getaway

August 27, 2019February 21, 2023 ~ Dave O ~ Leave a comment

My Darling B and I drove up to Door County last weekend to celebrate our 30th wedding anniversary and to get away from the rat race for a while. We both took Friday and Monday off, then planned to drive up on Friday and stay Friday and Saturday night, returning on Sunday afternoon so we would still have Monday to do weekend things around the house like clean and garden and be lazy.

To stay true to our natures, we waited until the last possible minute to book a place to stay or even to choose a place to go. About two weeks before our anniversary B googled a few tourist destinations in northern Wisconsin she might possibly be interested in, but that was just about all either of us did until two or three days before we were thinking of leaving. When it finally came down to the moment when we had to shit or get off the pot, I believe I was the one to suggest doing to Sturgeon Bay and bimbling around Door County for the weekend, an idea B was happy enough about to go along with me.

Tyranena

December 8, 2015 ~ Dave O ~ Leave a comment

After everybody got up and got showered on Sunday, we all piled into the O-mobile to make the short trip to Lake Mills, where we visited the Tyranena brewery. Their tap room opens at noon and they encourage visitors to order take-out food from any of the local restaurants and bring it in to eat while drinking beer, so B and I covered the table with 5-ounce tasters and we phoned a local pizzeria and asked for a sixteen-inch with plenty of cheese and sausage.

The tap room has plenty of board games piled up along the window ledges. I picked out a word game that we played for ten or fifteen minutes. When I guessed it was about time to pick up the pizza, I took my leave and made the short drive into town. The pizzeria was on the town square about three minutes away; all I had to do was duck in, pay the ponytailed girl at the counter and duck out. I was back at the tap room in probably ten minutes. It was like I was never gone.

B was a little concerned about how we were going to eat the pizza without plates, but the bartender solved that problem by handing us a whole stack of paper plates and napkins. He even handed over a jar of cracked red pepper in case we wanted to spice up the pizza a little bit. Now that’s a bartender who knows how to keep his customers happy. We gobbled up all the pizza while we played the word game some more and sipped our beers, which kept us there until about two-thirty. Almost all of us dozed off on the twenty-minute drive back, so we broke up to find places to nap for an hour or so after returning.

pacnw day 3

September 28, 2014 ~ Dave O ~ Leave a comment

B & I took the train west from Portland city center to Washington Park in the morning after breakfast. Washington Park is not a city park like the one on PSU campus we visited yesterday. That was a wide, green lawn with some tall trees, an island of serenity in the middle of a fairly large city. Washington Park, on the other hand, was a rising group of wooded hills at the southernmost end of a chain of parks that runs through the western edge of Portland, stretching north to south along the Willamette River. And though Washington Park was something of a brief coda at the end of those parks, it was still impressively substantial. We could have spent all four days of our visit to Portland rambling along the trails of Washington Park and we would have seen only a teeny-tiny part of it. That’s how big it is. I mean, it’s big. Really big.

We weren’t really there, however, to take in all its bigness. All we wanted to do this morning was have a little stroll around the Japanese Garden, or maybe the Rose Garden, depending on our moods. We weren’t sure which just yet. We were going to get there first, wander around a bit, then decide. While we were deciding, we took a little ramble through the park of the park where the Vietnam veteran’s memorial sits.

The memorial is in a little natural amphitheater with high pines surrounding it on the hilltops above. In the middle there’s a fountain in a pool, and a long, winding path spirals up out of the amphitheater around the pool. At intervals along the path there are granite monuments engraved with the names of the dead, a classic war memorial. I used to go out of my way to visit these things, but I’m kind of meh on them now. There are always going to be wars, but I’m not as gung-ho about them as I used to be. Seemed to me then as if there might be a point to it, but I have a much more difficult time seeing it now.

We ambled up the trail out of the amphitheater and then into the park, heading in no particular direction, although we wanted to end up at the road where we could catch the bus to the Japanese Gardens. By whatever lucky chance, we did end up there. The bus wasn’t due to come along for quite a while, so we spent a little time wandering here and there, waiting on a bench in the shade of a low tree, walking down the road and back up again, and finally standing at the bus stop until the bus finally showed up and took us around the park to drop us off at the gate of the Japanese Gardens.

Turns out the Japanese Gardens charge admission, something we overlooked every single one of the dozen or so times we Googled it. The entrance fee was more than we were willing to pay, and especially so considering that the bathrooms were out of order, so we ditched the Gardens and went to the International Rose Test Gardens instead.

I honestly don’t know why they’re considered “international” or what they’re testing there, but there is one very important thing I know, and that is that admission is free. Also, there are roses. The place is lousy with them. Not the most complimentary comparison, I know, but really, there’s no direction you can turn and not see roses. Even a guy like me, who’s not easily impressed by flowers, was kind of amazed at how many of them could be crowded into a few acres. And the smell was purty.

We hung out there for a good long time, strolling from one garden to another, but believe it or not there’s only so much you can take of purty-smellin’ roses, no matter how many there in all the colors of the rainbow. Eventually, we found ourselves a nice bench in the shade to rest our butts on again and plot our next move. It was getting late enough to start thinking about where we would eat dinner. I didn’t have an opinion about it until B said something about ramen and a restaurant called Umai PDX. It sounded like a pretty good idea all of a sudden, so off we went in search of the bus that would take us there.

I can tell you it’s the #15 bus and you’re supposed to catch it somewhere in the vicinity of Providence Park. I can also tell you that you’ll wait for-freaking-ever and you’ll never see it. Two #15 buses went the other way while we were standing there waiting for the one that was going in our direction, and I got the funny feeling as the second one went by that maybe we should have gotten on one of them just to see if maybe it wouldn’t loop around and take us where we wanted to go, but it was too late by then; Umai was closed.

Because we had ramen on our mind, we tried to catch the #20 bus next to a place called Biwa. The stop was just a block away, easy to get to and it seemed there might even be some hope it would eventually arrive, but after waiting for 20 minutes, B started Googling around to see when exactly we could get there and which stop we should get off and that’s when she realized Biwa didn’t open until 5 pm, an hour and a half from then.

We decided we were too hungry to wait for Biwa, so it was back to Providence Park to catch the streetcar to Boxer Ramen. There was even a streetcar coming down the hill as we approached, so we parked ourselves next to the track and waited. And waited. And when the streetcar didn’t turn the corner to pick us up, I asked B to wait while I did a little recon. That’s how I found out that we were waiting on the wrong side of the block! The tracks split and we were apparently waiting on the return loop, so we both went around the block and waited another fifteen or twenty minutes for the next streetcar. And that’s how we spent almost two hours near Providence Park waiting for transportation before we finally caught a ride to Southwest Park Street, eight blocks from Providence Park. We could’ve walked there on our hands faster than that.

I’m not sure the ramen at Boxer Ramen is worth waiting two hours for, but then I can’t say that the ramen at any place I’ve ever been, except maybe Cheese Rool Noodle, would be worth waiting two hours for. If you take the frustration of waiting two hours for three different mass transit options out of the equation, I would have to say that Boxer Ramen serves a pretty delicious bowl of ramen, and leave the rest up to you.

After filling ourselves with noodles and broth, B wanted to get a beer at Portland Brewing Co., a brewpub on the northwest side of town. Once again, we waited for the #15 bus long enough that we could have caught two #15s if they had arrived at the posted times. About five minutes after the second one was supposed to be there, I suggested to B that we go to BridgePort Brewing instead, mostly because it was on a streetcar line and not the phantom #15 bus line.

The streetcar took us to a rather frou-frou neighborhood just north of Old Town, where lots of warehouses had been remodeled into lofts and were mixed with new industrial chic construction. I couldn’t decide of Bridgeport was in an old warehouse, or if the building was in new construction that was built to look like an old warehouse. And once we were on the loading dock with a couple beers in our hands, relaxing in the cool evening air, I didn’t care much anymore.

When we had finally had enough relaxation and beer, My Darling B craved ice cream. Well, it was a vacation, after all. We walked around the block to catch a bus that, for once, showed up on time and took us a few blocks further on to Salt & Straw, a humongously popular ice cream shop in a residential neighborhood that was so incredibly upscale that my khaki pants and t-shirt featuring the logo of a Midwest brewery fit right in with the Banana Republic cargo pants and brewery t-shirts that the other guys were wearing. It was weird blending in to a place like this. But we were there for ice cream and nothing else, so we had to fool the locals just long enough to make it through the door and then get out of there.

There was quite a line waiting to get into Salt & Straw. The place got rave reviews on all the web sites we Googled, but we weren’t quite expecting to see the crowds we found thronging the place when we got there. The line wrapped around the corner and we waited maybe twenty minutes to snake our way in and finally get to the counter to order, but the ice cream was every bit as good as the hype made it out to be. We sat on a bench along the street, ooohing and aaahing as we slurped up the creamy goodness from our waffle cones. This is one of those must-visit places if ever your in Portland.

For only the second or third time that day, the bus showed up on time and took us back to our B&B. It even stopped at the right street this time so we didn’t have to backtrack three blocks at a trot, hoping we’d get there before we wet our pants.

pacnw day 2

September 27, 2014 ~ Dave O ~ Leave a comment

Saturday morning, after we showered and made ourselves all pretty, we joined another couple, Jennifer and Jason, in the dining room for breakfast. There were other people staying in the B&B, but we were the only ones who asked for a hot breakfast. Jennifer and Jason, who I keep wanting to ship to “Jennison,” drove down from Washington state for the weekend to see Tears For Fears, one of their favorite pop music bands in concert at the Waterfront Park. Since they were from Washington, we asked them what there was to do in Seattle and one of the first things that came to their minds was the restaurant in Post Alley that serves clam chowder. Now, here’s a couple after our own hearts.

The Saturday market is a living scene out of almost any movie about a post-apocalyptic distopian society living in a tent city. As we wandered from tent to tent, the smell exotic foods and spices alternated with the smell of urine, then back to exotic foods and spices. Smoke filled the air, some of it from regular cigarettes, some from funny cigarettes. About half the crowd was dressed in military surplus clothing that would have been called “punk” back when I wore clothes like that (I wasn’t punk, I just liked military clothing). The punkers carried backpacks that appeared to be stuffed with all their possessions in the world, and I’m pretty sure that no less than every third one had skateboards under their arms. Occasionally a punker would stop me to ask if I would give him money. I would not.

Tourists were just as easy to spot: They were dressed in blue jeans or track clothes, wandered around with dazed half-smiles on their faces, and none of them asked me for money. There was one tourist who didn’t look like the rest: a geneticist from the Czech Republic we met while standing in line to sample a stout from Rogue Brewing. We learned he was a geneticist because he was wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with a Campbells-style soup can labeled “Mendel’s Hereditary Pea Soup” and My Darling B wanted one just like it so bad that she asked him. Unfortunately for B, he said he got it from the Gregor Mendel museum in Brno. Kind of a long way to go for a t-shirt, no matter how much you like Mendel or genetics.

The Saturday market is not a farmer’s market; there’s food and drink, but it’s mostly lots and lots of crafty & kitschy items for sale – tie-dye shirts, trolls carved out of drift wood, belts of all colors and belt buckles of all sizes & shapes, hand-thrown pottery, framed photos & paintings, and just about any other thing you can think of. The actual farmer’s market, where they were selling fruits and veggies and things made out of fruit and veggies, was taking place on the Portland State University campus, and My Darling B wanted to visit that, too, so we jumped on the streetcar and rode it across town.

The PSU campus was a whole ‘nother world from the Mad Max weirdness along the waterfront. Nobody there was wearing military surplus clothing or skateboarding on your toes. Nobody asked me for money. I never once caught a whiff of urine. There was freshly-prepared, non-GMO organic food everywhere. We could have passed an entire morning stuffing ourselves silly with samples of breads, sausages, veggies and fruits. Next time.

After wandering through as much of the farmer’s market as we could, we walked down to the end of the park to catch the streetcar back to the waterfront. Here’s a funny thing about Portland: Drivers will stop for you when you go to cross the street. We noticed this yesterday when we followed a native Portlandian as he crossed the street to the bus stop and three lanes of highway traffic stopped for us. I’m pretty sure that anyone from Portland would be run over by a truck within fifteen minutes of being plopped down anywhere in Madison because he’d step off a curb thinking that all traffic would come to a halt. No chance of that.

We rode the streetcar to the vicinity of the Marquam Bridged where we thought we’d find the Full Sail brewpub. It’s almost there. They’ve got a storefront with their logo etched on the windows, and when I peered inside it looked like the place was plumbed for some heavy-duty waterworks, but there was definitely no beer being made there yet, nor would there be for quite some time.

This threw our schedule off a bit. Unsure what to do next, but having no where in particular to be, we wandered north up the waterfront and accidentally came upon Hempstalk 2014, where about a thousand honest-to-jah tie-dyed hippies in dreadlocks were doing their part to reinforce the popular stoner stereotype. Great job, guys!

Just past Hempstalk, we crossed the Hawthorne Bridge into what was once an industrial neighborhood but appears to be fast becoming a Brooklyized suburb of Portland. Five blocks north of the bridge we stopped at Hair Of The Dog Brewery, where the beers all seem to have first names – Adam, Ruth, Greg, Bob, Lila. The brewers explain most of the names on the brewery’s web site. B was happy that there were a lot to sample that weren’t hoppy; she’s a sensitive flower and gets overpowered by hoppy beers. She can smell the hops in most beers before she gets the glass to her lips, and she doesn’t like the scent of most hops. There must be a variety out there with an aroma she will like, but I’m still trying to find it. I liked the variety and tried as many different beers as my palate could handle; probably more than it could handle, come to that. My samples included everything from the hoppiest ale to the darkest stout. And we ordered a plate of sausage & cheese to nosh on while we drank, so the taste buds in both our mouths got quite a workout at this, our first stop for refreshments today.

There was some discussion about how to get to the stop for the bus that would take us to our next destination, and some dispute over who found it. I think I kept us going in the right direction, but B claims that she found the magical staircase that took us up to Morrison Bridge, where the bus would actually stop. Whatever, we got there, the bus arrived on time and we were on our way without delay.

We were probably the only people at the Cascade Brewing Barrel House who were there to drink beer that was not sour. As soon as we caught sight of the sign out front, proclaiming this as “the house of sour,” we debated whether or not we should even go in. Sour beer is the new trend in craft beers. In the same way that craft brewers have been tying themselves in knots for years trying to out-hop one another, they are now trying to make beers so sour that you will pucker your face all the way down your own throat.

Sour beer is not our thing; on this, My Darling B and I are united. However, Cascade did offer two beers that were not sours, and we did come all this way, so we ordered samplers of those two and gave them a try. Not bad, but it was apparent these were not the beers they had a passion for making. I wish them well with their passion. They may have made the sourest of sour beers that ever went sour, but we’ll never know.

Right across the street, and I mean literally right across the street, there’s the Green Dragon, a tavern with a wonderful beer garden and dizzying array of beers on tap. There was also what looked like an impressive brewery set up in the back, although there was nothing called Green Dragon beer on tap. It turns out several different brewers used the premises to make their beers, one of them being Buckman Brewery. We tried as many samples of their brews as we thought we could handle: Mistly Pale Ale and Buck Ginger Pale Ale, both crisp but a little too hoppy for B’s taste; a fresh hop mead, whatever that is (my notes weren’t very clear on this and I can’t find it online); and two braggots – Black Braggot and Super Braggot. I’d never had a braggot before. A blend of beer and mead, it’s like a beer with a bit more body and zip. B & I both liked it.

The Lucky Labrador was our last stop of the day before we headed back to the B&B, and really we were there for soup and sandwiches more than the beer, which was still good. I liked the beer hall atmosphere and kind of wish we had been in a mood to stay longer and enjoy it, but by this time we’d spent hours tramping all over Portland and really weren’t. We ate our sammies and washed them down with our beers, and then we caught the first bus out of there.

The bus driver either didn’t see our signal to stop or we pulled the cord too late. B is sure we weren’t too late pulling the cord but whatever went wrong, we had to backtrack two or three blocks to the street our B&B was on after the bus went singing up the road past our stop. And we had to do it at a trot; the thirty-minute bus ride had exceeded the ability of our bladders to comfortably hold on to the beer we were ready to off-load.

B sat up and read her novel for a little while after we got back. She said I was enthusiastically sawing logs just a few minutes after I laid my head on the pillow.

California Day 9

October 5, 2013 ~ Dave O ~ Leave a comment

Another change of plans – not that we ever had a solid plan to begin with, but when we flew out to California, the rough idea was that we would stay in a hotel in San Francisco for the first two nights. Then, after we rented a camper, we would overnight at state and national parks as we drove north up the coast and south back down to San Francisco. We believed this was extraordinarily clever of us, because state and national parks are cheap. Yeah, when they’re open.

We scoped out all the parks along our route so we could easily find a place to stay no matter where we ended up on a particular day. And we even stuck to our plan for the first couple days, but we can sometimes be kinda inconsistent, and then there was the government shutdown thing. Actually, I’m going to blame it mostly on the government, just out of spite. Why not? But according to the plan, we were going to camp right up to and including our last night in California, somewhere near San Francisco, then get up in the morning, clean up as best as we could, drop the camper off and call a taxi to the airport.

Well.

After getting a good night’s sleep on a real bed in Chico, we talked it over for, oh, maybe a solid two or three minutes, and discovered that we were both of a mind to get another good night’s sleep in a hotel in San Francisco, preferably one that was close to the airport. We could drop off the camper as soon as we got there, spend the rest of the day in the city, be guaranteed a hot shower in the morning and head straight to the airport. Done deal.

But before we left Chico, we had to off-load a whole bunch of glassware that we’d collected along the way as souvenirs. A wine glass here or there doesn’t seem like much, but altogether it weighed a shit-ton and took up way more space than we had in our suitcases. Not a problem, though. We, in our cunning little minds, had already anticipated this. We found a UPS store in a strip mall in Chico, stacked all our glasses and bottles on the counter and asked the guy to send it back to our little red house in Wisconsin.

He seemed puzzled by our request. Not because we asked him to put stuff in a box and have it delivered, but apparently because of the shear volume of stuff. It was obvious that this was the first time anyone had ever asked him to do anything like this. It took him ten or fifteen minutes to wrap his head around the project before he began to arrange the glassware on the countertop, fitting them together like puzzle pieces. Then got out his tape measure to see if he had a box big enough to hold them. When his first try didn’t satisfy him, he rearranged everything, measured it again, shuffled a few pieces around and re-measured, et cetera forever and ever. Honestly, I didn’t expect it to take as long as it did. I figured we’d drop it off, he’s say “fifty dollars” or whatever, we’d pay him and that’d be it. When he was finally confident that he could pack it, he rang up an estimate of a hundred twenty dollars. We were visibly deflated, but by then we’d been standing there watching this guy for about an hour, and we knew we weren’t going to get it into our bags, so we paid him just to get the hell out of there. And that’s how we ended up with a collection of the most expensive wine glasses and beer glasses ever purchased by anybody anywhere.

Finally on the road again, B searched teh intarwebs for hotels while I drove back. She could do that because we set up our phones to be wifi hot spots. It was an arrangement that worked really well: B could navigate by keeping one eye on the little blue dot that crawled across Google maps as we drove down the road, or she could open a browser window to ask The Google where we could get a cold beer, a hot meal, or camp supplies, or even try to find out what the hell that big ugly animal in the road was, and so on.

B found a hotel that was not only close to the airport and offered a complimentary taxi ride, it was also about fifty yards from a bus stop and B could book a room on-line. Score! As we got closer to the city, we pulled over at one of those do-it-yourself car wash places to clean out the van with a giant super-suck vacuum cleaner, then went on through Oakland and crossed into San Francisco across the bay bridge. With B navigating from the right seat, finding the hotel was quick and easy.

After checking in and dropping our bags and assorted junk in the room, we drove across town to drop off the van. This was B’s first visit to the part of town called Dogpatch, mostly abandoned lots and warehouses that were slowly being taken over by growing businesses. We were supposed to leave the van in the lot behind a warehouse and drop the keys in a drop box, but the keys were attached to a fob that was too thick and wouldn’t fit through the slot. Funny, they didn’t mention that when they gave me instructions for returning the van. Somebody else must’ve noticed that before. I tried calling but there was no answer, so we left the keys locked in the van and walked back to the nearest streetcar stop.

A Flight of Beers at the Thirsty Bear brewpub, San Francisco CA

There were a couple of brewpubs in the city that we had pegged to visit: Our first stop was the Thirsty Bear, because B said they had the world’s greatest nuts. It had something to do with the way they were glazed. I thought they were okay, but give me a dish of roasted pistachios and I’m pretty happy with that. A dish of nuts wasn’t going to hold us over until we got something else to eat, though, so B asked for a plate of fried olives stuffed with duck sausage. I like to try new things, and I like just about anything with duck in it, but that sounded to me like the cook was just trying to be weird. Nothing weird about the beer, though. That was just tasty.

Our second stop was Southern Pacific Brewing somewhere in the heart of what must have been the industrial center of the city. The brewery itself occupied most, if not all of a former warehouse and was surrounded by other warehouses that have not been altered much since they stopped being warehouses, if they ever stopped, except that maybe one or two had a new coat of paint or a new fence topped by freshly-strung razor wire. We saw very few other people as we wandered the streets looking for the brewery, and I got the unsettled feeling that we were in a part of town that we should not have been in, but B kept telling me to relax as she pointed us down one street after another, The Google guiding us to our destination.

Southern Pacific was on a dead-end street; a casual stroller would never find it. In spite of its location, it appeared to be one of the most popular hangouts in the district. A block away, I got the impression that we were in a mostly-abandoned part of town, but as we turned the last corner we were suddenly swallowed up by a converging throng of smartly-dressed people heading in the same direction. They were almost all young people; B and I both got carded at the door. It’s been a long time since that’s happened. It’s also been a long time since I’ve been to a bar where Devo was playing on the stereo.

The place was packed, inside and out. Even so, B somehow managed to snag a table on the patio. It was a beautiful night, just warm enough to relax under the stars with a couple glasses of house-made heffe and pilsner and a basket of fried noshies to share between us.

It was fully dark by the time we left. Getting back to the hotel didn’t seem like much of a challenge at first: We had to walk maybe five or six blocks to the nearest bus stop, and the rest was virtually automatic. The streets around the brewery seemed even more deserted than before, though, and we saw nobody except for the occasional axe murderer hanging out in a doorway, or serial killer pushing a grocery cart stacked with body parts. B told me I was being paranoid, but she was walking as fast as I was.

We cooled our jets for a little more than an hour at the bus stop, watching every bus but the one we wanted whiz by, one after the other. When our bus finally showed up, it was twenty minutes late, or at least I think it was. The schedule apparently wasn’t worth much. After a thirty-minute bus ride we jumped off and discovered that we had to walk a block and a half to our hotel. Not too bad, but not as close as we thought. Whatever. It was still a good day.

California Day 6

October 2, 2013 ~ Dave O ~ Leave a comment

Woke up this morning, rubbed the sleepers from my eyes, tumbled out of the van and went staggering up the road to the office-slash-general store to get a cup of coffee.

Halfway back to our camp site I slowed to a stop as I caught sight of B standing just outside the van, binoculars in hand, getting quickly back into the van and closing the door behind her.

Turning to see what she might possibly be looking at that would make her seek the safety of the car, I noticed an elk standing among the trees. Then I noticed a couple more elk just beyond the edge of the treeline. And then, finally, I noticed there was a whole freaking herd of elk slowly making its way through the field just beyond the edge of the RV park. Okay, so I missed them at first. I bet you’re not exactly Old Eagle Eye before you’ve had your coffee, either.

We found out later that they come though almost every day. And they’re used to having lots of people around. They weren’t in the least spooked by us, and a few of them came startlingly close as they made their way through an open field to the trees on the other side.

Elk, by the way, are huge. You don’t realize just how big they are until one of them is close enough to spit in your eye. Or stomp you like the bug you are.

After the excitement was over and we had all our crap packed up, we hit the road to look for some breakfast. On the way, we stopped at the entrance to Redwood National Park to take a few selfies with the notices that the park was closed due to the federal government shutdown. I was on vacation, so why did I care? Oh, I am so glad you asked. Because: Of all the places in California I’ve wanted all my life to visit, Redwood National Park was in the top five. This was my third visit to California, but only the first time I was close enough to the park to stop by. And what happens? The doot-brains in Washington get into a pissing contest and shut down everything, even the parks. When the feds shut down a park, they don’t just tell the guys in the Smokey hats to take the week off. No. They make the rangers set up sawbucks to block the entrances, then stand outside them and turn away visitors. No trees for you! Natural beauty is off limits this week! Thanks, federal government, for availing yourself of yet another opportunity to reinforce my opinion that you’re a sack of bastards.

You know what? We camped in one of your goddamn campgrounds anyway. Up yours!

Actually, I’m getting ahead of myself. We stopped at Antlers the last night we camped in California and found three or four other campers at the site who said all the forest rangers packed up and left when the feds shut everything down. Before they left, though, they told the campers that what they didn’t see, didn’t happen. The bathrooms were open and the lights were on, so we slipped thirty bucks under the door of the office and stayed for the night. The photo I took of My Darling B expressing her outrage at The Man for shutting everything down was too good not to share it with you at this point in the story, though. Now, back to Wednesday.

We had breakfast at the Palm Cafe and Hotel in Orick, and it was amazing! Their hospitality was top-rate from the moment we walked in the door. The host greeted us right away and showed us to a table by the window in the morning sunshine where he poured us a couple mugs of hot coffee and made sure they never got cold the whole time we were there. B zeroed in on the biscuits & gravy, her very favorite thing to order any time it appears on the menu, and she was very happy with the freshly-made biscuits and generous portion of gravy she got. I had a stack of the fluffiest pancakes I’ve ever been privileged to stuff myself silly with. We were both well and truly serensified by the time we climbed back into the van to hit the road.

From Orick we went straight north, or as straight as the twisting road would let us, planning to make as few stops as possible until we got to Crescent City to fuel. We made a hard right turn onto State Highway 199 out of Crescent City and crossed into Oregon shortly afterwards, making a big loop just over the border through the town of Grants Pass before heading south again.

Grants Pass, by the by, is probably not a place that you’ve ever heard of but was made famous, or maybe infamous, by the initiation of Tony Roberts into a club known as Mountain Man Anonymous in 1993. To become a member of the club, Tony let one of the club members try to shoot a one-gallon fuel can off his head with an arrow. The arrow went a little south of the mark. “Surgeons removed the arrow from Anthony Roberts’ head by drilling a larger hole around the tip at the skull’s back and pulling the arrow through,” the AP story explained, which has to be the single most ewww-inducing sentence ever printed in an Associated Press news item. I used to carry it around in my wallet for years so I could read it to people just to watch them squirm.

We did not plan to go to Grants Pass just so I could be in the place where this happened; it was just a lucky accident.

We made one stop at Medford to visit the Apocalypse Brewery, but they weren’t open, darn it, and didn’t open until four o’clock, too late for us to hang around and still make it to the show in Ashland we were headed for, so I can’t say anything about their beer, too bad. If you go looking for it, it’s really hard to find because it’s at the back end of a business park in what looks like a U-Store-It unit. Don’t give up until you check behind the fast-food store.

Onward to Ashland where, after driving all freaking day, we stopped for a much-deserved beer and some food at Caldera Brewing, a brewpub in a cavernous metal barn where hundreds if not thousands of beer bottles are lined up on shelves up the wall. I spent way too much time searching them to see if I could find two that were alike, then gave up after the food arrived.

Before heading into town to see the show, we checked in at Glenyan campground, an old KOA that still has the easily recognizable teepee-shaped front office. I still feel a happy little twinge of nostalgia whenever I see one of those. My family used to stop at KOAs whenever we went on our annual winter camping trip to the warmer climes of the southern states. A lot of the campsites at Glenyan were occupied by big RV trailers, most of them with pop-outs and most of them more or less permanently affixed to the property, making the tightly-packed grounds seem even cozier, but we were there just to stay the night. All we wanted, really, was a place to park and go to sleep. They let us use the rec room to charge our phones and tablets even though everything else was shut down or turned off, so bonus points, Glenyan, and thanks!

The show we were going to see in town was Cymbaline, just one of the many shows being staged at the Ashland Shakespeare Festival. We picked Cymbaline because we hadn’t seen it before and because it was presented on their Elizabethan stage, an open-air theater encircled by the audience seats, sort of like the old Globe Theatre in London. Figured that would be a more authentic Shakespearian experience, somehow.

There was a stage just outside the theater where a local and apparently well-loved band was performing a few of their own numbers just prior to the start of Cymbaline, so we hung around outside the doors to see what they were like. I’m not sure how to describe their music without resorting to clichés like “drug-induced” and “hippy-dippy weirdo with a side order of dissonance.” I can’t say I enjoyed it, but I can’t say it bothered me, either. Mostly, I was just bored with it. Not so the gathered crowd; they lapped it up and cheered for more, which made me feel as though I was somehow missing something. I kept listening for it, whatever it was, but I never got it.

Because the theater was open to the weather, naturally it rained on us. Quite a lot. We had seats right up front by the stage, which would have been the greatest if they hadn’t been out in the middle of the open roof. “I’m sure it’s going to stop any minute now,” B kept saying to me, as we were slowly being soaked through to our bones, and once or twice it did seem to be letting up just a bit, but then it would start coming down again, and of course it seemed like it was coming down a little bit harder, but that was probably only because we were already wet, chattering and miserable.

We eventually found an usher and begged him to change our seats for a couple in the shelter of the balcony, which would’ve been great if we weren’t already sodden as disrags, but since we were, we slowly froze all the way through to our cores as the first two acts played out. At intermission, we ducked out to the car, cranked up the heater as high as it would go and headed back to camp where we huddled together in a tightly-knotted ball under the quilts. I didn’t start to feel warm again until just before daybreak.

California Day 5

October 1, 2013 ~ Dave O ~ Leave a comment

Tuesday morning we managed to pack up all the camp stuff and take a shower without the benefit of coffee. One of the challenges of camping is testing yourself to the extreme and finding out what you didn’t know you could do, like getting out of bed without an alarm clock, communicating a coherent thought before coffee, or taking a shower outdoors.

Okay, the showers weren’t technically outdoors. There was a bathroom outbuilding, the kind that’s pretty standard at just about any state park: unpainted cinder block construction with no windows, unless you count the screened-over vents between the tops of the walls and the edge of the roof as windows.

This is going to sound really weird, but actually I enjoy a hot shower a lot more when I’m standing on a cold slab of concrete in a shower stall made of cinder blocks. I don’t especially like the part before, when I have to very carefully hang everything up so it won’t get wet or dirty; or the part after, when I have to step gingerly through cold puddles of water as I’m trying, and failing, to dry myself off. Why is it you can’t get yourself completely dry when it’s cold outside, anyway? I wish I’d paid more attention in physics class. Whatever. That part in the middle, when I’m standing in a spray of scalding hot water while I’m surrounded by cold and more cold, is just golden. I don’t want to do it often, but when I get to do it, it’s bliss.

After the chores were done and all our gear was packed up in the van, we hit the road in search of coffee. We combined the high-tech and old school methods: I used my Mark One eyeballs to scan the roadside for any sign of a coffee shop or diner while My Darling B searched teh interwebs on her tablet. After driving a few miles up the road, success! We pulled in at a campground at Westport, because every private campground’s going to have a coffee maker in the office, right? And as a matter of fact, they did. The nice woman at the desk gave us two piping-hot coffees in tiny little cups but didn’t have any lids for them. It turns out that you can’t drink coffee in your car if the cups don’t have lids. You think you can hold the cup steady, but you can’t. Physics again. Science is such a bitch.

We had quite a few miles to put behind us that morning, so we pulled to the side of the road, guzzled a couple mouthfuls of coffee, dumped the rest and went on.

Our first planned stop of the day was the world-famous drive-through tree park, although, as we found out later, there isn’t one world-famous drive-through tree park; there are about a gojillion world-famous drive-through tree parks. The particular one we picked out of the guide books was the Chandelier Tree near Leggett. And I didn’t drive through it, because it didn’t look like the van would fit. I got the front end in before I chickened out. If it had been my car, though, I wouldn’t have hesitated to put a few memorial dings in it. After snapping the obligatory vacation photos of the tree, we visited the gift shop to buy a souvenir post card.

Our high-priority destination that day, the one we got out of bed for, was The Avenue of the Giants, a road that runs parallel to State Highway 101 but up the opposite side of the Eel River. It’s twisty and narrow and you really can’t go any faster than about thirty miles per, which is great if you’re a tourist but not so great if you’re driving a dump truck and you’re trying to get to the construction site up the road through all the tourist traffic. These were big dump trucks pulling a dump-truck trailer, and the drivers had no qualms at all about tailgating. Ordinarily, I would have gone all passive-aggressive and slowed down to twenty-five or twenty, but because I was on a stress-free vacation and it was a sightseeing day, I pulled over to the shoulder every chance I got to stop to gawk at the big trees, take snapshots and, not incidentally, let the dump trucks pass.

We passed several hours winding our way up The Avenue of the Giants until, about halfway up the road, we finally came to the Avenue Cafe in Miranda, where we could sit down for the first meal we’d eaten since the plate of macho nachos we gobbled down at Silver’s in Ft Bragg the day before. The gal who took our order at the register warned us that it was lunch hour for the local high school and the place was going to be chock-full of teenagers in about fifteen minutes. She wasn’t kidding. They started to line up at the front door right after we sat down at our table by the window, and they were there until just before we left. Nice kids, though. It’s not like they were any trouble. There were just a whole lot of them in a tiny little restaurant. And a pretty great place to eat, by the way. I had the Philly cheese steak sandwich and can recommend it. Ate the whole thing, even though it was big enough to feed two people. B had jalapeño poppers, her very favorite appetizer, and a gigantic calzone that she couldn’t finish. Wimp.

Back on the Avenue of the Giants, we eventually got to the place all the dump trucks were headed to, a stretch of road that was all dug up. We had to double back and find a bridge to cross over the river, which happened to be at Meyer Flat, which happened to be the location of the River Bend Winery, which happened to be a winery B wanted to visit. We spent close to an hour there; the owner was pouring the samples and he liked talking about his wines.

A little further up the Avenue of the Giants we pulled off to check out the visitor center because they had one of those cross-sections of a redwood log with labels pointing out rings that corresponded to the beginning of the industrial age, the signing of the declaration of independence, Columbus’s discovery of America, and so on. Speaking of which, why is Columbus still the discoverer of America? I thought it had been proven six ways from Sunday that at least three other famous explorers discovered America before he did. I think it’s about time to re-label the redwood rings, don’t you think?

Just up the road from the visitor’s center, we pulled off at Founder’s Grove to hike the loop trail and gawp at some big, big BIG trees. One of the biggest was nicknamed “the Dyerville Giant” because it was between 360 and 370 feet tall when it was still standing. Unfortunately, it’s not standing any more. It got knocked over by another falling redwood in a storm, and when they both hit the ground there were people in San Francisco who stopped what they were doing and said, “What the hell was that?” I took quite a few photos of it from various angles, up close, farther away, panoramic, but none of them captured the sheer size of this monster. Unless you’re standing right next to it, feeling like a bug, it’s size doesn’t register. The best I could manage was a photo of My Darling B looking like a pixie at the foot of the giant.

On to Fortuna, the home of Eel River Brewery, America’s first organic brewery but, even more important, home to some of the most delicious beers we sampled on this trip. We got a flight of a dozen beers, a sample of all the beers they brewed. Yum. And the pub itself was a lot of fun, too, and clearly very popular. Every table had a big basket of salted-in-the-shell peanuts. You were meant to shuck them and throw the shells on the floor, as everybody else was doing. If you tried to pile them neatly on the table, the waitress would just sweep them off with the back of her hand when she brought you your beers, or stopped by to ask if you needed anything. We passed a leisurely hour or so there before we moved on to Trinidad.

We were hoping to stay overnight at an RV park called Sounds of the Sea. When we got there, the lady who came out to check us in looked around and asked, “Where’s your unit?”

“Oh, we just have the camper van,” I told her, waving in the general direction of our conveyance.

She gave it the hairy eyeball. “We only have spots for RVs,” she informed me in a tone that suggested I was not of the body.

“Well,” I offered, “all we need is a place to park it for the night. We don’t even need hookups.”

She looked at me like I was talking crazy talk.

“Or if that’s too much trouble,” I went on, “I can just look for another place.” I thanked her for her time and excused myself.

As I was climbing into the driver’s seat B asked me what was going on. “They don’t take our kind here,” I told her, starting the engine.

“Our kind?”

“Hobos who camp in vans.”

Driving just a little further on, we came to Elk Country Lodge. Three guesses why they call it that. Hint: There was a real live elk in the driveway when we drove in. Just standing there, looking majestic, surrounded by tourists standing just outside their cars taking pictures. Signs in the office warned us that elk often wandered through the campground, and that we should give them plenty of room because they are wild animals. Some people need to be told that. Actually, some people need more exposure to wild animals and, if it results in a little natural selection, so much the better.

Elk Country RV Resort turned out to be a great place to stop for the night because we had the campground almost to ourselves. Not that we wanted to stay up all night blaring music on the radio and dancing on the roof of the van or anything like that; just that we liked the peace and quiet. As the evening closed in, we popped open a bottle of vino we bought during our drive up the Anderson Valley, and sat in our camp chairs snacking on the noshies that were still left from our visit to the farmer’s market. When it was finally too dark and a little too cold to sit outside, we retired to the laundry where we surfed the internet while washing underwear. It doesn’t take much to please us.