom door and shouted at Aaron, telling him to get out of the shower. I yelled at her, saying it wasn't costing her anything (her usual script involved something about water costing money, and interesting thought from someone who's never paid an electricity bill or a water bill), and if there's someone who doesn't need discouragement from taking a shower, it's Aaron. Without going to school, that kid's just not learning to fit in with regular people. So then my mom insists that she wasn't yelling at him, that she was being reasonable, blah blah blah. Yeah fucking right. I asked Aaron later whether it felt like she was yelling at him, he said, "Yeah." And that's all that matters.
| Day: | 7 |
| Miles Driven: | 300 |
| Total Miles Driven: | 2300 |
| Animals run over: | 3 |
I'm so far behind in my writing. I'm writing tonight, but I have a few days of writing to do. I'm gonna try to do at least a couple of days' worth of writing tonight.
We left Spokane this morning after hitting Perkins for breakfast and then Staples to return the cd burner. On our way out, we also went by the Manito Park in Spokane, they have a nice set of greenhouses and a Japanese gardens. I, um, had to use the restroom, and I went into the one near the Japanese gardens. This was an older bathroom, I hope, as there was no stall door on the toilet. There was a urinal next to the sink, and there was a divider there, but the toilet was standing free.
You can guess that I didn't use that one. Fortunately, there was a nice bathroom at the greenhouse area of the park, so I went and used that bathroom instead. I was still extremely surprised that there was a toilet without a stall door. Who is gonna use that to take a dump? Only the extremely desperate, I guess.
After we left Spokane, it was pretty much just a day of driving. I drove the whole way, in part so that I could be completely justified in playing my newly burned cds in the car, to make me feel better for having spent the time burning all of the cds. We drove through the panhandle of Idaho and into Montana, stopping for the night in Kalispell, MT, at the Grand Hotel. This place is a nice old hotel, though they do have modern internet access.
When we arrived at the hotel, we had the most bizarre experience. We gave the girl at the counter our last name, to check in, and another woman behind the counter said, "Oh, I think you're the ones with a bag in the back room." We were all thinking, "WTF is she talking about?" Then she said, "I guess you left a bag at the airport, maybe Boise?" and brings out my mom's missing piece of luggage. So we've driven 2600 miles over the last week, only to find my mom's luggage in the middle of Montana. Odd. Pretty cool, but odd. I guess United figured out where we were going to be by looking at the itinerary stuff that my mom had in her bag, and they forwarded it on to here.
As soon as the woman brought the bag out from the little room, my mom had a real "Ginny" moment, one that made me cover my eyes and pray that somehow I was switched at birth. There was a piece of paper that got put on the outside of the bag, taped to it, obviously by someone at the hotel (it had their letterhead on it). Apparently when they received the bag, they debated calling the only number they had for my mom, their home phone number, but had decided against it. They had written a note on the paper that said, in part, something to the effect of, "wanted to call, but it was to (sic) late in PA." Not bubbling over with thanks to the lady behind the counter (though I guess she didn't really make the bag appear in the middle of Montana anyway), my mom does take the time to say, "Oh look, she used the wrong 'too'." Right there in front of the lady. I don't know if it was that particular lady who wrote the note, but whether it was or not, it was definitely not the right thing for my mom to say. Once we were in the room, I was yelling at my mom about it a little bit, though she couldn't see where the problem might be. Apparently she said something to my dad about how I had pointed it out to Aaron yesterday on a postcard he had written to one of his friends or maybe our grandparents. But she couldn't see the difference. If she can't tell the difference, no amount of me talking is gonna show her the difference, so I didn't even bother to try to explain further.
We went out to dinner at a local place called "Moose's" which had peanut shells on the floor, cheap beer, and good pizza. I had 2 glasses of Okanokee, a regional beer (I guess). Even better, it was $1.40 a beer. I turned down the opportunity to have a beer called "Moose Drool," though I do plan on getting a couple of glasses with the Moose Drool logo on it tomorrow morning. While there, my family was really pissing me off; Aaron was being a brat, my dad was acting weird about dinner (he's not particularly fond of pizza, but they had other shit there, and he was doing his version of a pout, I think, something he does most often when he's hungry), and I don't think my mom was very happy about being in a place that said "saloon" on the outside. She was probably also unhappy about my drinking a beer (or 2), my dad drinking a beer, and there being smoke in the place (though it really wasn't that bad). The pizza was really good, and a good change of pace from what we've had already. Aaron was pouting during the whole dinner experience because we hadn't gone to Wendy's again, though we ate there last night.
After we got back to the hotel, my dad and I went out to check out the "Casino"s that are around town, we only went to the 2 closest, but they were both places where you can only play the electronic machines, so we didn't even bother.
I watched portions of "Top Gun" and "Austin Powers", and tried to figure out how to get my camera to work better for me. It's midnight again, I'm tired as hell, and I'm gonna go to bed. Without getting my writing done, of course.
| Day: | 8 |
| Miles Driven: | 300 |
| Total Miles Driven: | 2600 |
| Animals run over: | 3 |
Thursday, August 05, 2004
The start of the trip
I'm not done with this yet, but I decided I wanted to post some of it anyway. I haven't put in the links to images yet, either, but at least you can know what I've been up to so far on the trip.
Sunday August 1, 2004
Sunday August 1, 2004
My flight was at 530p from Pittsburgh to Chicago. I hadn't packed yet when I woke up at 9a, but I had pretty much packed by noon. I'm never one to pack early.
I wanted to make sure that I got to the airport by 3:30p, the last few times I've flown out of Pittsburgh (granted they were Monday mornings), I've had to wait in the security line for almost an hour each time, and I didn't want to rush it. There's been some road work going on out towards the airport, so I wasn't sure whether the bus would be delayed by those. So I wanted to make it on the 2:00p bus, just to make sure. My sister drove me to the CMU airport flyer bus stop, I was out at the airport by 2:35p. No detours.
I had to wait in line to get my ticket and my baggage taken care of, that took probably 20 minutes. Then security. Oh boy. 5 minutes. Good thing I planned ahead.
Once in Chicago, I looked on the monitor to see if my parents and brother had come in yet. They were taking a flight right around the same time as my Pittsburgh flight, but flying from Allentown. Their flight came in, they weren't surprised at all that I was waiting for them (though with all this time with them on the trip, I have to wonder why I even wanted to spend more airport time with them).
The flight to Boise was uneventful, though long. No movie. We landed in the Boise terminal, and here is where I hand out the props to the people who designed the Boise terminal bathrooms. Those are some great bathrooms. The dividers between the urinals were large. The floor to ceiling, two and a half feet deep variety. Then I washed my hand, and they had foamy soap. That's the best. I'm a man of simple pleasures, I guess, but foamy soap definitly wins points with me. On exiting the bathroom, they lost a few points, though, for the door. It was a swing-inward type. The cardinal mistake of bathroom design. Big loss of points for that. Also, paper towels instead of those awful not-gonna-get-your-hands-dry blowers. Good deal.
So my dad and brother (Aaron) go with me to get the baggage, my mom goes to get the car rental. They pick up their four bags, I pick up my two, we meet my mom over in the car rental line, and eventually we get our car, a Ford Freestar with 13852 miles on it. I'm sure this number will be much larger when we turn it in on the 17th or 18th. Much.
It's at this point in the retelling of this misadventure that I will note that my mother didn't make it out of the airport without talking about money. My dad told her to get the collision insurance offered by the rental car company, and she had to make a comment about paying for the airfare, and now paying for the car rental. And now the insurance on the car rental, too.
I've bought a Ford car new, my 1999 Mercury Cougar. I'm not anti-American cars, I'm not anti-Ford. Having said all that, this minivan is a piece of junk. It's way too small inside (my parents' '92 Caravan has more internal room), the brakes on it aren't very good. And then there's the beeping. The incessant, infernal beeping. Apparently Ford has decided its best policy for regaining market dominance is to piss off the people who already bought their cars. The car beeps when you don't have your seat belt on. Passenger and driver. I learned this while driving from the car rental lot to the terminal, a distance of about 800 feet. It beeps repeatedly for about 5 seconds. And then, two minutes later, if you haven't yet put your belt on, it beeps again for 5 seconds. And so on.
I appreciate the safety of utilizing the seat belts. I also recognize their inconvenience when watching birds or taking photos from the car, or driving 200 feet down a 15 MPH road. And during these otherwise peaceful times, I would like to avoid having to listen, repeatedly, to the car beeping at me. But in this Ford Freestar, I can't. I'm not in the car five minutes, and already it has pissed me off.
Monday August 2, 2004So we're off, making sure our belts are buckled (as I write this, two days into the trip, there isn't a person in the car who isn't pissed off about the beeping), looking for Walmart. We hate Walmart, but there's a certain necessity of having Walmart in the year 2004, and even moreso when it's midnight in Boise. With nothing else open at this time, our choices are somewhat limited. We shopped at Walmart for 45 minutes, buying the necessities of our trip (cooler, food, drinks, paper towels, etc). While we were in the checkout line (yes, there was a line at 1am), my mom said she wanted to go out to the car, and she got the key from me. She came back in after about 3 minutes, saying that she seemed to be missing a bag. Apparently my family's incompetence knows no bounds. Somehow my dad and brother hadn't paid enough attention to know how many bags or which bags to grab from the carousel. Short one bag, we tried in vain to go back to the airport to retrieve the missing. They had closed already. "Not even security has a key." said the person in the Northwest office (we flew United).
So my mother and I (we had left Aaron and my dad at Walmart to finish the checkout process) are at the Boise airport at 1am, missing a bag, and she starts crying. Way to start the trip.
<cue Batman "next scene music" here> Back at Walmart, we pick up my dad and Aaron, tell them what's up, tell my mom that she has to make a decision about what to do. We can stay in Boise until about 6am, until the United office opens, and get her bag; or we can start driving. Staying in Boise means skipping some of our trip. The late start means that we can't see the Redwood forest. The late start means that this has become just the 5-state tour, not the 6-state tour that we had planned. After eating some 130am Burger King, my mom decided (after some more crying) that there wasn't much in there that she couldn't live without, so we went on with our trip.
20 minutes later, we're off the interstate, and on US 20 West, to Bend, OR. 65 MPH, I'm cruising it at about the speed limit. This is not a well-lit road, this is a road where hitting a deer or elk seems not only possible, but probable. That collision insurance is seeming like a good deal.
My dad's back has been bothering him for a couple of months now, to the point that he wasn't sure that he would be able to go on this trip. Sitting in the seat trying to sleep isn't helping him, so my mom suggests that he get in the back and sleep on one of the bench seats.
The road we were traveling was one that winds through small towns, and when it does so, the speed lkimit drops precipitously. This happened about 30 minutes into the trip. 65 MPH right down to 35 MPH. I hate that, so I usually just kind of coast down to the speed limit, rather than applying the brakes to get down to the speed limit.
It bit me this time. I was doing about 50 MPH, in the 35 zone. As I'm pulling over to let my dad and mom switch seats, I see the flashing lights behind me. My dad's already out of the van, I don't remember exactly what was said, but the cop said that I was going an "extremely high rate of speed." Give me a break. It's one thing to tell me I'm speeding, but 50 isn't exactly an "extremely high rate of speed." Anyway, the cop felt it was sufficient to offer a verbal warning about it (without approaching the driver side window, even, since my dad was already outside the car), so I guess it doesn't really matter. That would have made the first day of the trip even better, a nice fat ticket.
So my parents switch seats. What this means of course is that she's going to be sitting in the fron with me. I figured she'd probably sleep, so I didn't think much of it initially. Instead, she ends up staying awake the whole time (around 4 hours), jibber-jabbering away. Talking about everything, but a lot of it starting with, "Well, I had it in that other bag, but.." Yay.
I can tell you, a day and a half later, that this bag and what was in it has been a topic of conversation more times than I care to think about.
I ended up driving most of the way to Bend, which is somewhere around 300 miles from Boise. Going through Eastern Oregon seems to be much like going through what I imagine Nevada or New Mexico to look like. A lot of scrub brush, not a whole lot else. There were a ton of jackrabbits, and we also saw a few (mule?) deer. The jackrabbits were pretty smart and stayed out of our way. Until 430am or so. A jackrabbit darted in front of the car, I was doing about 60 MPH, and while I'm not entirely certain, I'm pretty sure that jackrabbit is no more. (S)He hit the front of the car with an audible sound, there just wasn't enough clearance.
I switched driving duties with my dad at about 6am, and Aaron also got up and rode shotgun with him. I don't think my dad was driving even 10 minutes before he hit a rabbit, too. Luckily, this was to be the end of our Thumper-killing spree.
I tried to go to sleep, and all told, I probably got about an hour of sleep on this day. I was one tired hombre. We just stopped way too frequently for me to get any solid sleep. I wake up when the car stops, I can't help it. Our first stop occurred at 645am, when we stopped at a rest area about 20 miles outside of Bend, OR (on the Boise side), right around sunrise. (insert link here to images 103-109)
We drove through Bend, stopping for gas and the restroom (insert image 112). Not a bad restroom for a gas station, but it had the inward-swinging door. "I guess I won't be able to hold it until I get home," I quipped as I got out of the van.
We stopped a few more times before getting to Crater Lake (insert link here to images 113-119). I'm already starting to get the feeling that we're gonna be stopping a lot more places than we planned. Which is a good thing, but makes the days longer.
Crater Lake was phenomenal. The deepest lake in the country, it's about 1950 feet deep (Tahoe is 1600), and was formed by a volcano collapse. Since the large cone of the volcano collapsed, there have been a few smaller cones that have come up out of the bottom of the lake, the largest one even breaking the surface of the water that currently fills the lake (image 130). The lake's water is a deep blue, it's quite striking, especially with the surrounding scenery of rock and trees. I can only hope that the photos I took convey some of this. I took quite a few photos (the joy and burden of digital photography), we stopped several times (3 or 4) around the edge of the lake to take pictures and just to see what we could see. (images 120-183). At the one part, I thought the rock face was very striking (image 156).
After hitting the gift shop, we were on to the next part of our trip, California and the Redwood forest.
One note before I continue. While we were at the Crater Lake information center, complete with TVs and video of what happened to create Crater Lake, there was a woman sitting on the floor against the wall, directly across from where you walk into the center. She was breast-feeding her baby. In theory, I don't have a problem with women breast-feeing their babies in public. In practice, I don't really care, either, but I find it hard to be around when a woman is breast-feeding her child. I can't speak for other men, but for me, the problem lies in knowing that there is a bare breast pretty much right there to look at, but knowing that I shouldn't really be looking at it. I feel like the need to look at boobs is so ingrained that the baby getting to look at it, while I can't, well, that's just not fair. I guess what it comes down to for me is that I'm cool with women breast-feeding their babies in public, but if they're gonna do that, they have to be ok with me looking. Having said that, I tried my best not to look, but it was pretty much a losing battle. Rather than try to fight that battle (which generally involved me realizing that I was looking and trying to figure out how that kept happening), I ended up just walking outside to avoid the issue entirely.
Ok, back to the trip to the redwood forest. On the way through Southern Oregon, we happened upon the Rogue River Gorge. Most of the waterfalls along the way are supposed to dry up by this time of year, but obviously the Rogue River doesn't. I overexposed a bunch of pictures trying to get cool shots where the motion of the water, but that's basically because I don't really know what I'm doing with my camera. Typical. (Images 184-221.)
This part of our trip was basically a planning mistake. I had been talking with another instructor a few weeks ago while teaching, he said that if we were going to Crater Lake, we should hit the Redwood forest in northern California. I mentioned it to my mom, she left me a voicemail saying it was doable, I told Aaron to tell her to tell me how many hours of driving "doable" meant, he told her that I said to go ahead with the switching of reservations, and thus our trip to the Redwood forest was born. There are actually several Redwood forests in California, we couldn't make it to the ones with the big Sequoias, they were too far away from the rest of our trip. No driving through a tree for us. All we could swing, with the rest of our trip, was a trip down the Redwood Highway.
While driving down the Redwood Highway, I was really beginning to think that it had been a mistake to make this part of the trip. The views and scenery were very nice, but nothing like I was hoping for (images 222-228). And then we got to them. The real redwoods.
While it might have been a planning mistake that took us to the Redwood forest, actually going to the Redwood forest was anything other than a mistake. Words cannot convey just how awesome and heart-rending it is to go the Redwood forest. To put your hands on and look up at another living thing that has been around for probably thousands of years, standing 200 feet in the air and 10 feet in diameter gives you a sense of who you are and where you stand in the universe. Some measure of poignancy is added by the fallen redwoods that litter the forest. No matter how big, you can always fall.
After visiting the Redwood forest, I can honestly say that I have never experienced anything like it. I don't think I'm likely to. I've walked next to large land animals (elephants at the Pittsburgh Zoo), I've never felt anything special about trees before, but I definitely felt something in that forest. Astronauts have been said to touch the face of God by going into space, and that's the phrase that I think fits the Redwood forest best for me. There's something very sacred about it, to me, something that no religion can hold a candle to. I don't know how else to describe it. It's definitely worth the trip if you get a chance. (images 229-248)
20 minutes after leaving the Redwood forest, we were at our (m|h)otel, the Best Western Crescent City. After a short visit to the beach there (images 249-254), we had Subway, Aaron and I utilized the pool and hot tub, I downloaded the pictures off my camera, and we were all in bed by 9pm. The only eventful thing that happened in Crescent City was that Aaron got stung by a yellow jacket as we were getting out of the car to go to the beach.
| Day: | 1 |
| Miles Driven: | 600 |
| Total Miles Driven: | 600 |
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