10,000 feet to sea level

Friday (Sep 29)

What a beautiful spot. For whatever reason (altitude?) I slept very poorly … wide awake and laptopping from 4 am to 9 am when I finally felt sleepy :-/. I set the timer and slept an hour or so before leaving at 11 am checkout time.

Yosemite is fucking crowded today. Eight minutes in the entrance line. A big sign announces Volunteer Appreciation Weekend. I think it may be extra crazy because of that.

I stop for a few minutes at Tenaya Lake. For some reason, yesterday and today I’m full of nostalgia for when I took this road with my Mom … 50 years ago! I looked up the history of the Tioga Road and discovered that right where I am sitting was VERY controversial back in the day, because they had to dynamite a stretch of the beautiful granite dome behind me to make this road. I think of myself as an environmentally sensitive guy, but here I am really enjoying the spot, with no sense that the wilderness had to be abused for me to be here. The world is a complicated place.

I know this morning’s drive will not offer any kind of coffee, not even bad gas station coffee, for at least an hour and a half of driving, till Buck Meadows probably. So I have planned a nice little breakfast party for myself at Olmsted Point! I have one of those 4-cup bags of coffee I liberated from a motel room coffee machine. I boil it up in my saucepan, flavor it with milk from the Von’s two days ago, and lay out a tasty brownie and tasty lemon bar I cleaned out of the refrigerator before I left. Pretty awesome!

Another few miles of spectacular scenery then the drive settles into narrow two lane road through endless pines for the rest of Yosemite.

Exit the park, drive past Buck Meadows, then through the very inviting little town of Groveland, to the hidden in plain sight gem I discovered last time – Priest Station Cafe. I hit the perfect time before dinner rush – 4:15-ish. Nobody there when I arrived, four tables full when I left.

Bees and  bratwurst — My bratwurst and sauerkraut dinner was delightful. Unfortunately it’s yellowjacket season, and since I was the only diner at the time I had like five of those fuckers buzzing my plate, trying to follow my fork into my mouth, that sort of thing. They have a strategy for this – they bring out little dishes with morsels of extremely tasty looking but lightly poisoned pieces of grilled salmon, and it works! Once they get the scent the yellowjackets mostly hover around the salmon instead of MY bratwursts.

Back into Gold Country rush hour. Join 49 north to a windy little road that cuts off a stretch of 49 that goes through downtown Sonora, then past the Tuttletown camping exit (a mistake!), and on across the bridge to the Glory Hole camping area, which was perfectly nice except for the locked bathrooms.

The locked showers was a cruel blow to me. I had pretty much given up the notion of a shower until tomorrow, then to find I could have one tonight if only they unlocked the damned door is tough to take. I scratched my itchy scalp with a little more bitterness.

Other than that it is a pretty sweet place. No doubt super hot in the summer, but perfectly pleasant now. After the last four nights being in the 20s, it feels positively balmy over here – 71° at sunset. The sunset was spectacular.

Saturday – Sunday

As the helpful Camp Host explained, my camping receipt over here would get me into Tuttletown this morning for a shower if I wanted to backtrack the ten miles to do it. If I wasn’t driving to a shower this evening I would without a doubt do so.

Anyway, back up the hill to re-join 49 north, which goes right down the main street of Angel’s Camp. I noticed a little bakery downtown and I should’ve stopped. Yelp had made a coffee place in Copperopolis sound pretty good so I passed on by. That place turned out to be in the Copperopolis Town Square, a fake town square erected in a field by some developer to serve the ritzy lake-based communities they erected nearby. I didn’t care for the whole thing. The coffee place was adequate but that’s about it.

The landscape flattened out after that. I join 99 on the east side of Stockton and drive north a few exits to pick up 12 West in Lodi. Get relatively cheap diesel in town – I saved $10 or so by getting filling up my tank here at $2.8/gallon rather than back in Lee Vining at $4/gallon.

Follow 12 over the bridge at Terminous, where the Gannons used to keep a boat ages ago and where I once spent the weekend. Continue on to Rio Vista, where I decide to treat myself to a fancy dinner at The Point. Well, the dinner wasn’t too fancy, just fish and chips and water to drink, but the view is very fancy – right on the Sacramento River. Here I felt odd for not having showered in five days.

Then onward to Gannon’s. The rest of 80 was easy going. I was sad to see that the backups on 37 east were still happening on a Saturday evening – yuck. Luckily I am going west. It was smooth sailing, as it usually is.

Little Tula is sick – sad. I am being allowed to stay in the penthouse – that is the former attic that has been turned into Collin’s luxury accommodation. Throughout high school this was treated as his sacred teenage space by the grown-ups, but now that he’s off to college, I guess it’s lost some of it’s magic and it’s acceptable for me to sleep there. Pretty sweet except for the lack of bathroom.

Sunday

Basketball day. Leave at 10:30 for a noon game at the junior high school in Benicia. They won. Then grab lunch at a Subway, then game 2 at the fieldhouse at Allan Witt Park in Fairfield. They lost.

Tyler’s team here is way less talented than his Eureka team. But that’s ok because they are not really a team per se, they are the “Fall Skills Program” of the North Bay Basketball Academy. So the games are really full game scrimmages with refs to get the boys ready for the real league in the spring. That whole concept seems pretty Marin to me. Anyway it was fun. The games were fun. The refs were weird, calling strange technicals and generally being drama queens, but the whole thing was pretty cool. Ty is pretty much the best player on his team, not necessarily in terms of talent but in hustle and focus. He seems to be at a different level than most of them in terms of understanding what the f-ck is going on out there. So we think he will get “drafted” by a good team for the real games in the spring.

Monday

It had been decided by everybody that I would stay in the penthouse one more night so Ty could stay in his luxury pad one more night. No school for him this week. So we have a leisurely morning, then I drive Tyler and myself up to Petaluma for my first night at the Martha family’s new house.

She very busy. Pretty chaotic. All go out to Mexican restaurant down the road. I really liked it. In fact I really like the vibe of the whole area.

Tuesday

Around noon go with Martha to pick up Tula at day care. They are fortunate enough to get her into the day care (pre-school?) at Sonoma State. Those college day care places are the best! Each toddler has their own careperson!  Then we get coffee in downtown Cotati, which also has a real pleasant vibe.

Back to the house, she disappears into the bedroom to finish off Tu’s nap. In Eureka it really didn’t matter what part of the day I left, but down here in the megapolis, for every minute I delay after about 3-ish, I will spend two or three extra minutes sitting in traffic. So when she reappeared around 4, I proposed to stay one more night and drive home in one day. My proposal was not accepted.

So … about 4:15 I head out into the traffic maelstrom. Petaluma was busy, but most of the two-lane roads across Sonoma and Napa were pretty open. It’s the last stretch of if 12 where it narrows and merges with I-80 that is always backed up in the afternoon. Intermittent backups through Fairfield and Vacaville, I made it to I-505 and it was smooth but long sailing after that. I cut off the last few miles by taking Lone Star Road directly to:

I drove through traffic hell straight to here because I was so looking forward to watching sunset reflected off the pond as I de-pressurized by walking the nature hike to the far observation deck here. FAIL!!! There is no water in the pond!

I was done with driving so the auto tour held no charm for me today. I just sat down on the bench at the empty, sad, deserted main observation deck. As I sat there I realized it was pretty fucking awesome, water or no water!

• No people at all (solitude is one of the reasons I do these trips).
• Very quiet except for the murmur of Route 20 in the distance. Also still, no wind.
• Birds in the distance – some large formations of geese(?) were mobilizing from wherever they had been eating to wherever they were sleeping.
• Some ungainly fliers flew past in the middle distance, which I took to be Night Herons making their way back to their hangout on the creek.
• and best of all … An exquisite if unspectacular sunset!

There were no clouds, so none of that kind of spectacular reflections, but to sit in that perfect quiet stillness and watch the outlines of the Yolo Mountains to the west shade from pink to deep red to gray was very nice. It was so still that whatever mosquitoes were still on the move at 60° were eating me up as the colors finally faded.

I endured the mosquitoes to stay till the last hints of pink on the were gone. It was beautiful and restful and made all the stress of the drive go away. The plan had been to stay at Granzella’s, but sitting there I decided to stay at the casino.

The Granzella’s vs Casino tradeoff has always been:

• The Colusa Casino parking lot is a great place to sleep and to wake up in the morning, but being in the casino for dinner/breakfast kind of sucks.
• Granzella’s is a great place to eat and drink in the evening and have breakfast and wifi in the morning, but sleeping in their busy parking lot kind of sucks.

I remembered there was one meal I liked at the casino, and decided I could go to the town of Colusa in the morning. With the elevated sense of Nature’s wonders I had just imbibed, I really wanted to wake up looking at almond orchards instead of the Granzella’s dumpster, so on to the casino!

Wednesday

Despite the two IPAs and the steak and olive salad right before bedtime I slept pretty well. I have a new insight, namely that a big reason I don’t sleep well on these fall trips is that I am not used to the very noisy heater clanking on in the middle of the night. So … very mild in the valley => heater doesn’t come on => good sleep.

I had a weird time at the nice breakfast place in Colusa and a weird time getting diesel at the Gold whatever Casino,, but other than that the trip home was entirely uneventful, in the best possible way!