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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