Category: Travel

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Back South

We were gone 51 hours. Drove 1,035.3 miles. Left Eugene today at 1:51 p.m. and got home (514 miles later) at 10:34 p.m. Stops in Weed, Redding, and Williams. And in Dorris, California, too, to snap a picture of the Elm Motel (see below).

Elmmotel

5:03 p.m.: Dorris is the first town you hit in California as you head south from Klamath Falls on U.S. 97. The highway makes several turns in town. This place is just south of the last bend, and just across the street from the big restaurant in town, a divey-looking place called La Tapatia. In addition to these two establishments, Dorris (population in 2000: 886) boasts that it’s the home of the tallest flagpole west of the Mississippi. Whether the claim is true or not (and I can’t find anything right now that contradicts it — stay tuned), the flagpole is an eyecatcher.

Shasta

5:11 p.m.: You could see Mount Shasta for well over 100 miles to the north along U.S. 97 today, despite partial overcast. This is from closer up — it was probably about 45 miles to the northeast of the mountain and just a few miles southwest of Dorris and the warm welcome waiting northbound travelers at the Elm Motel.

Corvette

7:13 p.m. At the In-N-Out in Redding. There were two Vettes parked just outside. This was the nicer one and the better picture.

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If You Want to Drive on My Road

One thousand miles on the highway (to Eugene and back last week) gives one lots of time to ponder the following: “Why the (your favorite expletive beginning with “f” here) don’t these slow drivers in the left lane get the (favorite expletive again) over?”

Admittedly, such reflections are a necessary product of driving — even preferring to drive — well above the speed limits posted on our Dwight D. Eisenhower System of Interstate and Defense Highways and other fine public routes. I plead guilty. But.

No matter how fast you’re going — the posted speed limit or 15 miles an hour over it — if you look in the rear view mirror and see someone bearing down on you from behind, that tells you they’re going faster than you are and you need to get or stay out of the way. The fact you’re driving whatever speed doesn’t entitle you to the left lane. The sane, courteous and cautious course is to get over to the right at your first opportunity. Let the faster traffic by; presumably that’s what all those “Slower Traffic Keep Right” signs are about.

And also: When you’re going 66 and you decide to daringly overtake that car in front of you that’s going 65, watch what’s happening in the left lane before you pull out to do it. If faster traffic is coming up, either stand on it to make the pass and get it over with so you don’t hold up your sweet-tempered brethren, or wait until the lane clears and you can take your own sweet time (and 12 miles or so) to get past your barely slower neighbor.

Thank you.



Next: The many uses of directional signals.

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Williams

Williams1

On any drive north or south on Interstate 5, Williams is an important spot on our personal travel map. It’s 100 miles from Berkeley, give or take a mile or two; so when we get there on the way home, we’re within a couple hours of our front door at most; or, headed the other way, we’re about halfway to Redding (or about one-fifth of the way to Eugene).

The town sits on the western side of the Sacramento Valley, where Highway 20 comes down from the Clear Lake plateau and heads across the river bottoms to Colusa, Yuba City, and Marysville  before it begins climbing through the Sierra foothills to Grass Valley and Nevada City.

Like all the little farm towns up and down the valley, there’s some history there under the surface, which naturally you don’t get at when you’re just passing through. You sort of suspect it when you look at the handsome old brick building a couple of stop signs west of the interstate with its weathered pale green paint, arcade shading the sidewalk and and recently hung fast-food banners.

The only history I know of, though, is what we’ve seen on our short stops through the years: the ghost Dairy Queen (we walked in one day after the place had been shut down, though all the signs and most of the interior fixtures were intact and the front door had been left open); the crummy road meals; the night we stayed in town with our neighbors, the Martinuccis, and drove out to the fields east of town to watch a comet; stopping for gas on the way home from Wilbur Hot Springs in the blaze of October.

Williams2

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Flying Home

Heading back, watching the night unfold, watching the towns approach, slide past,

right-angle layouts, the bright stitching of main streets against invisible landscape.

I can guess the names of the bigger towns: Rockford. DeKalb. Galesburg. Iowa City. Cedar Rapids. All maybes. Nothing big enough to suggest Des Moines or Omaha. Then the smaller towns. Some I’ve passed through, others are just names I’ve picked up along the way. Dyersville. Grinnell. Ottumwa. Story City. Stanhope. Storm Lake. Then across the invisible Missouri: Grand Island. McCook. Hastings. Ogallala.

But most without any names that I know, though I’d love to learn them. All down there somewhere in that thinning web of settlements as we move west, each town throwing its main-drag strands of light into the dark. Island universes in uncounted numbers.

[Translation: United Flight 385, Chicago to Oakland. Took off 8:45 p.m. CDT, landed 10:45 p.m. PDT.]

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Anatomy of a Toot

As promised, photographic documentation of what’s called locally “a toot.”

But having spent two hours posting 11 pictures in that little photo album, I’m reminded why I don’t do it more often. I mean, it takes two hours. Part of the problem is the seeming inflexibility of the TypePad photo albums: The pictures appear on your working site in the reverse order you chose them; when you post them, they appear in reverse order again — or, to look at it another way, in the same order you orginally picked them. That always confuses me and I wind up writing absurdly prolix captions (also time consuming) that are supposed to have some sort of narrative order but come out rather jumbled. The current effort’s a case in point. Could be that later I’ll go back in and try to fix my fractured storytelling. But for now: Bed.

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Brief Road Blog

In Chico (just west of Paradise) after a quick un-air-conditioned ride up Interstate 5 in a red ’93 Honda Civic hatchback (aka “The Machine Messiah) to visit a Sacramento Valley monastery celebrating its 50th anniversary. Temperature: 106. Relative humidity: 9 percent. The backstory: The monastery figures in a long tale involving Leland Stanford (in a cameo), William Randolph Hearst, and a 12th century Spanish abbey. I’ll relate all — as many others have done — later. With dramatic photographic evidence.

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Flying Home

Thunderheads_1

Airline travel has become endlessly irritating and uncomfortable most of the time. The snack boxes they used to give away as consolation that those bad hot meals weren’t served anymore? Now you have to pay five bucks for one, and various combinations of chips, jerky, whizzed cheese, pretzels and cookies have been given cute names like QuickPick, JumpStart, Biafra, and Moe. But now I’m wandering.
I always take a window seat if one’s available. I can deal with the confinement as long as I have a chance to look out the window. I’ve always found the view of the world outside and below full of a beauty so singular and surprising I don’t feel fit to express it. So, Monday evening on United Flight 863 from O’Hare to San Francisco: Somewhere over Iowa we flew past this wall of storm clouds growing into the summer sky to the north. Even though I was pretty sure a picture would only hint at the play of light and texture and shadow, I pulled out my little digital camera and took a couple of shots. Glad I did.

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AirBlog: LAX and After

6:40 p.m. PST: Exclusive coverage of the delay of American Airlines Flight 1519, nonstop service from Los Angeles to San Francisco, brought to you from seat 4A of a Boeing 737 (sorry, I don’t know the tail number. I can probably find it, though).

We’re parked in what I heard one of the cabin crew people refer to as “that remote area” of Los Angeles International Airport. The reason: Stormy weather up around the Bay Area has caused inbound flights to back up. So air-traffic control had American load this plane, then pull it away from the gate (which was needed to debark passengers from another flight). The pilots drove it over to this “remote area” — actually, we’re alongside a runway and taxiway and see a steady stream of planes passing — to sit for an hour or so before taking off for tne north. (Part of the problem during stormy or foggy weather around San Francisco International, as anyone who uses the airport or lives in the area knows, is that the airport must close one of its two parallel runways. Normally, planes land side by side, separated by about 250 yards when they reach the runways. That’s too close when visibility’s poor. The solution to this is building additional runways, but that’s proven to be expensive, time-consuming, and fraught with environmental controversy. I’m not complaining about the delay or the runway configuration myself. I figure it’s something of a miracle that planes can fly through storms at all, let alone find a runway through clouds and fog and actually land on it.

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One last thing about the trip: As I think I mentioned somewhere before, I wound up with something of an accidental first-class ticket. I like it. I’m not jammed in with the rest of the poor saps apprehensively trooping to the rear of the plane. Uniformed persons are solicitous of my welfare. They’re anxious to hang up my jacket, bring me food and drink, laugh at my jokes, and hear my life story (well, the jacket and food and drink parts are true). I dread my next flight, when I go back to being one of the poor saps.

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One other thing last thing: We finally landed in San Francisco at 9:15 p.m., about an hour and a half later than scheduled. In addition to getting grounded in Los Angeles, we also happened to arrive in the Bay Area at about the same time as a very intense weather front, and got put in a very bumpy holding pattern. I looked out the window the whole way. Occasionally the moon would break through the clouds as we jolted along, then we’d plunge back into a blinding combination of what looked like snow and rain. It was one of those situations you just know the only way the flight’s viable is because the planes got real good navigation technology on board; in the olden days, I think the option would have been to bail on the airport socked in by rough weather and land somewhere else. Anyway, we kept circling, and after 20 or 30 minutes of that, they told us we were cleared to head to the airport. The only alarming thing was that the weather got wilder the closer we got to the airport, so that the wings were rocking and the plane was pitching all the way down to the runway. The landing itself was the hardest one I’ve ever been aboard for, though no oxygen masks fell down and the window shades stayed up (Dad talks about a flight he took once that ended with such a heavy landing that all the shades slammed down and oxygen masks dropped).