No Services This Exit

I had missed the Davis to Reno scenery due to darkness last time I was out here, and it was nice to see, but nothing to write home about.



Nevada and Utah (so far at least) express no love for their scenery. Some very nice scenic views driving, with absolutely no place to stop and get a photo. On the other hand, its awful big scale stuff, with the same thing to look at for a long time. The Bonneville Salt Flats (Newfoundland Evaporation Reservoir?), for example, are really cool. For ten minutes. An hour of them gets tiring.


Alison & the Floating Island.


Rush hour seemed like a bay area tradition we could avoid seeing, so Alison and I got on the road before six this morning. This also put us into Salt Lake early enough to have dinner during civilized hours, and we met up with Aaron, his wife and child at... I forgot the name of the place already, but Brazilian barbeque. Interesting, and meaty.


Tomorrow, a relatively short run to Denver (ish) and therefore a stop at Arches on the way. Neither of us have seen it, and I wanted to take the 70 route anyway to get the whole mountain (and driving videogame) experience in the ski resort areas.

4036.2

I am glad I didn't bother to add up the total mileage for the trip before we left. I might have been scared off of it. We're already over four-thousand miles. I swear. Seems impossible, but there it is. No wonder the gas is killing my (wildly estimated) (pseudo) budget for this trip. At least the car, despite being over 113,000 miles (and rapidly counting) still gets like 27 miles on the highway.



Though we've left that portion of the trip behind for a bit, the whole part thru Oregon had lots of encounters with Lewis & Clark, and the Oregon Trail, and all that. Every place we encountered them treated it as a relatively unique experience, worth paying attention to, but I was so used to the same stuff in the KC area, I blew it off for a while. Finally I realized its much like the river following I had previously been ranting about. Its an interesting connection, that people set forth from very near my house, and ended up where we did in the north-west. And we thought it was a long trip by car, on interstate highways.



Anyway, back to the story. We've been in Pacifica for three days, and have done several spates of touristing and shopping in the city as well.




We've done some walking and driving around, but the water is cold so not really any ocean work since the surfing (and I am still sore from that). The hotel pool is closed, and their alternative turned out to be in Half Moon Bay, like half an hour away over what ends up being a dangerously twisty road. Cool and scenic, though, so we stop various places, and come back the next day to hike up the state park we saw the entrance to.



McNee Ranch goes back a few miles, but we stuck to the coast. Good views, as its basically above CA-1 where its dangerous there. The rest of the park is some sort of amazingly unique and unspoiled wilderness, such that efforts to avoid the twisty road have been thwarted since the 60s, and just now they are solving it by tunneling under the park.


That evening we went to the Cliff House for dinner. Good food, but we were suprised to find its an NPS concession, and indeed there's a series of good looking parks on this side of the headlands. So, Monday we took the same route up the coast, bopped around the edge of Lincoln Park, then drove over random city streets (stopping along the way for some Turkish) to Fisherman's Wharf. Not too impressed with most of the touristy stuff, but the NPS had a nice little museum (sadly, still under construction) and a lot of old, restored boats. Mostly big ships, but I liked the junk, the working schooner and the other small boats.



They even had a functioning boat building shop. Apparently, aside from their work on restoration, they offer classes.

After this, more wandering thru the city, with stops at EQ3 and Room & Board for shopping. Also some wandering along the waterfront areas near the stadium and the Academy of Art. We ran across a nice little gallery that had half its first floor dedicated to an artsy, but still production-level, letterpress shop. They do wine labels and other such high-end, low-volume stuff. Talked to them a bit (due to my print history and mostly-latent sadness at not pursuing it anymore) and it was cool to see.

More Oregon Touristing

Originally we were gonna go straight from Portland to Pacifica. But a number of people insisted we see the sights in Oregon. One route, after being narrowed a lot, was 15 hours of driving. We have reservations and stuff in the bay area, so cannot just skip back a day, so instead we had spent the night in Salem. That morning, we headed out east on 22 and kept on going till we get to Bend, where we follow the road back south-west (well, down US-97 and a series of state highways) to Medford. After that, its I-5 all the way.

This whole drive was about opportunistic sightseeing. If we see something good, in time to stop and turn without rolling the car, and feel like it, we stop. As it is, we spent way too much time, so I don't want to hear any griping about stuff we missed. One of the first stops was, oddly because we saw lots of burned trees.



There was an "interpretive center" (and radio station!) for the B&B Complex Fire off the side of the road. We like nerdy, outdoorsy learning, but this was much more interesting and informative than we expected. We both knew vaguely that fire suppression had caused the forests to be more prone to major fires, and were generally bad, but this explained why.


Newberry National Volcanic Monument - Lava Butte - Deschutes National Forest... It was really interesting, and impressively visual to be there, but none of the photos really do it justice (I probably just need to get a wider lens). So, instead, here's a chipmunk.



This is on the top of the Lava Butte, so its not totally irrelevant. Alison insists I tell everyone that he is eating a nut I gave him. So, there, I admit that the shot is a setup.

We got to see the Three Sisters from up top also. Not that close, but I had never seen them before, so that was nice also.


One of the places most everyone suggested we go to was Crater Lake, and this was gonna be a snap, as the looping route inland took us right by the entrance gate. Which is as far as we got.



If the NPS is too cheap to plow the road and even basically open the park in May, could they at least put up a gate that a Guatemalan pygmy goat farmer wouldn't be embarrassed to have?


We then stopped at the (or possibly a) Rogue Gorge. This was cool as hell, way more impressive than you'd think for such a small feature,





This was also nice as once again we followed the Rogue River down till we got to I-5. Seeing it go from a tiny, but violent, stream to a broad river supporting a lot of name-brand nichhe agriculture was nice.

We passed a lot of places, but stopped at the Eden Valley Orchard for a bit of wine tasting (well, Alison did the tasting) and some other minor touristing.



Alison got a bottle of... something. I don't follow wines well. The place is headquartered out of a really nice, old house, with the original 19th century. Alison now wants a monkey puzzle tree...



All this took longer than I expected, and California seemed very annoying todrive thru. We didn't get into the room till well after midnight. Regardless, while it was light, I-5 was prettier than an interstate would be expected to be, so it wasn't a total waste. We got a good view of Mt. Shasta, for example, as we circled it for what seemed to be hours.