vanishing act

Not really sure where the weekend went. It was here when I got up this morning, but now I can’t find it no matter how many places I look for it.

When I got up this morning, I decided the first thing I was going to do was write a rough draft of an itinerary for the summer vacation we’re taking in October. Yeah, it’s a little weird to call a vacation that’s just a few weeks away from the first snowfall a “summer vacation,” but there’s a good reason for it, and here it is: Whenever we’ve taken vacations in the past, something has always gone wrong that we didn’t account for, so now we plan our summer vacations to start in the fall and that way there’s one HUGE thing wrong with them that we already know about and are prepared for.

I just made that up. Could you tell?

So anyway, after I brewed a big pot o’ java and settled back in my easy chair with my laptop, I opened up the very brief outline I’d already started for our trip that had maybe four items on it, three of which were stuff we added only because we were looking at an area on the map around the number one key scenic tourist destination we knew we were going to see while we were on the west coast, a redwood forest like the kind that Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak strolled through in Vertigo. Never cared much for the movie but that scene has nagged at me from my memory since the first time I was awestruck by it. I’ve been to California twice, but I’ve never seen a redwood forest, so when we started talking about taking a trip to the west coast, that was the first thing I asked for.

My Darling B was okay with that but was somewhat iffy about anything else, hence the short list. Oh, and there was a Shakespeare festival in Ashland, Oregon, she was keen on seeing if we could fit that in somewhere.

Since our desires were so sketchy we weren’t even sure where to begin our trip, so we randomly chose Seattle, Washington, as our starting point, thinking we would head south from there down the coastal highway and stopping at whatever sights looked interesting, or when our butts were too tired of sitting in a car seat any longer. It’s kind of impossible to sketch an itinerary based on an idea like that, though, so when I sat down with my cuppa joe and my laptop this morning I went looking for a slightly more substantial beginning to start our trip.

To make it easier to wander about, one of the things we’d been considering was renting an RV and, after stopping whenever we felt like it to see whatever we felt like looking at, we would pull into a KOA or some other small campground to stay the night. I’d found a dealer in Seattle to rent an RV but then made the mistake of looking for horror stories about them, and the internet being what it is I naturally found a few, which sort of put me off the idea of renting.

But this morning I started looking for rentals again and when I found a dealer in the San Francisco area I thought, Why not start our trip in San Francisco instead of Seattle? It’s closer to the redwoods, for a start, which means less driving, probably, and since I’m going to be the one doing the driving, that sounded like a great way to start.

So I checked out the San Francisco area for things both of us might like to go see and found quite a lot, really, probably because it’s San Francisco. I’d be surprised if there’s anybody anywhere who couldn’t name three San Francisco landmarks. Don’t tell me you can’t. And just north of San Francisco there’s Muir Woods where Jimmy and Kim strolled beneath those redwood trees, and a farmer’s market in Marin. My Darling B loves farmer’s markets.

I ended up piddling away three hours sketching out an itinerary that took us north from San Francisco to Redwood National Forest, up through Grants Pass to Ashland where we could drop in on the Shakespeare festival, then south through Chico so we could stop at the Sierra Nevada brewery in time for Oktoberfest before returning the RV to the dealer in San Francisco. It took three cups of coffee and one hell of a lot of googling, but I managed to do it. Somewhere in the middle of all that, My Darling B got out of bed and helped me google from her perch on the sofa (she’s the one who discovered Oktoberfest). And now that we’ve got the bare essentials of the trip sketched out, we’ll need another Sunday morning, or maybe two more, to flesh out the details.