Sedona part II

I thought I would just get up, have a quick breakfast, take a quick little hike around, and get out of town. The red rock cliffs, however, just would not let me go. I ended up taking three different trails, up two different peaks, over 8 miles and most of the day, in the end. This area is just unbelievable, there are a almost 100 trails just around Sedona and the mountain range goes on and on. I didn't do anything really worth writing about, but if you get the chance to come down here, jump at it. Sedona is pricy, but you can always camp.

Sedona Arizona

(I added a link to some of the songs I've been listening to on the trip. Let me know if you like this feature. Link is to the right above my picture)


Wow! So far Arizona has been unbelievably cool. I didn't get any really good desert pictures from the Southwest part of the state but the Saguros (like the Taco Time guy) and whatever the ones above are, alongside the highway were so cool! I'm going down to Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument after I get back from my christmas break to spend more time with the Cacti.
Where I did spend time was in the Prescott-Jerome-Sedona corridor of Central Arizona. This area is my new number one favorite spot, displacing the San Luis Obispo-Santa Barbara area to number two. This area is high up in the mountains and surrounded by National Forests (like the Ponderosa Pine forest above) and the Red Rock State Park (below). The scenery was fantastic and all three of those towns were fun to stop in. Prescott has a western feel, Jerome is an old mining town and is literally perched on a mountain slope, and Sedona is surrounded by some of THE MOST AMAZING rock formations ever!

Jerome, AZ













Sedona, AZ I got into Sedona right at sunset so didn't have a chance to take very many pictures. It is clearly a very high rent zone, all the buildings are following a 'blend in with the scenery' building code; they even made McDonalds make its 'M' green instead of yellow!

Joshua Tree National Park

To live in the west is to be constantly surrounded by mountains. Everywhere I have gone so far there has been mountain range after mountain range. I am shocked at how much of California is either mountains or deserts, how do they fit so many people in here? Looking at the map I see this going to continue at least until Texas, after that I expect to enter flatland. I wonder how much the daily presence or absence of mountains effects ones world view. For me I experience a sense of sublime wonder when surrounded by mountains, forcibly reminded of forces much greater than myself. I wouldn't want to try living without them.

While it is winter, and most animals are hibernating or inactive right now, I have seen some cool animals on this trip. My list so far includes: Black-Tailed Deer, Elephant Seals, Sea Otters, a Turkey Vulture, Pelicans, Harbor Seals, Cormorants, Red-Tailed Hawks, Coyotes, a Road Runner, and a covey of Quail. The Turkey Vulture was probably the coolest; a huge black bird with a bald read head riding the thermals along the cliff-face, over the highway, along the rugged Big Sur coastline. As I drove along the mountainside, 500 ft above the surf below, the huge bird suddenly coasted up from below the road bed and soared along the highway, lifting over ridges and dipping into ravines for about a quarter of a mile of driving.

Today I went through the Mojave National Preserve, drove along Route 66 for a while, and then passed through the Joshua Tree National Park. Only one road was just recently opened in Joshua Tree due to the 14 inches of snow they had gotten during the storm. Much of more famous parts of the park were in the closed area but I was able to access the Colorado Desert for the first time. The Mojave, characterized by the Joshua Trees, is a higher elevation desert that includes Death Valley. The Colorado is a hotter, lower desert that starts in J.T.N.P. and extends south into Mexico, where it is known as the Sonoran Desert. The Colorado has a whole different set of flora including: Cholla Cactus, Barrell Cactus, Jojoba, Mesquite, Creosote, Smoke Trees, and Octillo trees.
I did some great nature hikes today and ended with a climb to Mastodon Peak (3371 ft) for a great look around the valley. I tried to go to the Patton Museum to see all of the World War II tanks they have preserved there but was too late to get in. I ended in Blythe, CA, right on the border of Arizona. Tomorrow morning I say goodbye to California!

Escape!

I finally got out of Las Vegas today. I didn't get very far, just to the first town back over the California border, but it took me three hours to get here because of all the traffic from other escapees. Baker, CA is too small a town to even have a chain Motel so I have finally taken the plunge and stopped at a random, independent roadside motel: the Wills Fargo. (note the clever use of an 'i' instead of an 'e', thus avoiding pesky trademark infringement suits) It's no luxury resort, but I long ago decided that all motel rooms were essentially the same: they have a bed, a toilet, and a shower. The only real difference is the price. So good enough.

(Hmmm, I can stay another night . . . or steal the blanket! What to do . . .)

It's my Blog and I'll Diatribe if I want to . . .

Sin has such a good publicist, you'd think it would be more fun. Having spent three days in Vegas, I declare it Sinfully Vile. The sin I can handle, but the vileness just drags on you. The various available sins look so good on the flashing signs and glossy handouts but they just don't live up to the presentation. I did not see a single glamorous person in any of the many casinos I went into, even the pedestrianly average folks were mere infrequent raisins in this fruitcake of the hardscrabble and the luckless.

Driving down the strip is the biggest hard sell of them all. From the outside these casinos look amazing and cool. Every one of them beckons you to come inside and see the gross splendour of their exteriors writ small in the imagined details of the matching interior. But instead, all one finds is the exact same slot machines and gaming tables as every other hotel, even the off, off, off strip cheapies near my $38/night Super8. They are like a box of choclates where every piece appears to be more extravangantly decadent than the next, but all contain the same dry coconut filling.

The immense expense of building these structures should mark their dangers as clearly as does the bright blues and greens of the South American Poison Dart Frog but, just as hundreds of visitors to the less regulated zoos of South America are killed each year through their unbreakable desire to touch the pretty blue froggies, the brightly colored extravaganzas of the casino skins draw us in, rather than logically scaring us away. The message our instincts should be telling us is: they would never spend the billions necessary to build these hotels if they didn't expect to earn it right back with interest from the fools who are lured inside. The games are rigged and the advertisments lie.

That being said, the show I saw (Stomp out Loud) was even better than its advertising. The performers just oozed personality and talent and I thought it was great. Cirque du Soleil always delivers and I'm sure the Blue Man Group is great as well. Taking that in hand, I propose the SInverse Law of Las Vegas: the relationship of glamour delivered to glamour advertised varies in inverse proportion to the amount of implied Sin. Gambling is high in sin, low in actual glamour; Broadway style shows are low in sin, but high in actual glamour.

This is rule especially applies to the sex industry. I have not been inside a strip club in over a decade and, despite my boredom, did not break my self-imposed rule of never going to one alone this week (and no, I didn't join a group tour either), but I did look them up on the internet out of curiosity. The girls shown on those websites only confirmed my previous experience, the actual girls in actual stripclubs range from okay to downright homely. However, there were some gogo dancers at the Planet Hollywood (dancing up and behind the blackjack tables, those wiley bastards) who were mind-blowingly hot. This is an important message of the SInverse Law, the more clothes they wear and the more distance they have from the audience, the hotter the girls. Based upon this law, I don't even want to know who would show up if you actually called a prostitue.

Snow Detour

My plan to return to Death Valley today were cut off by a snow storm! Chi thinks it's the one that hit you guys, come down to visit me and bring us all closer together through the miracle of weather. Be that as it may, it did keep me out of Death Valley as several of the passes into the park were closed and they were expecting four more inches today. Yes, it would have been cool to see Death Valley in the snow, but I've already had my fill of adventure driving in the Sierras this week. So I decided to divert down to Las Vegas and hole up for a day or two until the weather gets better.

As you can see from the photo above, the snow followed me all the way into the outskirts of Las Vegas - where it hasn't snowed for three years. There is just something pathetic about this photo. Normally, snow on a red christmas bow adds authenticity to the scene, but somehow, with the palm tree it just doesn't work the same.

The Joshua Trees, however, look super bad-ass in the snow. I got several cool pictures from this stop.

Vegas in the cold rain is a little bit weird. It definitely loses a little bit of its magic with such mundane weather. I ended up catching 'The Day the Earth Stood Still' in one of the casinos, and getting half-price tickets for 'Stomp Out Loud', which was really really good. If you haven't seen Stomp before, it is certainly worth the price. I especially liked it because they basically just make music the whole time, like going to see a band but with a little bit of acting and dancing. The players were truly extraordinary; they developed distinctly warm and engaging personalities without ever speaking. I would definitely go see it again.
I actually found my cheapest motel of the stay here in Vegas; $38/night for a Super8 way, way, way off the strip. The room is quite large and as nice as any other cheap motel. And, it has a 'Fitness Room' with Nautilus machines! Not bad. Also on the plus side, (from a certain point of view) it is surrounded by some exceedingly tawdry casinos - oh the people watching!

Death Valley

Death Valley today. No real adventures, just driving all over this huge National Park trying to take in as much as possible. It was a beautiful day, but cold not hot. The warmest it got anywhere today was about 60 degrees, although I did get a bit of a sunburn. The picture above is of Badwater Springs, the lowest point in North America at 288 ft below sea level.
Most of the park is rocky with sparse dormant little bushes, but there was one spot with honest to goodness sand dunes that you could just walk around on. Climbing up shifting sand dunes, just like in the movies. Cool!
But way back in the side canyons there was fresh water. This is Darwin Falls, at the end of about a mile of deep, narrow ravine.

Tomorrow I'm going to do some more hikes in Death Valley and then head down to the Mojave national Monument.

A Slight Mis-Calculation

California is a pretty amazing state. Yesterday I was sailing again in Santa Barbara Strait, today I ended up at 9200ft in a snowstorm. I didn't mean to get there, my little Prius was not happy with me, but it is pretty cool that I could go from sea level yesterday, to 9200 ft today, and tomorrow hop over the Inyo Mountains and get to 265 ft below sea level in Death Valley.
To catch you up on yesterday's events: I decided I had to stay one more day in Santa Barbara so that I could go sailing again. I was about to head into the desert portion of my trip and wanted a little bit more ocean before heading off. The guys at the sailing center said the afternoon winds were better so I decided to go to the Santa Barbara Mission in the morning. The Mission was cool, in a geeky museum sort of way that makes for dull reading. I'll just summarize by saying the most impactful part of the tour was the section about the blacksmithing, leatherworking, woodworking, weaving, and farming the Missionaries had to do. It was impressive to realize that when the Friars first came in 1782, they were volunteering to be completely self-suficient: any kind of tool or object they needed, they were going to have to make it themselves.

The sailing was great, went for three hours this time and they only charged me for one! I got out far enough from the shore to get into some real Pacific Ocean waves; long rolling swells that lifted and dropped the boat about four feet. Nothing dangerous about it, but it was a completely different feeling from anything I've ever experienced before. It was like little hills that come right at ya. The bigger ones would crest at about the height of my head, but they were smooth enough that it was a gentle ride up the side. Impressive though.

I got out of the boat and headed straight inland towards the Mojave, trying to see how far I could get before it got too dark to see anything. I spent the night in Palmdale, a huge, boring subdivision of Franchise Hell on the edge of the Mojave.

My goal for today was to drive up 395 to Lone Pine in the Owens Valley, a long valley between the Sierra Nevadas and the Inyo Mountains. Lone Pine is at the base of Mt. Whitney, the highest mountain peak in the lower 48 states (although its only a couple of hundred feet taller than Mt. Rainier). From here I can pop over into Death Valley early in the morning.

It is a pretty long drive from Palmdale to Lone Pine, but today I learned the difference between miles on a dead straight interstate at 75 mph, and miles on a spaghetti noodle state highway going about 40 mph like I have been doing all down the coast: I was half-way here by 10:00 am! So, I needed a detour; grab the map and see what side roads I could take . . . hmmmm . . . that little squiggly line seems to go up into the Sequoia National Forest and wander around in the Sierras before dropping back down to 395 again . . . looks great, I'll go that way.

It started off super cool, driving through a forest of Joshua Trees at first, then crossing some sort of altitude or climate line that switched it over to pine trees on the slopes with cottonwoods growing in the river bottom. I got some great pictures of this High Chaparral landscape that I'll put on Facebook in a few. The whole loop was about 100 miles, winding its way deep into the Sierra Nevadas and then dropping back out to the valley through a pass.

Well, I learned a thing or two about passes today. Passes in Washington are something I am quite familiar with: they are all at about 3500 ft or so, they are all maintained by road crews, and you can count on them being only about ten degrees cooler than the temperature at their base. None of these things are true about passes in the Sierra Nevada. I was approaching the base of the pass, the roads were clear and dry, there were high clouds but the sun was out and it was 49 degrees. These conditions in Washington would mean that the top of the pass would be a piece of cake, no problem. Sure, I was already at 4000 ft at the base of the pass, but what of it? If it only drops ten degrees it will still be above freezing even at the top . . . right?


Wrong. Man, that pass just went up, and up, and up, and up! I was constantly sure the crest was going to be just around the next bend. My map did not list an elevation for this minor little pass but, how high could it be? Here are some of the signs I drove past: "Road not cleared past Johnsonville" (never saw Johnsonville), "Chains Required" (I had chains, no prob, won't need them), "5000 ft", "6000 ft", 7000 ft" (hit snow here), "8000 ft" (there are no tire tracks on the road, just pure snow), "9000 ft" (good god, it has to top out soon!). The top of the pass was at 9200 ft! That is almost 2000 ft higher than the very peak of Whistler mountain! Oh, and the temperature at the top? 39 degrees like my estimate? Try 16. Shit.

The Prius actually did very well. The east side of the pass had only a couple of inches of snow and the Prius handled it like a champ, no problem. I figured I just needed to get over the top and life would be good. Thank heavens I finally broke down and put the chains on just past the peak, because the other side was far worse. I was in an amazing forest of Sequoias, with amazing views, but socked into a full on snow storm with over 12 inches of snow on the un-plowed road. The car was bottoming out on the drifts of snow. This was very, very not good. I was in the ass end of nowhere, no cell service, and very little chance of other vehicles. It was beautiful, but I white-knuckled it the entire way through.

Toyota makes very good cars, I just have to say. Even the Prius has great traction control. Yes, it would be nice if I could disable the loud beeping every time it detects a slip in traction (ups the tension, doesn't help), but it must have some sort of slip-differential or power transferring system because it powered its way up hill, through nasty icy ruts covered in powder, snow-plowing the road in front of it with the bumper. Also, the Engine Braking setting on the transmission is pure genius and made the down-hill trip so much safer.

Don't worry, Jess, I'm not going to make a habit of it, but it was quite an adventure. I took the side road at 10:00 am, traveled over 100 miles on it in five and a half hours (half of that in the pass), and returned to 395 only 20 miles north of where I pulled off in the morning. But still made it to my planned stopping point at Lone Pine by 5:00.

Santa Barbara

Look who's got a new haaaiiir cut, look who's got a new haaaiiir cut. So the day has finally come where I got so sick of the little tufty thing on my forehead that I just shaved the whole thing. I knew it was coming, after all, there really is no other graceful way to go bald; you just have to own it. I was pretty nervous because I have never had a buzzcut before and didn't know what I would look like, but I'm pretty happy with it.

Showing up at Anderson's Barber Shop at 10:00 am to do the deed ended up being an experience in itself. Ramon, the San Luis Obispo barber who did the honors, was very helpful. I said "I think I just want to go for the basic buzz cut. You know, a #1 razor all over."

"A #1!?" replied Ramon, with shocked overtones and a throaty spanish accent.

"Or a #2?" I quickly riposted.

"Oh yes," Ramon confirmed, "this will look much better." The conversation thus concluded (and in a pleasingly manly manner; god knows how much verbage it would have taken chicks to settle this issue), we got right down to the buzzing. The result is clean, unabashed, and quite welcoming to hats (no hat hair).

I must say that I was delighted to return to the masculine realm of the true Barber Shop. Not only is the price right ($10), the atmosphere is naturally soothing to the male ego. There are, of course, no women present. The decor is straight 1972; pleasingly wood-paneled and plain. Your chair faces across the room to the waiting area so that you can chat with the customers waiting their turn. Sure, there is a mirror on the opposite wall, above the row of waiting chairs, that you could watch the progress of your haircut in if you'd like, but we men are generally unconcerned with such things. We'd rather all stare across the street together at the hot blonde in the cowboy boots and mini-skirt who works at the boutique over there. It is of much more interest to us to determine if she is the one with all the tatoos who has worked there for months, or if she might be new. If a woman came in, she would surely want the chair swiveled around so that she could stare at herself in the mirror the whole time . . . as if something important were occuring, but we men have more important things on our mind.

Like the story of the young girl who came in the shop just last week. She told one of the customers (an older man who knew her from somewhere) that she had gotten a new tatoo and would he like to see it? He said, "Sure." so she lifted up her shirt, unbuttoned her jeans, and tugged everything down in the front to show him. Well, I guess his eyes just about bugged right out of his head, along with the other customers in the chairs and the Barbers behind them, "cause she was standing right there by the register!" If we weren't facing each other, we couldn't make knowing eye-contact and leering smiles that, without a word being spoken, say clearly to each other, "Sluts! Let's do 'em."

Yes, it was good to go back to the Barber Shop. It had been too long.

You might also have noticed from that first picture that I am sailing! This was the total capper to my great day today! I want to thank Tess for suggesting I get The Lonely Planet travel book for California. Thanks to it, when I pulled over a few miles out from Santa Barbara to figure out what I wanted to do, I saw immediately that there was a sailboat rental shop right on the beach. I instantly threw down the book and made my way straight there. Sailing is one of my great passions that I rarely get to indulge and I was so hoping I would find a way to work it into my trip!

For those of you who don't know, sailing is a fairly complicated sport and renting out sailboats to strangers is something of a dicey proposition. The boats are expensive to maintain and take a lot of wear and tear from use, particularly if some idiot comes along who doesn't know what they are doing. Not many people rent out sailboats deserving of the name.

Well, the Santa Barbara Sailing Center was my faintest hope come true. They had sweet little 21' daysailers for a reasonable price (not cheap, $30/hr., but reasonable) and they were willing to let me take one out with only a short written test of my sailing knowledge (I scored 99%). You can see from the picture that the boat has it's share of wear and tear on it, but it worked just fine.

Sailing is something I look forward to, but not without my share of nerves. It is a complicated sport requiring some real skill, and to take an unfamiliar boat out in unfamiliar waters by yourself is a little risky. Capsizing is always a possibility (preventable with skill, but mistakes get made) with a result ranging from embarrassment to death. But it is that same skill and risk that gives such a great reward. It was beautiful to be out on the Pacific, with Santa Barbara and the Santa Ynez mountains behind me, the Channel Islands in front of me and the sun setting over the ocean to my right. The boat handled beautifully and the wind was just perfect. I had to show some skill (beating into the wind to re-enter the narrow harbor channel), but I pulled it all off gracefully and got back to the dock exactly as planned, five minutes before closing. Beautiful!

Big Sur

Elephant seals were the random element of the day, today. I saw a whole bunch of people standing on the edge of the beach looking at something and decided to pull over and see what it was all about. As it turns out, there is a whole colony of Elephant Seals that happens to mate and give birth on that particular beach. Neither of those two things were happening just yet, but it was still cool to watch them hang out on the beach, swim around, fight, and make some really trippy noises. Mating season is in January, and things are supposed to get really interesting then, with lots of fighting and fucking all day long - might have to swing through on my way home!

For the last two days I have been making my way south from San Francisco. Yesterday morning I had a yummy breakfast at Mama's in the North Beach neighborhood of S.F., bought some christmas presents, and then headed south to Monterey. The beach at Monterey ended up taking up my whole afternoon, as once I started walking on it I just couldn't make myself stop. I probably walked four miles down the beach until I hit a seawall and had to turn back.
Today I drove down the Big Sur coast to San Luis Obispo, stopping along the way for an eight mile hike up in the Big Sur State Park (above). So far, I've gone for hikes/long walks every single day and am really enjoying it. Prior to this trip I haven't hiked in decades, but I'm finding it very relaxing and rewarding. Driving past all of this cool stuff is frustrating, there is so much to do and see, I feel like I'm constantly missing stuff. Getting out of the car and wandering off into the woods and mountains makes me feel like I at least didn't miss that part of the landscape.

Todays hike was the first one where heat was an issue, I didn't wear my coat and I got a little overheated a couple times! It's definitely warming up as I get further south. There was also a lot more wildlife on this hike: hawks, deer, quail, and tons of birdsong from the bushes. I wonder if the northern forests weren't so quiet because of the cold.

The climate has gotten a lot drier as I've gone south too. The hills pictured above are a lot different from the Cascade Ridges of a few days ago. Even the Redwood Forest near Crescent City was quite wet, with the under-carpet of ferns I'm used to from the rainforest on the Olympic Pennisula. Down here the trees are mostly oaks and they only grow in scattered patches.
This was a really cool mini-mountain sticking up out of Morro Bay. You can just make out two tiny little people on the beach on the right side of the mountain to give you a sense of it's scale.

Tomorrow I'm heading down to Santa Barbara and from there I'm going to head east and north again into the Mojave Desert, the Sierra Nevadas, and Death Valley. I've decided to skip L.A. and San Diego this trip as a big messy, urban sprawl that I'm not really that interested in anyways.

San Fran

Let me just say that there are few things more disappointing than bad Pad Thai. I admit that being addicted to Thai Tom's unbelievably wonderful Pad Thai is more or less a guarantee of being disappointed elsewhere but man, what a disgustingly mushy, weird flavored mess Pad Thai can be. Really, who prepares Thai food with absolutely no spiciness? They didn't ask how many stars I wanted, but I didn't know that meant there would be no spice at all! Crap! Blech. (and it's not like I went to Thai food in Ashland, OR or anything, this is San Fran! Huge asian pop. What the hell?)

With that off my chest I can tell you about my stay in S.F. Last night was everything I wanted this trip to be: I drove into town with no clue about what I was going to do, found a cheap motel within two blocks, booked a room (quite a comfortable one actually) and bought tickets for a concert that same night that I could walk to. Totally random and off the cuff, and it worked out beautifully. It was a pretty steep hike up and over Pacific Heights, but my hiking experience this week served me well!

This is The Coup playing at the Fillmore. The Fillmore is a massively historic concert venue, the birthplace of the Grateful Dead, and I was thrilled to get to see a show there. I've read about it in tons of books and stories and it didn't disappoint. Really nice people that worked there too, the girl at the Will Call window had noticed that I was from Seattle from my order form, asked if I had ever been there before and gave me the whole rundown of the place. It looked pretty rough from the outside, but it was really cool inside with hundreds of concert posters from the last forty plus years on every wall.

The Coup was a great show, by far the best Hip Hop show I have seen yet. These guys had so much more going on than the Hip Hop acts I've seen before with a lead and bass guitar, full drums, hammond organ, two singers and Pam the Funkstress (center of above pic). Pam was a fantastic DJ, scratching up a storm, occaisionally using her enormous breast on the turntable instead of her finger. And for all of you ladies who can't play a musical instrument with your boobs, maybe you should just think about that.

Today I went on a huge trek through the city, from the Presidio, up over Russian hill to the top of the famous Lombard St. curvy, steepest road in America, down the other side to the North Beach neighborhood, up Telegraph Hill and to the top of Coit Tower (where I took the photo at the top of this page), back down the hill and through Chinatown to Cafe Zoetrope pictured just above. This building was so cool looking I just had to go in for a drink, even though it looked like a spendy place. As it turns out, this building is owned by Francis Ford Coppola and has tons of cool memorablia on the walls. Including the picture below of Mr. Coppola taking advantage of one of Thailands main tourist attractions.



They also had a fabulous single malt Scotch, the Macallan 12. Which, I wanted to add, is a wonderful thing to order. I got visible respect in two potentially awkward bars by ordering a single malt scotch. The first was last night at Liz's Boom Boom room; I went in because I could hear live music playing inside and it was the only dive-y looking place on a whole street of trendy hipster joints. It was a little more hard-core than I had really bargained for, with a pretty serious looking jazz quartet and kind of a tough looking, older crowd. The bartender was hot, but in that tatooed, torn stockings, anarchistic bartender chick way that is always intimidating. At Cafe Zoetrope the place was white linen and crystal with an older, mustachioed Italian bartender who'd obviously worked there for decades and served the countless moviestar guests of Mr. Coppola. Both bartenders attitudes changed just that little bit when I asked them about their single malts, if nothing else, it wasn't a boring order to fill. So, thanks to Ilan for turning me on to scotch, it's serving me well.

Meshell Ndegeocello and The Coup

Well, an hour ago I had no idea what the heck I was going to do tonight, whether I was even going to stay in SF or just drive through. Now, I'm booked into a sweetly cheesy Super 8 on Lombard St. and am about to walk up the hill to see Meshell Ndegeocello and The Coup at the uber-famous Fillmore! Woo hoo!

I gotta get moving to make this happen, so I'll update you all later on how it went.

Golf this!

So I'm driving along Hwy 1 and I can see the neighborhood getting tonier and tonier as I get closer to San Francisco. The promontory I stopped to do some writing in was sharing its space with a gof course, the first one I've seen on this trip. A little bit further down the road I see a sign for Pebble Beach. I don't know if this is where the famous golf course is or not, but I was so obsessed with a bizarre vision that I just had to pull over and write it out for you.

For those of you who know how I feel about gold, and for those of you who know what a complete nerd I am, this will come as no real surprise: I have been imagining young Jedi Apprentices who sneak out of the academy to come practice their skills on the golf course. Not with a golf club, but with their lightsabers. What better test of your reflexes than to stake out the green of the 18th hole as 'your territory' and defend it against all comers: only a true Jedi could strike down a golf ball in mid-flight! Oh, just imaging those frustrated and deeply angry corporate attorneys and vice-presidents. How impotent and useless they would feel as the young Jedi punk leapt 15 feet in the air, flipped over twice, and sliced their tee shot in half before it even hit the fairway!

The golfers would keep piling up at the Tee-off space as no one was able to complete the hole. They'd start to gang up on the young punk and tee-off six or a dozen at a time, but to no avail! Our Jedi truant is up to the task, leaping and spinning just like Master Yoda to intercept every ball. Every once in a while the apprentice would use his Jedi Mind Tricks to make the poor Dentists, Surgeons and Accountants think he had gone away, but then appear again from nowhere when they tried to start playing again!

Oh those poor thwarted rich white men, how vexed they would be!

Redwood Forest and the North Coast

I woke up early today to a clear blue sky and went back to the scene of my disappointment last night to try again with a sunrise picture. Not quite early enough for the sunrise, but its still a nice shot.

Before going any further with this blog, there is something I need to get off of my chest. I have been pissing all over these National Parks and Monuments. I don't know what it is about hiking, but I have to pee every twenty minutes! There's never anyone around . . . there's all these convenient trees to stand behind . . . I don't know, maybe this is normal, but I've pissed everywhere: on 800 year old Douglass Firs, on 2000 year old Redwoods, over the rim of the crater at Crater Lake, off the cliff into the fog-bank, everywhere! I doubt there's any real harm in it, but I feel a little bad about it.

John Steinbeck wrote "The redwoods once seen, leave a mark or create a vision that stays with you always . . . from them comes silence and awe. The most irreverent of men, in the presence of redwoods, goes under a spell of wonder and respect." This was written on a park sign at the trailhead I randomly stopped at. I read this sign, took two steps down the trail and was literally overcome with wonder, to the point of tears. No words can describe walking through a redwood forest better than 'wonder and respect.' I spent the morning hiking through this forest and took great peace from their massive presences. What a gift our ancestors gave us in preserving this forest.

After my hike I continued on down Hwy 101 to Eureka where I stopped at a tempting looking Organic Grocery store. I had intended to bring a huge pile of Builder Bars with me for when I couldn't find a restaurant that looked good or just wanted to keep driving. I forgot to get them before I left and was surprised to stop at two different grocery stores along the way that didn't carry them. I knew the Organic store would have what I wanted. I deduced the presence of the Organic Grocery store because of the woman crossing the street in front of me in a floor length hand knitted rainbow poncho and no shoes. Following her with my eyes I noticed the teenage girl in the garishly tie-dyed parachute pants and knew my Clif bars were within reach. Inside the store I was embarrasingly un-cool at the coffee bar when I realized at the last second it was actually a juice bar and then spastically pointed at someone else's drink and said, "What's that? I'll have one of those!" I then compounded my gaffe (of not having ordered a smoothie here every day of my life and having the menu memorized) by not adding any bee pollen, ginseng, acai powder, wheatgrass or wasabi to my drink like everyone else. (ok, maybe not the wasabi) (Sighhh), out-greened in Eureka . . . when I get to Texas I'm gonna throw my organic weight around like a big green bully, make them feel like self-poisoners!

Past Eureka Hwy 101 heads inland so I peeled off onto Hwy 1 which sticks with the coast. Hwy 1, along with the road up to Oregon Caves, is right at the top of my list of roads that Chi should never be allowed to drive on, even when sober. For those of you who have been to Carkeek Park in Seattle, it is just like the drive down the ravine to Carkeek's entrance, only it's 22 miles long and drops about 4000 ft from the mountains to the sea. I swear there was not one straight bit of road the whole distance, just one curve blending into the next, many of them full on literal hair pin turns. I was almost nauseous by the bottom, and I was the one driving! It was so much fun . . . but I'm now glad that there weren't any of the bicyclists that the signs warned me about, 'cause I would have squashed 'em.

At the bottom I finally got my Pacific Sunset. Second times a charm.

What's in a name?

Well it was another amazing day today. I got off to a slow start due to a leisurely breakfast at the Tee Time Cafe in Grants Pass (at right). I only made 85 miles in distance again but had a fantastic hike at the Oregon Caves National Monument.

Once again, the drive up to the park was spectacular, this time driving up a tiny, shoulderless road alongside Sucker Creek. The left side of the road was hard up against the mountain and the right side was a sharp drop off to the creek with a hard curve every 100 feet it seemed. Huge trees grew right by the side of the road and, half way up, around the corner just ahead of me jogs a lanky fool of a teenage boy. Granted, there was not a single other car on the road the whole time, but this idiot (in jeans and a t-shirt, not running gear) is running down the road at full trot where there is absolutely no room to pull over for him. I slow down to see if he needs help (which he obviously does) but he just gives me a goofy wave and keeps on going. If I were Catholic I might have said a prayer to St. Jude (patron saint of fools), but as it was, I just figured he'd learn his lesson when he had to turn around and jog back up this steep ass mountain.

The caves themselves were closed for the winter but there was a cool three and a half mile trail up into the mountains and the old growth forest behind the caves. I had the entire park to myself, didn't see a single soul in the whole place, but the forest was just fantastic. The trail was steep (1100 ft of elevation gain in 1.3 miles) and it was dead quiet, not even birdsong for most of the way. I sat on a bench for about twenty minutes, at one point, and didn't hear a thing but the buzzing in my own ears.

This is apparently the largest Douglass Fir in Oregon, over 40ft in circumference. It was the highlight of this trail, the whole reason to climb up the mountainside. It is a pretty impressive tree, and you'd think that the Park Service would put a little effort into marketing this tree . . . like, by giving it a cool name, like . . . The Woody Mammoth, or Isengard's Bane . . . or maybe if they were Road Runner fans they could have called it Treeificus Giganticus. Alas not. I'm afraid the Parks Department is filled with tragically literal-minded Guardians who could do no better for this magnificent conifer than to call it The Big Tree. So, if you ever go to Oregon Caves National Monument, be sure not to miss taking the Big Tree Trail so you can have a look at The Big Tree yourself.

Driving down from the mountain I got back on 199 to finally cross the border into California and head down to Crescent City and the Pacific Ocean. The trip out of the mountains, down the Smith River gorge this time, was yet another gorgeous drive through wild river gorges and mountain passes. I wanted to stop a couple of times, but it looked like if I kept going I might be able to hit the beach for the sunset. It was such a beautiful day, I was sure an ocean sunset would be the perfect romantic cap to my day. However, coming down out the mountains has had a predictable result this trip, after getting hyped up over getting to the beach on time for sunset and racing through the northern part of the Redwood Forest National Park I dropped out of the last pass and hit sea level only to be met by an impenetrable fog-bank, just like yesterday.
Ahhh, sunset on the beach in Northern California. Oh well, it was still a really cool day.

Crater Lake

Today was an absolutely amazing day. The weather was perfect and every turn of the road revealed new wonders. I took a lot of pictures today and will upload them to facebook later (I may need to set the file size lower on my camera, too big!). I'm really just stunned at all the cool stuff I saw today, the pictures are lame in comparison.

I was out the door by 8:30 and headed up Hwy 138 from Roseburg (if you're in the mood to follow my journey on a map). The geography of Southwestern Oregon is impressively hilly. My usual range, from Bellingham to Eugene, is essentially entirely floodplains and valleys, and even though we think of it as hilly that is only because we can see mountains from the generally flat places we are. SW Oregon is hilly! And in a completely random way too, it looks like a two year old mixed up some lumpy mashed potatoes and peas and tossed them in the air to see what shapes they would make on the floor. There are almost no flat areas at all, and where it is flat, people have crammed farms and houses into every level spot. The towns look like the cornflakes that get mashed into the valleys of your molars.

Hwy 138 follows the North fork of the Umpqua River up into the Calapooya range of the Cascades. Driving along the side of that river, full with the autumn flood, with the morning sun filtering down through the huge old growth firs, was the first of several sublime moments of the trip. Every trail head I passed, I wanted to stop the car and hike for an hour just to experience that forest and river. I did pull over a couple of times to get out and take some pictures, but got going again quickly to make sure my main goal of experiencing Crater Lake would work out. It was so cool there, I actually want to go back there and camp!

After three hours of driving up increasingly steep and frosty roads, I finally reached the Rim Village of Crater Lake. The rim is at 7100 ft. and it is pretty cool that you can just drive straight up there. Any worse condidtions and the Prius wouldn't have been a good choice, but today it was just fine. There was a couple of inches of snow in the park but it was above freezing. In the photos you can see the extra 1000 ft peak I decided to climb up by myself. That probably wasn't a great choice safety wise, but I had cell-service (yay verizon). If any of you experienced hikers want to tell me to make a different choice next, I'll listen. The path was kind of icy.

After about an hour an a half I headed back down, this time going south on 62 to 97, into Eastern Oregon and towards Klamath Falls.



It was cool to see the forest change from the firs of the west slopes to the pines of the east slopes. You can see the differences in the forests when you look at the pictures. But after only a few minutes of driving down the the Eastern side I came out onto the Klamath Basin. The Basin is at 4100 ft and is a dead flat valley with mountains on either side and a 133 square mile lake at the lower end. Again, amazing scenery.

After leaving Klamath Falls, at the base of the lake, I headed back west on Hwy 66 through the Cascade Siskiyou National Monument. This was probably the funnest drive of the day, super curvy roads, not a soul on them, old growth pine forest all around and another scenic surprise as I crested a mountain pass and suddenly found myself at the top of a 2000+ foot drop. Winding down the side of that valley, from the crest of the Cascades down to the fog filled valley floor was the last of four distinct eco-systems I drove through today. I was in bright sunshine all day, until I hit Ashland at the bottom of that valley and was swathed in fog all the way from there to Grants Pass where I am staying tonight.

On the map I did three sides of a box today. Starting at Roseburg I drove roughly 80 miles east to Crater Lake, roughly 80 miles south to Klamath Falls, and then roughly 100 miles back west to pick up I-5 again only 64 miles south of where I started. Not very efficient, I suppose but, my god, that was the single best drive of my life. Unbelievable.

Tomorrow I finally hit California. I'm heading down 199 to Crescent City and hitting 101 down the coast!

I can see Sherwin Williams from my room!!

Here you can see that actual end of the Pacific Northwest. Eugene sits at the end of the Willamette Valley, nestled into the mountains and hillsides of the Coastal Ranges. Everything north of there was socked in with the perpetual grey gloom of a NW winter, but you can see that the clouds end at the mountains and freedom waits beyond!







This is one of those hills that sticks up in the middle of a farming valley that I can't help but mentally paint a castle on top of. For at least a mile I think about the thick walls, lined with trebuchets, launching huge buckets of rubble at the evil host below.

The problem with taking pictures on a solo road trip is that there is no one to be IN the pictures. Landscapes are deadly dull. I'm going to have to do something about this . . .

First Post

December 3rd, 2008
Roseburg, OR

Hello, welcome to my mid-life crisis blog!

I'm counting today as the first official day of my trip even though I was supposed to leave two days ago and actually left yesterday. Today I crossed out of my usual range and had my first try-out of writing the script of my trip on the fly. I spent last night with Tess in Portland (thank you), had my first greasy spoon breakfast in Multnomah, hit Powell's for a Lonely Planet travel book of California that Tess recommended, and finally got on the road by noon. Eugene is the furthest south I have ever been on I-5, so crossing that line and checking into my hotel here in Roseburg makes this my first official day.

Tomorrow I'm heading up to Crater Lake National Park, swinging down to Klamath Lake, and then seeing how far I can get towards the coast before dark.

Between paying $1.80 per gallon and averaging 50 mpg on the highway, my travel costs are an insanely low 3.6 cents per mile. That means the cost of driving the 500 miles from Seattle to the California border will have cost me all of $18.00. This is absolutely unbelievable, my lunch today, french dip and a beer in Eugene, cost $16.50 in comparison.

My Broadband adapter for my laptop works like a charm. I have internet everywhere I go and can just pull over to the side of the road and do a quick google search for 'good food in Eugene' and find a great brew pub and quick directions on how to get there. It couldn't have been simpler. It might be harder to find my way around bigger towns but so far everything looks great.

I thought I would splurge today and stay in a $65/night hotel because it listed and 'Exercise Room'. I haven't worked out since Saturday so it sounded like a good way to kill an hour and work off my greasy spoon food. Unfortunately, 'Exercise Room' is apparently a loose term. I was imagining some cardio, some nautilus machines, and hopefully a few dumbbells. I suppose I am going to be forced to learn hotelspeak, perhaps what I was thinking of would be referred to as a 'mini-gym', be that as it may, I was disappointed with what I found.

For $65 at the Quality Inn in Roseburg, your Exercise Room consists of a treadmill, a stationary bike, and a stair-climber. A cleverly placed wall of mirrors makes it momentarily seem that there are two treadmills, two stationary bikes, and two stair-climbers. Ones rational mind immediately rejects such silliness and tries hard to resolve one or two of the superfluous cardio machines into actually being a weight machine, perhaps with a rack of dumbbells hidden way off to the left behind it . . . but no, its just a wall of mirrors reflecting the completely pedestrian treadmill, bike, and stair climber directly in front of you.

This makes one wonder about the minimum legal definition of 'Exercise Room.' Perhaps somewhere in Texas there is a $45/night hotel whose listed feature of 'Exercise Room' is actually just an empty room with a medicine ball in the middle. And I suppose if we are putting this hotel in Texas we have to assume that there is also a Coke Machine in the Exercise Room; one with no 'Diet' selections and 1.5 litre bottles . . . Actually, a medicine ball is probably way too metro for Texas . . . let's say: an empty room, the aforementioned Coke Machine . . . a 60" plasma T.V. locked in on the NASCAR channel . . . and (for exercise) no place to sit.