San Francisco and Oregon

It's been a little while since I've updated this blog, and a few things (and a few thousand miles) have happened since. When we were done with Yosemite I drove back down to the coast to Ventura, CA, just north of where we left off for our inland detour. We had a nice time going out to the Channel Islands on a boat and hanging out for a few days for the Santa Barbara Solstice festival and other things. That festival was insane. Loads of middle-class California people in a trance state, dressed as peacocks or painted blue or you name it, dancing around throwing fire sticks, playing drums and just generally making complete idiots out of themselves but totally enjoying it! I imagined that kind of thing happening in the South... and couldn't really. People just seem to not take everything as seriously out here (except their cage-free tomatoes, diet free of "toxins", and street sweeping; they're very very serious about keeping their streets clean in California). Anyway, it's not a surprise to hear a bartender say something like "Hey! you can't smoke that out here... unless you pass it to me first (wink, wink)" or to have the police tell you "well technically... you're not supposed to sleep in your van here, but just keep moving around and have a wonderful time in California!" Unfortunately I got some kind of terrible sickness in Oxnard and had to waste a day in a motel room puking my guts up (not really what I had in mind for the day), but shortly after we were headed up the PCH.

The stretch of the PCH between Santa Barbara and San Francisco is amazing. Most people rave about how great Big Sur is, but the whole surrounding area is close to the same terrain. Sheer cliffs hundreds of feet down into the waves on rocky beaches below, and mountains thousands of feet high right at the ocean. Oh, and I bought a surfboard in Santa Barbara from some guy who had been doing research on amorphous silicon deposition at UCSB, but it took until about Monterey until I could find a beach I wouldn't kill myself on (here I was wishing for Pacific Beach in San Diego, still the best beach yet).

So we made it to San Francisco, which was great sure, but it was still a city with (I'd say) very subtle differences to any other major city out there. The difference between say the Sierra Nevadas and the Appalachains for example, is much more extreme and exciting to me than the difference between San Francisco and New York. So much of your experience of a city is the individual people you know there anywhere, so in most places you can find somewhere to fit in. I liked the fact that San Francisco is so close to these great places in Northern CA and by the beach too, but I wasn't a huge fan of all the people or the fact that there's this cold fog hanging around in the summer and you have to wear 2 sweatshirts on the 4th of July just to stay warm.

It's weird how old landmarks or symbols tend to crop up as tourist attractions once they've lost their relevance. Right now, operating on the corner of Haight and Ashbury streets, is a Ben and Jerry's ice cream store, and a place that sells "tie-dye" printed t-shirts next to people my age taking pictures with the street signs. Cannery Row in Monterey is now devoid of sardine canneries, but has hundreds of tourists milling about in mirror mazes and souvenier shops. Yosemite Valley even is a long shot from how John Muir saw it I bet, still beautiful, but full of thousands of tourists eating breakfast burritos and driving Priuses around. You really have to figure out for yourself what's happening and not listen to the whole "tourist and travel industry" telling you what to see and do. Some of the coolest things I've seen so far on the trip I've discovered completely by accident, and some of the most hyped things have been very disappointing. Anyway, I was ready to get back into the mountains when we left San Francisco.

We were headed out to Crater Lake in Oregon to meet my parents for a couple days there and on the Rogue River. Crater Lake is at 6200ft inside of a dormant volcano. It's also 53 degrees and almost 2000ft deep (I went swimming but couldn't touch the bottom, even near the shore where it wasn't quite 2000ft deep). It's so blue, the ranger identified the color by its wavelength off the top of his head, 420 Crater Lake blue. And it is. You can see literally a couple hundred feet down and it really is some blue water especially when the sun is out.

After a day and a half exploring Crater Lake, we floated down the Rogue River on kayaks which was great fun. The first real time I've been in a boat this summer and the water was warm enough to be comfortable swimming in. We asked the girl at the kayak place about some mountain biking and hiking in Oregon for this week and got some great recommendations we checked out the next day. Unfortunately our POS GPS (this Tom Tom has been out to get us all trip) decided to take us on some Forest Service Roads that would be fine in maybe a Jeep, but were quite interesting in the van. (Still the worst road prize goes to the unpaved roads in Sedona, AZ tho) We found an awesome campsite in the Siskyou National Forest for $5 and we were almost the only ones there. Tons of trails around the area which I had to bike and run around on. The mountains here, the Coastal Range, kind of reminded me of maybe the Smokies, but with different trees. I liked Oregon already.

After a day in Bend, drinking some Deschutes beer, we headed to the Mt. Hood National Forest with another endless set of trails in the Cascades. I had a particularly good long run here just down a rolling trail next to a big creek. We stopped in Government Camp, OR on the way and found out from the chatty bartender that you can literally ski all year (even now in mid-July!) on Mt. Hood.

Next we made it to Portland, where we headed immediately to the Rogue Public House to drink some beers. We actually met some girls from North Carolina there who were meeting someone's brother in Portland. He had just moved out there about a year ago and he and his friends were really trying to sell the idea of Portland to us. It wasn't a hard sell. We went to a couple other breweries with the NC people and then called it a night. Oregon may be my favorite state so far. And I'm not really even done with it yet, we decided to leave now and come back later in the fall to maximize our time in... Alaska! That's right, as I write this, we're about 1400mi (a bit over halfway...) into the long drive to the interior of Alaska. I think we're in the Yukon territory still. Anyway, we stocked up on food and bought a case of Red Bull and have just been driving non-stop for about 36 hours now, only stopping for gas and sometimes animals in the road. We should be to Wrangell-St. Elias National Park sometime Monday afternoon (we left Saturday morning). I'll have to write a lot more about Alaska later I'm sure, but for now Canada is pretty beautiful (if very very lonely feeling up further north). And by the way right now it's almost 11:00PM locally and the sun is still very much up (it rose around 3:30).


Day 72, 10,540mi (and counting very fast right now)

July 13, 2010 - Return to S. California thru San Francisco

Hey there, amigos. I feel as guilty as a parent who just sent their kid to fat camp. Just haven’t written in so long. I know you’ve been waiting for an update, friends, all four of you. Lo siento on that one.

We’ve been busy as I’m sure you all have for the Fourth and all. We excitedly returned to the coast of California, just north of where we left off (Malibu). Some mountains and preserved wilderness contain Los Angeles’ mess to the east of Malibu beach. Safely situated to the north, along the coast, is a town called Oxnard where normal people live. I got a haircut there.

Citrus farms surround the highway leading to this area. You can smell the acres covered with these fruit plants. Next morning we checked out Ventura, CA, which had the best farmers market I’ve ever seen. It was here that Matt procured some delicious poison strawberries.

Matt had heard somewhere about the Channel Islands, a series of smallish islands about 20 miles off the S. Cal coast. A little like the Galapagos, they have some weird biology going on due to evolution, Native Americans, and most of all, European settlers. We found a company that shuttles people over for day trips and campouts, so we went over for a day. We awoke in the local Wal-Mart parking lot and hurried over, just in time to catch the boat early in the morning. It was a cold morning, too, and we saw a number of seals warming themselves on rocks and buoys as the boat departed.

We ended up in a small group led by a young ranger with dreadlocks. She pointed out indigenous plants and invaders as we hiked around a path that led through about five small canyons along the coast. A small friendly-looking fox appeared and scampered down the path while we took a break. The scenery was great and we enjoyed the sun while the mainland was blanketed with fog. There was an amusing but odd little family on the tour as well—a slightly haggard mom with two little daughters who were all decked out in enough layers to survive a winter in the tundra. The older daughter had a violent fit of vomiting on the ride over and the younger sang songs and shrieked. Eventually we discerned the little longhaired one was in fact a boy, but that’s neither here nor there.

That evening we had a fun time in a local bar the ranger recommended, where we befriended the bartender. That guy had a troubled past and told us some stories. The following morning Matt awoke with a painful illness which seemed like a 24-hour bug. Perhaps it was from unwashed farmers market strawberries, or Yosemite water. Being incapable of doing much, we checked into a cheap motel in Oxnard where he could rest and I could do some odds and ends like get a haircut.

Feeling rejuvenated the next day we moved on northward, stopping in Santa Barbara to get a surfboard for Matt from Craigslist and a wetsuit for me. We ventured north beyond civilization to where the Pacific Coast Hwy climbs the cliffs along the coast, allowing spectacular views of the bright blue ocean. Camped in a state campground near Big Sur, which is a series of parks in this area where the Big Sur river enters the ocean. We hiked some around here and went to the beach, but we couldn’t stay there long due to the strong chilly winds that shot sand around. Soon after we passed thru Monterey and Carmel, very nice towns on the coast, and up to a less-fancy area called Marina. First we passed thru Cannery Row, of Steinbeck fame, which is now a little touristy. But it was fun reading about the history of the town that built an industry around anchovies (until they decimated the population).
Marina had some state beaches that were enticing enough for us to try surfing there. Unfortunately the beaches were too steep for waves to last long, and it was pretty choppy, but we managed to have fun. We took advantage of the Asians in the area and tried some Korean barbeque. Delicious stuff with lots of unusual sides like kim-chee and various kelp things.

Santa Cruz, between Marina and San Francisco, is a very nice little city with a university. We checked out the nightlife and ended up at a sushi bar near their closing time. They kept giving us free stuff—sushi, calamari, and sake. Next day we moved on and arrived in San Francisco.

We checked out Golden Gate Park, the beach nearby, and ended up parked in the Haight district for a couple nights. In a way it reminded me of Budapest, old and sometimes grittier than I expected. The Mission district, for example, had lots of panhandlers and bums and sketchy shops, but it also is a destination for good food and nightlife. Over a few days we explored parks, like the Presidio just south of the Golden Gate Bridge, where I biked around and enjoyed the cool weather. I found a huge record and CD store which we enjoyed, and we checked out a brewery near the bay bridge. For the Fourth of July we joined the masses and sat out on the waterfront near Fisherman’s Wharf. It was a cold, cloudy night but we enjoyed fireworks and some free live music from an R&B cover band and a Rolling Stones cover band—one that I’m pretty sure played at my fraternity house some years back in college!

In Chinatown we fought for a parking space, found one, then went for lunch, which was good and plentiful. The only downside is we got into a fight with our waitress over a $9 plate of fried rice we didn’t order. “You order fried rice?” No! “But you eat fried rice!” Well, yes, but we ordered the $1 white rice. “Who pay for fried rice? Me?” Well, it’s your fault, and why the hell is fried rice $9? Whatever.

Matt had been sick this whole time and sought out a chiropractor and massage which seemed to help some of the problems which still persisted from the strawberry episode & surfing injuries. All in all we agreed the city is a very interesting place, very distinct from other cities. Certainly a fun place to visit with something to offer everyone. Then we left, back to the south around the bay, to meet in a couple days with Matt’s parents who came to Crater Lake for a vacation.