portland, olympic penninsula, victoria

July 28

 

I haven’t been able to post for a couple of days because we were either without wifi or the kids had used up all the charge in their laptops.  Portland was a really cool city.  We walked the Northwest side after having lunch in a Vietnamese restaurant called Silk.  I had a dish called CaRi, yams, tofu, mushrooms and vegetables in a coconut-based yellow curry.  I now have to reconfigure my list of favorite dishes and place that one somewhere in the top five.  The city is full of interesting shops and a well-established hippie culture (some genuine, some hippie-chic). 

 

We stayed in Portland only two nights because the campground was a little strange.  It’s a huge trailer park with an area devoted to rv’ers.  We picked it because it’s close to the city on a little island on the Columbia River.  As soon as we pulled in (at about eight in the evening), we were greeted by two friendly (that could also be read too friendly) obstinate, neighbor cats from hell.  Our initial impression of “well aren’t they nice,” turned into “WTF is wrong with these guys!” Our protestations escalated from “Hey, get off the table so we can eat,” to tossing water on them.  At that, they simply rotated their heads around on their limber little feline necks to nonchalantly lick it off and meow as if to say, “Yeah, yeah, so when do we get dinner?”  The only friendly person we met there was a sweet woman who seemed almost as starved for attention as the cats.  She really was nice and helped us plan a little bit for our trip up the Olympic Peninsula.

 

We headed out early and decided we’d try to make it to Quinalt Lake, about thirty miles inland. We stayed at a very friendly little private campground there that had a site looking out over the lake.  It was peaceful and beautiful and we slept about a hundred yards from the world’s largest Sitga (I think) spruce.  This was actually kind of sad, because a wind storm had come through the area and broken off the top of it as well as a mile wide swath up the east side of the hill beside the lake.  We hiked what had been a woodsy trail to find ourselves walking through a wasteland of fallen BIG trees. It should have been cold and misty, but there was no shade left and the area was experiencing a heat-wave to boot, so the experience was foreign even to us foreigners.  The scale of the devastation was sickening.  There is so little of the peninsula that has not been logged and these pristine old giants had been swatted down like match-sticks.  Huge root disks stuck thirty feet in the air while hundred foot long trunks lied tangled together.  We did see a spectacular, glowing rose tinted post-sunset sky with a crescent moon over the lake that seemed to say, nature can be terrible but it is also incredibly beautiful.

 

We drove to Forks the next day (Sunday).  Ursula and I now know more than we could ever have hoped to about sexy, teen-vampire romances.  We drove out to La Push where we had salmon burgers and fries on the “Treaty line,” picked up some cool rocks from the beach, and took a picture or two of the cliff.  We made our way to Lake Crescent where we cooled off (the weather here is abnormally and disturbingly hot) in the snow-melt water and then hid from the mosquitos inside the camper.

 

Monday was a FULL day.  We drove to Port Angeles (Ursula declared it cute) and had a wonderful breakfast waiting for the ferry to Victoria.   The Ferry ride was expensive, but relaxing.  Victoria is a bustling town that is the prettiest city we’ve seen on the trip.  It is my favorite so far.  We had a great time going from shop to shop and left early to catch the six o’clock ferry to Vancouver.  The tab for the second ferry brought our total ocean-going expenses to around two hundred and fifty dollars.  How do the Victorians do it?   We had a great conversation with an amazing lady named Dhina.  She was an Ethiopian born physicist who lived in both Switzerland and Sweden and was here vacationing alone.  The hour and a half trip on the sunny deck with cool salt-water wind in our hair and a picturesque

Mount Baker in the distance went by in what seemed like only a few minutes.

 

Ursula and the kids were feeling courageous and wanted to see if we could make it to Vancouver WITHOUT having a reserved campsite. After some less than admirable navigating and ensuing still-on-the-road-after-dusk-nail-biting, we are now at an elaborate facility about five miles out of Vancouver in an area called Surrey.    

 

 

Redwoods

July 23

 

Yesterday we hiked Damnation trail. It starts at Highway 101 and descends one thousand feet through old growth redwoods all the way to the ocean.  From the tops of the trees two hundred feet above, sunlight is filtered through the mist to softly light acre sized patches of ferns and delicate moss coating the branches of smaller trees.  Every hundred feet or so, the trail curves around the trunk of another gargantuan redwood and the view all around is of one after another fifteen foot diameter bark covered columns rising up into the canopy. The trail was used by Native Americans to hike down to the ocean, and walking it is like stepping back in time.  The trail dead ends at a little outcropping of rock where a small stream empties into the sea.   We had lunch there and had fun picking through the driftwood.

 

Four percent of the old growth Redwoods are left.  One out of twenty five escaped the chain saw and those would be gone too if not for the national parks and conservation efforts.  What a shining example of the rapacious nature of capitalism, the true religion of America.  It’s no small irony we print “In God We Trust” on our money.  What a subtle way to say, “It’s all up for grabs.”  The same type of thing is happening with mountain top removal in Appalachians right now.  The

Chinese are paying top dollar for coal, so screw the mountains.  Maybe I can find some solace for my tree-hugging, commi-pinko heart in Portland where we’re headed as I write this.  It’s supposed to be one of the greenest cities in the States.  We’re going to be camping on the Columbia River and should be there by six or seven tonight. 

 

We looked for lunch today in Crescent City as we started the trip to Portland and have some sad news to report to James.  Glens bakery is closed and has been for a while.  We couldn’t sample the blackberry pie he recommended and now have a deep-seated yearning for same that only some local operation will be able to fill.  The blackberries are in season here and they are delicious, but we’ll only be satisfied when we taste them in the form James planted in our minds.       

          

San Francisco on foot

July 21

 

We did San Francisco on foot by following the walking tour route in Ursula’s Lonely Planet.  The bus dropped us off near Union Square where we soon found Grant Avenue and the official entrance to China Town.  We visited many shops, walked down the alley where the Chinese revolution was allegedly plotted, bought fortune cookies at the factory and then our stomachs told us it was time for lunch.  While we were debating where to go, the perfect restaurant found us in the form of a woman handing out menus on the street.  She led us off the main drag up a hill about a block and a half to a little place where we had Hong Kong style chow fun and shrimp dumplings that were the best Chinese food I’ve ever tasted.  A really friendly local guy who sat at a table beside us told us we lucked out by finding the best place in San Francisco.  Everyone seems so friendly on the west coast.  We ended the walking tour at Coit tower and came down the east side through a hillside garden walkway with loads of exotic flowers and beautiful trees.  We missed the ferry back to Larkspur and had to walk back across town to union and Van Ness to catch the bus. 

 

The next morning we packed up and headed out to crawl along the beautiful cliff-strewn coast again to what we thought would be a sunny and sandy destination: Caspar beach (5 miles from Mendocino).   The cold ocean mist forced us into jackets, but the beach was pretty and had a group of seals playing in the surf and pelicans plunging in front of a really nice sunset.  The next day we had planned to spend soaking up the sun in the sand in the nice little cove beach, but gray skies settled in and we got on our bikes to ride into Mendocino.  Ursula and Devin decided to turn back and take the bus into town while Aidan and I pedaled our way there.  We had a deliciously warm clam-chowder lunch, bought some bread and pastries (the blackberry cheese Danish was really tasty) got tired of waiting for the other half of our family to show up, (the bus didn’t run until really late) and rode back to camp.  

 

At the moment, I’m sitting in the camper while Ursula is driving through Redwood forests on 1 and 101 about 150 miles south of our next campsite: Del Norte State Park.  The road is a seemingly endless series of curves and I’m fighting motion sickness to type this.  The sun is shining and the air is almost hot.  What a difference in temperature there is just a few miles east of the ocean.  We’ve already seen some big redwoods from the road, but we’re going to get up close and personal by this evening.  We’re still having fun and can’t believe we’ve done all the things we have in just two weeks. 

Bug Sur and the coast

July 19

 

It’s Saturday morning.  The significance of the word weekend has faded.  The sun is coming up over the little parking lot that is the “campground” we found to keep us in San Francisco.  Our little patio of astro turf carpet, ten dollar Chinese made collapsible chairs and fold up table is squished between our camper and the neighbor’s slide-out trailer section.  The laundry we washed yesterday evening is draped over the chairs and is still damp because the laundry mat (very clean and well kept BTW) closes the doors “promptly at eight o’clock” and clotheslines are forbidden.  It’ll take weeks for Ursula to overcome the shock of being told we can’t hang up our underwear outside.

 

The day before we had left Solvang content in the knowledge we had a reservation at a really nice beach campground only to realize we had booked one in Mendocino NOT Monterey.  That’s a difference of about four hundred miles.  We had to reconfigure our plans (an absolute catastrophe for come of the more schedule oriented members of our party) and ended up staying at McGrath State park which is near the shore, but in not on the beach.  It was crowded and dark and we set off before Devin woke up (not having really spread out camp the night before).

 

We drove up the coast hoping the sun would gain the upper hand in the incessant battle between itself and the mist so we could see the ocean.  Most of the time we only saw these glorious, sun-lit and shadow filled, neck-craning hillsides to our right ending abruptly and precipitously in the mist to our left but occasionally we would see the shore below.  On one flat portion of the stretch, where we could clearly see the ocean, we stopped at an elephant seal observation point.  The ocean was gray and had many charcoal-colored rocks sticking out here and there.   Most were about as big as compact cars and some of them happen to have been elephant seals playing.  Their movement is slow and almost escapes your notice because of the waves and froth in the ocean, but their call is unmistakable.  It’s a long low flatulent grunt that sounds like a Harley Davidson starting for the first couple of turns.  The seals lie on the beach and occasionally a couple of them will charge each other and meet up bouncing chests because some offensive transgression of big fat seal etiquette has occurred.  We enjoyed it immensely. 

 

We had lunch looking over and into one of the many the cliffs we pulled off to see, stopping also at Julia Pfeiffer State park.  We hiked up there to see a waterfall showering a little club of privileged gulls and the foundation of an old house that belonged to one of the early twentieth century’s elite.  What a place to have lived!  At another pull-off, we hiked down to the ocean and grabbed a couple of oblong, completely rounded pieces of granite to bring back as mementos.

 

By the end of rush hour, we entered a mist covered Golden Gate bridge and came out the other side into the sun. Just as we came to the end of the bridge, where it winds around the mid-section of a hill, we saw a mountain size cloak of mist come rushing over and down the top toward us – cool but kind of spooky.  Today we’re heading into San Francisco, either by bus or ferry. 

LA - hello and goodbye

July 15

 

Made it to LA!  We drove from Flagstaff up 89 to visit the Grand Canyon.  Highway 89 is full of waves, the road has these 6 to 12 inch ups and downs that deliver a sinusoidal input to the camper with a frequency of about too hurts (normally that would be 2 Hz, but Devin’s laptop suffered two dents in the top from a hurtling jar of spaghetti sauce and a descriptor denoting pain seems more appropriate). 

 

The north rim of the Grand Canyon really is worth the extra time it takes to get there.  There’s a whole different story to go along with that comment, something to do with Escalante, but I won’t go into details to save the driver some embarrassment.  Awesome, awesome, awesome is the view and the drive up there at eight thousand feet is totally different than the desert leading to the south rim.   The road is a lot like the parkway in Virginia, with gentle curves and lots of grassy fields edged by pine forests and little groves of Aspens here and there and wildflowers everywhere.  The fields are so big you really need binoculars to see any wildlife and I kept scanning them because I know it’s perfect bear country.  

 

After the Grand Canyon, we drove to a little campground called Blue Water Lake in Utah.  It was hard to sleep that night because it was so hot, but it was a good stop-over and I figured if Aidan could overcome her fear of wild bears to sleep in the woods, I could keep my fear of Mormon fundamentalists at bay for one night.

 

We drove through Las Vegas all the way to LA where we camped at Golden Shores RV Park less than a mile from the Hyatt in Long Beach.  The Hyatt is where we rendezvoused with Helmet.  We visited the Aquarium of the Pacific and ate at Bubba Gump’s seafood restaurant.  How strange to meet up with family from Germany on the West coast.  We had a great time, and as usual, Helmut knew more about the city we were in than we did.  He was so cool, he let the kids experience the Swiss team accommodations that night while he slept in the camper.  They got a hot shower, a nice big bed, TV, and Starbucks in the morning to give them a taste of business travel.  I wonder if they'll end up doing that kind of thing as professionals in another ten years.

 

We left Helmi just before noon and drove to Hollywood where we walked down the avenue of the stars and took pictures with the sign on the hill as a backdrop, and then we drove through Beverly Hills and down Rodeo Drive.   We ended up staying in McGrath State park that night and were surrounded by what we think may have been victims of the housing bust.  We’re calling ahead now to check the availability of campsites to lesson the stress now.  That night at McGrath, I booked a site at a nice RV camp called Flying Flags just to give everyone something to look forward to.

 

Today we stopped in Santa Barbara to hang out at the beach.  A long, grassy park stretches for several miles on the beachfront southwest of the city and cyclists, in-liners and walkers are in constant supply.  We saw the latest Harry Potter film there, checked out the really cool downtown area, which is a little touristy, and then headed out.  Now we’re at Flying Flags.  It’s an impressive operation (a little expensive but worth it to recharge our batteries, psychologically speaking). 

 

The air is getting cool now.   Ursula is wrapped up in two blankets and even suggested going south again, but the kids called her prissy and we’re not turning around, we’re headed to Big Sur and San Francisco.

 

Oh yeah, Devin ended up getting her camera and she’s taking photos of everything, even bread on the sofa.  It’s little annoying but she gets some great shots.  Also Vickie the GPS is working fine now (the problem was the charger) and she’s really saving our butts.  Thanks mom.  

Flagstaff

July 10

 

We took the bus to town Wednesday.  Santa Fe is really spread out.  Cerrillos Rd (the main route to the Plaza) is lined with Wal Marts and Walgreens and full of a lot of traffic, but the sidewalks are great and the drivers are extremely cyclist friendly.  Devin ordered some of the best chicken tacos at a little restaurant called the Shed.  Almost all the architecture here is adobe, it blends in with the landscape and helps hide the number of people living here.  I feel kind of like a mud-dobber going in and out of all these tan little round hovels. 

 

The next day we packed up and headed out to visit Taos.  Thousands and thousands of giant charcoal-brown boulders stick out of steep, rocky mountainsides that hem-in the river.  The scenery is fantastic.  An expansive green valley (100 times larger than our own little one in Roanoke) stretches between sparsely placed giant mountains, while the shadows of clear, bright cumulous clouds migrate across the landscape.  Cutting through the middle of all this is the Rio Grand River Gorge and it’s hard to see it as the two thousand foot deep scar it is, because the view from the road is ten miles away.  You look across this wide flat land and see snaking through the middle what looks like a little black river, but what you’re seeing is the shadow of the long cliffs that make up the sides.   Looking at it from the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge is breath-taking.  Pictures can’t capture the scale.

 

July 11,

 

We visited a Pueblo Indian village and met some really cool people who put out this centered, non-stressed aura.  They were so friendly.  I keep imagining the early Spanish Catholics with their fear, guilt and holiness crap descending on these contented souls and just totally messing it all up.  At one of the churches I reluctantly visited (next to the oldest house in America) there is sign that reads something to the effect “all the ghosts here are friendly.”  Yeah right, you murdered relatives, you desecrated holy sites, tore apart families, inserted your own perverted superstition, forbid old customs, and every (dead)body’s happy.  The lies we tell ourselves are tragically funny.  

 

We left Taos without seeing enough to satisfy Ursula.  We’ll go back.  Heading toward the Grand Canyon, we decided to camp at a little State Park called Blue Water Lake.  We chased the sun to get there before dark, but pulled in just after all the light went out of the sky.  After a quick late dinner of grilled pizza from Trader Joes (not bad at all), we went to sleep and woke up the next morning to see wild horses staring at us from across the campground.  We left after a little hike to look over a cliff that stood above the dam making the lake.

 

Heading toward Flagstaff , we visited the Painted Desert, saw the Petrified Forest, and the ruins of a thousand year old Indian camp with famous rock art, and then saw Meteor Crater national monument (that’s cool).  The meteor must have slammed into the earth at an almost vertical angle because the crater is almost perfectly round.  The size of the “whump” and what it did to the rock is mind-boggling.

 

We stopped for fuel and I left the gas cap on the door.  About a tenth of a mile down the interstate, Ursula heard it fall and I trudged the tenth of mile back and luckily found it on the side of the road.  We got to Flagstaff, set up camp, went shopping to buy the Camera Devin so desperately needs before we see the Canyon, and cooked hamburgers.  I’m typing this looking up at the mountain on the northeast side of Flagstaff in a KOA in the 6 AM morning chill.  A blue bird just came by to sit on the number post of site next door.  Time to see if I’ve got wi fi and check email.      

  

 

         

Made it to Santa Fe

Monday July 6

 

Twelve hours of driving brought us to Memphis where we thought we might find a cool Elvis T-shirt.   Aidan now has a lasting sensory imprint of the word seedy, and I have to consider changing the name of this blog to Gullible’s travels because as soon as we pulled into a parking lot a couple of blocks from Beale St, a guy marks me as a sucker and hits me up for jumper cables to start his truck.  Not having any, I end up handing him some cash so he can borrow some from a cab company.  “You can take my wallet as collateral,” and “I’ll leave it in an envelope on your windshield in an hour.”  Yeah.   Dude, if by some odd chance you remember my license plate and happen to find this blog, you are one smooth talker.  No wonder you could afford to send your daughter to school to become a pharmacist (the spiel was almost worth the money).  The best thing about that stop-over, was a seeing a fuzzy burnt orange sunset dipping into the Mississippi.  Devin declared it totally worthy of the new camera she relentlessly says she needs. And while the barbeque sandwich I had wasn’t bad, the impression it left was that the chef was as tired and bored with its preparation as the local musicians were with their five thousandth rendition of some tune that somebody else made famous forty years ago. We hightailed it out of there to try to make it to Little Rock before we pooped out, pooping out at a rest stop half an hour east of there.  The rest stop itself was pretty “pooped out” too, so around 4 AM local time, I woke up and got back on the road.

 

The next stop was in Oklahoma City.  We had to find a book at the local Barnes and Noble for Aidan’s summer Center for the Humanities project.  The GPS Mom lent us worked a miracle and led us (not so straight) to one.  By the way, we’ve named her.  Aidan set the preference to British English so Victoria (Vickie for short) seems to fit the thing nicely.  Ursula says she sounds more like an Elizabeth but “Vickie” has already stuck.  After spiraling us toward a couple of destinations, and my ensuing comments that she seems to have been hitting the sauce, Vickie went on strike.  She up and quit right when we needed to find the road to Hyde Memorial State Park in Santa Fe.  We found it anyway.  The camper climbed the winding route past multi-million dollar adobe mansions and between mountains bunched together like a lined up population of double D’s in C size cups. All the spruce, cedar and pine, remind me of pipe cleaners, and the effect of the light, naturally air-conditioned and tree scented air on my psyche was like an attitude reboot.  We spent the night in a campground with neither hook-ups nor other people.  It was really cool (in both senses of the word).

 

The next morning, everybody justifiably wanted (and needed) a shower and we decided we’d settle for a campground near the city.  So after a short, fairwell hike to some excellent rocks and waterfall (where Devin again assured us a nice camera was the only way to adequately record the event), we set off down the mountain.  We found a nice little citified campground (without Vickie’s help) at Los Campos where I now sit writing this entry.  We had a long day today trying to bike to the plaza.  It was much farther than we estimated and the kids got tired after seven or eight miles.  I had to turn around and bike back to the campground to get the camper while everyone waited because an intense migraine to hit Devin really hard.  After rest, dinner, hydration and another shower, she’s as good as new.  Aidan and I went riding on our bikes to get some smoothies and a new USB cable for Vickie (she sure worked well for the young geek-squad guy at Best Buy). 

 

Everyone’s asleep.  The kids are snuggled in the camper and Ursula is snoozing in the tent.  I’m sitting at the picnic table under our awning with our tacky, multi-colored lights reflecting off of the keyboard and the bright, full moon shining just above my eyebrows.  The heat of the day has turned into a cool evening chill and I’m ready to sign off, and crawl into the tent for a deep, outside sleep.  Tomorrow?  Santa Fe via bus.  Thursday? Maybe Taos.