Finally starting

Through the wonders of Facebook I came to know that Durrett High School, Class of ’66 is having its 50th Reunion (!!) on July 23 back in good ole Louisville Ky. I took this as the universe telling me it was time to take one of those big trips I’ve been threatening for the last five or so

Leaving for an extended period of time is intertwined in my mind with a lot of things that really have nothing to with it. Mostly getting the condo de-cluttered and cleaned to be ready to sell or maybe even list on Air BnB. Obviously that does not have to be so, I could just empty the fridge, take out the trash, flush the toilet, and leave, But that is not how I think of it – paying for two places for an extended period is just wrong…

So the last two or so weeks have been pretty exhausting mentally and emotionally – cleaning, re-arranging, discarding things (that’s the hard part for me :), re-distributing – for a few hours every day. I must say it turned out pretty well!

In a perfect world I would have done this weeks in advance so as to have time to set up some kind of Air BnB arrangement whereby the place could pay for itself while I’m gone, but I am not that person and that definitely did not happen.

So I will be paying mortgage, HOA, and utilities as always for my condo AND spending extra money every day on gas, food, and lodging on the road.  I console myself that I will be well-positioned to get the AirBB going when I return.

I will lay out the trip plan in overview here, so we can all look back and laugh at how different the actual fact turned out to be:

• Reno
• San Rafael (see family, esp the new 2 month old)
• Eureka (hang at Martha’s house)
• Portland (actually Tualatin, my van customizers)
• Boise (Elton)
• Milwaukee (coupla friends) -> Indianapolis (Cousin Doug)
• Louisville
• Chapel Hill (visit the same folks I saw at the reunion)
• Washington DC (Peggy)
• home by way of following the route of Lewis and Clark – through Iowa then South Dakota north-south, then take a left in North Dakota, Montana … then whatever …

Noticeably absent from this list is a stop in Florida to visit to my sister in Dunedin. It’s too fucking hot and it seems foolhardy to go to where the Zika mosquitoes are if you don’t have to. Maybe I’ll shorten this trip, go home and get the ABnB going, then take an extended southern tour in the winter … ahh, sounds much better. [ed note: It was plenty fucking hot in Missouri, turns out]

Doing the Lewis and Clark thing on the way home will get me way up into North Dakota to places I’ve never been before.

Thursday

Tomorrow was to be the the day I drive to San Rafael, but my hosts there decided their parking situation was too dire. Collin is a new teenage driver (eek!), plus Martha and Chad brought both their cars. Chez Gannon is full up. Laura seemed pretty frazzled by the notion of taking on one more vehicle and its occupant, so … no San Rafael.

Friday

I woke up thinking I would be driving to Eureka today.  But the more I thought about it, the less sense it made to do that. I took a bathroom break, cleared my head and went back to the laptop to rethink my near-term plan.

I really do want to visit the van guys and the audio guy in Oregon, so why don’t I just drive straight there? It will save me a couple of days of driving;  I can wait to leave on Saturday and still have a comfortable trip, so that’s the new plan!

Having decided to just stay home, Friday was an extra great day! I did my usual Jungle coffee thing one more time, and savored it more than usual. Walked over to City Hall and picked up my parking permits, then went home and finished packing and organizing the condo. I went out for one happy hour beer at the Tap House and hung with the usual 20-something suspects. I went went upstairs only to get the final box. Not the last thing I’m taking, not be a long shot, but th unit of stuff that had to get stored under the seats. Then back to van to get all those many units of stuff organized. Longer trip = more stuff so it took an hour or so to get everything efficiently stowed (I hope!).

Saturday (Jun 25)

Finally the day! No more “should I stay or should I go?” crap. Just get up, make my coffee, carry the final bags, rinse the morning’s dishes and I’m outta here!

Pick up my sando – Rubicon Deli this time, Newman’s is closed on weekends – return library books, get cash and head out. Break up the monotony with a stop at McD’s in Susanville, then decide to take the slower, curvier west side route around Eagle Lake, just because I can.

This spot is right on the Reno-Klamath route, so I drive past here 2-3 times a year. It’s just the right amount of time/distance from Reno for a first or last night’s stop. However I am a winter travel guy and it’s closed mid-October to mid-May, so this is only the second time I’ve stayed here.

This trip feels different that the last few jaunts. My van feels more decrepit, I feel more decrepit. Very glad to be out, but I probably don’t have that many more years to do this before one or both of us falls apart.  Also it’s summer, and I fucking hate summer. Bugs everywhere all the time, the whole fucking scrub-land has an angry inset buzz to it, dust, discomfort. yuck.

It’s been eight weeks since the last trip, and I’ve driven the van maybe five times in that period. So it spends weeks at a time sitting in the same spot under the trees getting shat upon and sap-dripped upon and collecting bushels of nasty little tree droppings. On one side of the street I am parked literally three feet from a wild area, so insects and small mammals are constantly trying to make my van their home. Sucks for the van. It looks derelict, with 10-15 streaks of bird poop running down the sides. Sucks for me when I go for my service and they tell me a family of rodents is living in my engine.

Right now I am discovering that I have ants … ants!?!?

Sunday

Slept well. I drifted off happy to not be thinking about not another day of moving stuff around and deciding what goes to Salvation Army.

Laying in bed after daylight I have the bittersweet amusement of watching columns of little ants march down the corner of my kitchen cabinet about a foot from my face. They all seemed to be going down, no little ants going back up. A mystery that will have to wait until I feel like moving.

I read and type from 7 to 9:30, then sleep again till 11-ish. Kind of my style on many days. Part of living well for me is not having to force sleep. Just take it when it comes and do something else when it doesn’t.

I leave my dusty spot on the side of the hill around noon, aiming for coffee, wifi, and a burger at Oney’s about 40 miles down the road in Adin. What a clusterfuck that turned out to be.

• Walk into the super crowded and busy farmer’s Sunday meal with my laptop and a big “dude from the city” sign on my forehead.
• Recoil in horror at the lenght of the ordering line and the lack of seats.
• Drive 400 years to the ole reliable Adin General Store, which has great biscuits and gravy and is cool and quiet to find … it’s closed on Sunday;
• Sit and take stock, and notice I get No Service, so I cannot Yelp my way out of this.
• Drive 3 miles back towards Reno to get some 2 hour old coffee from the only gas station in 30 miles. Gas lady confirms that the next restaurant going my way is Merrill Oregon, 100 miles away.
• Take stock again, decide that at 2pm, the Sunday dinner crowd MUST be dying down, so why don’t I take my coffee, get in line at Oney’s and just chill.
• Good Plan!  Here’s how it went, thanks to my iPhone stopwatch for the hard data:
  — 4 groups ahead of me, took 9:55 minutes to get to the head line. Take in the irony that there is NO ONE behind me, meaning that I was the very last person to suffer the Sunday rush, and the next person will just waltz right in and order.
  — 6:15 to order. This one surprises me, didn’t seem like a big deal, but that’s what the numbers say!
  — 20:30 til my double burger with fries arrived

For a grand total of 38:40 minutes from walking in to chomping my first fry. What the heck, I wasn’t in a hurry anyway, and I got a nice slice of life in Adin.

This campground is such a nugget of reliable awesomeness! I am early enough (4:30, four hours of daylight left!) that I got my pick of the spots in B Loop. I didn’t even try for A Loop, the big boys always have all the good spots there. Despite my firm plan to get the best morning shade, I ended up taking the cozy spot with good evening shade. Maybe I will move in the morning.

There are clouds today. I love clouds.  I am happy to say that the ant problem solved itself. They were so numerous and so busy that I feared that a nest had set up (colony?), but it seems not, I’ve seen a couple of stragglers, but the parade seems to have disappeared. – woo!

What did I do for my four hours of daylight?  Cleaned the tree crap out of the wells under my windshield wipers. Wrote some of this. Set up the hammock I bought online for the first time.

I had the key insight that I will use it a lot only if it’s easy to set up, so I invested another $30 on a pair of straps dedicated to hammock-hanging. They are awesome, the hammock is awesome, swinging in the hammock is perfect, and it takes maybe four minutes to break the whole thing down. Spectacular!

A little before sunset I mobilized for a hike up the hill to the Visitors Center and the path behind it and the lava caves. No moon tonight, so start earlier than usual and flashlight required. The only people I encountered were a couple of spelunkers! I followed them down the ladder into on of the more obscure caves, enjoyed the coolness and the weirdness for a few minutes then went back up the ladder to leave them to their serious spelunking.

The vista up here and the sunset are beyond spectacular. The scale of the valley we’re looking over to the east is like the Grand Canyon horizontally, with maybe only 5% of the vertical, like it was filled in after about 800′ :)

I took a shitload of pictures with my new camera trying to get a handle on its many features. What’s best for sunset pics, Shutter Mode or Aperture Mode?

No bugs here in the high desert, so I hung out outside until about 11:30!  Uploaded all the pics to study them and their settings while I still; remember what I thought I was doing.

Monday

Damn that sun is hot up here. It woke me up at 7:30 to move the van to shade … and again at about 9, to move to better shade … and again at 11 because that ole sun keeps moving and those ole scrub pines are short and sparse and and not really very shady.

Drive slowly and enjoy the vistas out of Lava Beds, especially that trippy recent black, forbidding lava field the road borders for a few miles. I was quite shocked that the entrance kiosk at Lava Beds was manned, or rather womaned for the first time EVER in my long experience of passing through here. Since it is usually unoccupied, paying the entrance is an honor system thing at the Visitors Center. The lady ranger was making sure folks had paid. I am an old person with a Senior Pass so I was cool!

Drive slowly up one of my favorite roads. Due north to Oregon, the lava cliffs with mule deer and soaring raptors on the left, and the fields, marshes and pools of South Tule Wildlife Refuge on the right, Visitors Center is closed for remodeling. Left on Stateline Highway to do a drive-by on Lower Klamath Wildlife Refuge also. I did not do the full tour, but cliff swallows have taken over the large information kiosk as their nesting spot,so I enjoyed that show for a while.

Klamath Falls was functional.  So so lunch and wifi at Nibley’s, diesel fill-up and a trip to Fred Meyer.

The first part of the drive north, Upper Klamath Lake, then the glimpses of the Williamson River you get for a few miles is quite pretty, but after that, US 97 is about as boring as a highway can be. Straight and wide and lined by endless, uniform, unchanging pine forest. Finally I get to head west into the piney woods, and am much happier.

Odell Lake is pretty cool. The crusty old coots in the campground not so much.  I just couldn’t make it work. The ones I did say hi to gave me the stink-eye, and seemed like some others were judging me for not saying hi. Whaddareyagonna do? Mark it down as a great place to take out that kayak I got but never use.