Archive for the ‘Nonclassified Nonsense’ Category

Lake Arrowhead, CA — Oregon Coast

Today is March 2nd, as opposed to March 3 (as I mistakenly wrote in the gas log) or February 31, as Berck’s watch thinks.

I haven’t journaled much because we’ve been heading up the left coast, generally a windy way. I can’t type very well when it’s curvy because the laptop flies out of my lap. But now we’re heading inland into Oregon, and the road is a much straighter.

We just stopped at a McDonald’s to use the bathroom. My policy is usually that I’ve eaten a bunch of McDonald’s hamburgers without having used their toilets, so I’m justified in using their toilets without buying their hamburgers. Except that I think we’re probably about even now. I still might have felt fine about ducking in and back out, but there was NO ONE at the counter, and the cashier greeted me when I walked in. It’s now a little past noon, and there’s a line. Ah well. But I felt like some french fries, so I ordered a small fry, despite the fact that there was none listed on the menu, only a “MEDIUM” for $1.69. “One dollar,” said the cashier. When my order came up, someone yelled, “One Value Fry!” I figured that was me. It wasn’t very small. Berck fussed at me for spending money at “that place.” “We could have stopped at Dairy Queen and gotten a Blizzard!” Berck likes the idea of public restrooms you pay for, like they have in Europe. I guess paying 25 cents is better than a dollar or two. But that’s the way we do it in this country.

We left Lake Arrowhead and had lunch with Berck’s dad where he works in Apple Valley. Then we headed north across the high desert, then west over a ridge of thousands of windmills, through mountains that looked like pictures of New Zealand, into a flat valley full of almond trees in bloom, and over a windy road into some high, dry hills.

By then it was time to find a place to pitch our tent, so we headed for the nearest National Forest. We turned off the highway onto a paved road with grass growing in the cracks. That became a dirt road with a notice, “NOT ADVISABLE IN WET WEATHER.” Fortunately, the road was good and eventually brought us to a campground. We couldn’t figure out how much to pay or where to get a “Forest Adventure Pass” that we weren’t supposed to park without. So we camped for free. Everything was soaked from the storms that week, but somehow we got a fire going hot enough to heat up a can of chili we found in the trunk.

The next morning we drove through what looked like Wales to me, the Lake District to Berck, though we both agreed the grassy hills needed more stone walls. California has some beautiful countryside.

We finally made it to the coast and started up California 1. We should have timed our drive up the coast in the middle of the week…it was pretty full of weekend riders.

The noise Berck worried about until the folks in Grand Junction told him it was probably “valve noise” suddenly got worse. In fact, it got REALLY loud. We were worried we weren’t going to make it to San Jose. Berck pulled off at one of the few gas stations along the route and opened the hood. “The only thing it could possibly be besides a valve blowing is exhaust noise,” he said. Sure enough, one of the header pipes was cracked. We were quite relieved to have such a minor thing go wrong, but our relief turned to headaches from the noise and exhaust coming straight into the cabin when we had the vent on. Berck put some epoxy on the crack yesterday. I think it helped a lot, but he has his doubts.

We called up Brandon Downey in San Jose as we approached, but he called us back to tell us he was in Seattle for the weekend. Oops. We’ll visit him when we head back down.

So we drove California 35, which is an amazing one-lane road that follows the ridge separating the Bay Area from the Pacific. Then we headed for the nearest campground, a beach site in Half Moon Bay. It was closed. ARGH! We stopped at a taqueria for some super quesadillas and Mexican Coke for the first food we’d consumed since the Ultimate Cheeseburgers at the Jack-in-the-Box we’d visited for breakfast. Then we headed through the twilight, San Francisco, and the Golden Gate Bridge to the next nearest campground. This was in a labyrinth of a park on the north end of the bridge where it took us a good half hour to just find the closed visitor center. There was also a campground alright, but it was quite a walk away from the parking lot, which warned us not to park overnight without a permit. Well, how the heck do you get such a permit?? We gave up and headed further north to China Camp State Park. The weather was lovely, it was pitch black, and we were exhausted, so we didn’t even bother pitching the tent and simply slept out beneath the waxing moon.

In the morning we cut our way through the rolling hills separating us from the coast, then drove 1 until its end joining US 101, found a state park to camp, and then headed up the road a few miles to the first town we’d hit in hours. Berck screeched to a stop in front of a trattoria and tried to order gnocchi, but they were out, so he settled for raveoli. I had a burger, and we split a pitcher of Fat Tire. Then we headed back to the state park only to find that the campground was “CLOSED FOR SEASON.” Now what?? So we drove north until we got to the next state park campground which was fortunately open. By now it was completely dark and raining, but with the help of the headlights, we managed to get the tent up without getting too wet. The bathrooms had coin operated showers, which almost made up for the $13 a night fee, but the power went out in the night, so no showers in the morning (which Berck discovered AFTER taking all his clothes off). We also discovered that we were camped in a redwood forest. Pretty cool.

It started raining again right before we got up, so a rather wet rain tarp went into the tent bag. Fortunately, the weather cleared up for a beautiful day of driving up the Oregon coast. We camped at a state park within sound of the surf and surrounded by moss covered conifers. Berck wanted to spring the four bucks it would take to get a bundle of dry firewood, but I told him I could gather enough for a couple hot cans of chili. A couple hours, an empty lighter fluid can, every bit of scrap paper in the car, and a lot of lungwork later, we finally got my pile of soggy (not wet, soggy) pine branches to ignite. And hot chili we did have.

It’s weird to be so far north but not cold. In the desert on the Mexico border, our drinking water would freeze at night. But up here in the Northwest, near the border with Canada, it gets chilly but not very cold. Just rainy.

On Tuesday morning we had showers with unlimited HOT water, which made the $13 fee worth it. Well, it was for me anyway; Berck says he had lukewarm squirts (I guess I used it all up).

Lake Arrowhead, CA

It started raining here in Lake Arrowhead today about noon. Then the rain turned to snow. It’s coming down in thick, wet flakes and has actually started sticking to the ground. I’m glad we got here yesterday!

Apache National Forest, AZ–Meteor Crater, AZ

The roads in Arizona suck. The roads in New Mexico were quite nice; apparently NM has lots of highway money it doesn’t know what to do with, because they stick signs up everywhere. Every time you pass over a culvert, there are dozens of black and yellow striped signs warning you that, if you need to veer off the road, don’t do it right now. Every time the center line changes from broken to solid, a sign on the side of the road will warn you, “NO PASSING ZONE” or “PASS WITH CARE.” I suppose that might be useful if the road were snow-covered, but this is New Mexico we’re talking about. Berck says, “I find these signs almost insulting.”

But the roads in Arizona are pretty bad. Makes typing tricky at times, reading back over what I wrote unpleasant, especially since we’re cruising at 90.

We stopped for the night at a little green tent on the side of the road in a National Forest(according to the map). It was actually a couple mile drive, the last half mile of which was mud or snow. We finally got to the campground, eerily deserted. There was no place to pay for camping, a bunch of the signs were missing. One sign that still stood said, “Check in with host! –>”

The only thing in the direction of the “host” was a snowy path leading to some wood cabins. So after we picked our site, we headed down the path. There were actually dozens of cabins, but they were all abandoned. Inside each was a couple of mattresses, bed frames, refrigerator, tiny stove, and sink. All the windows were missing, and most of the doors had been broken in. Saplings grew up around them. It looked as if it had been a motel made up of individual cabins that been left to rot. The complex was getting some good use, though … brightly colored little balls were strewn everywhere in the snow. It had become the perfect place for a paint ball game.

Other than the spookiness of our campground’s status, it only had two drawbacks: it was cold, and there was no drinking water available. This was a problem because we only had about half a liter of extra-strong lemonade to drink. We were surrounded by patches of snow, and a creek ran nearby, but we don’t have a pot or water purification devices. It was getting too late to go anywhere else, and Berck had already gotten the car stuck in the snow once.

At least there was plenty of firewood, including some National Forest sign posts that had been sawed up and stuck in a pile. I’m not sure if they were meant for firewood, but one of those huge logs made a nice fire. We had some hot soup and some HOT Wolf chili, unfortunately, since we didn’t have any drinking water to wash it down. But we ate a couple of oranges and felt better.

We ended up saving the lemonade for the morning. That was a mistake, because it got so cold that the lemonade froze solid. We were warm enough in our sleeping bags, but to conserve heat, we partially closed the vent in the top of the tent. That was also a mistake, because we woke up to find the inside of the tent covered in frost that was quickly melting and raining on us. Hopefully, our tent and accouterments will have time to dry out tonight before we have to re-enter them.

We just passed through Petrified Forest and Painted Desert National Park. Most of the “forest” has been carted out over the last hundred and fifty years by souvenir hunters and gem enthusiasts. Petrified wood is beautiful stuff. Fortunately, there’s probably a bunch of it still buried beneath the hills, waiting for the nine inches of rain the park receives to uncover it all.

Now we’re driving through Winslow, AZ listening to The Eagles’ “Take It Easy.”

We’re back on an Interstate, having left them pretty much behind since San Antonio. Wrestling with truckers again.

Just went to the Meteor Crater. 12 bucks a person to get in! They’ve surrounded the crater with three miles of chain-link and barbed-wire to make sure you don’t get a free look at it. It’s big. Twenty foot-ball games with two million seated spectators could fit in it. All from a chunk of rock 150 feet in diameter. At least they’ve got a decent “State of the Art Museum.” My favorite was the meteor generator, where you got to pick the velocity, size, density, and angle of a meteor hitting the earth, then watch animation of the consequences.

Very Large Array, NM

We just visited the Very Large Array Radio Telescope. It’s the array of radio dishes featured in the film Contact (which is the first movie Berck and I ever went to see together … awww). The visitor center had a little display about the making of the movie. They seemed very excited about it but were careful to point out that creative license had been taken … for instance, you don’t listen to radio telescopes with headphones, like Jodie Foster did.

There’s a little walking tour that visitors like us could take, right up to one of the dishes. The array is pretty amazing. Each dish is the size of a baseball diamond. There are 27 dishes, 9 on each arm of the array. When the astronomers want to see something really, really far away, they put the dishes out so that each arm is 13 miles long … that’s long enough so that if the VLA were centered in Washington, DC, each arm would extend beyond the Beltway. When the astronomers want to see something with greater resolution, they bring the dishes in close so that all of them are within .4 mile. 27 smaller radio telescopes spread out but working together can “see” as well as one huge dish. The VLA is the most powerful radio telescope on earth. But the VLA is part of an even larger array, the Very Large Baseline Array, with radio telescopes stretching from Hawaii to the Virgin Islands.

The VLA is on a high plain (7000 ft) in the middle of nowhere, New Mexico. The plain is surrounded by mountains to shield the radio telescopes from radio transmissions from cities, of which there are none close by. When the dishes are spread out at their furthest, they reach the edges of the mountains.

Berck and I wonder how many non-scientists have seen both the VLA and the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico, the largest single dish on earth, like we have.

El Paso, TX–Lincoln National Forest, NM

We spent last night in a little campground at the edge of a National Forest. It was a 12.5 mile drive off the highway to get there, the last 4 of which were gravel. The Miata can handle graded gravel roads just fine, but it doesn’t have much clearance. We often have to travel along the ridges of the ruts to keep from scraping bottom.

As we entered the campground, the host emerged from his camper, which looked like it had sat in the same place for quite some time, and came to meet us. He was wearing Marine issue BDU pants, a sweat shirt, Ray-Bans, a little hoop earring, and had a red beard down to his chest. “How do you fit it all in?!” he exclaimed, looking at our trunk. His Australian shepherd stuck his nose into the car and sniffed around. The host told us where the best sites were. “You’ll probably see my horse running around too.” Sure enough, we rounded a bend to see a shaggy little horse standing on the side of the road, looking a little surprised to see us.

Our host coasted up to our campsite on his motorcycle as we were putting up the tent. “Seen any of those deer?” he asked. “Me and my horse were chasing some up there before I put my horse up for the night. I just had dinner: elk liver and onions! Tomorrow night it’ll be heart.”

Berck piped up, “I guess it’s a pretty rough night when you’ve got to eat the hoofs!”

The campground is located just in the foothills beneath the only snowcapped mountain in the area. It’s a beautiful spot, and we had the whole thing to ourselves. Plus, it is in a National Forest, which are much less Nazi-ish than National Parks, so we could build a fire! We built one from green juniper branches some idiot camper had chopped down, but which burned nicely in a hot fire, and some yucca stalks, which ignite quite well but smell like burned corn. We heated up some Chunky’s Soup and baked beans and grilled some sour dough bread and felt quite satisfied.

It got cold last night, though the drinking water didn’t freeze. Tonight I’ll have to try sleeping with more clothes on.

We bought Berck some long underwear at Wal-mart in El Paso yesterday, but after trying them last night, he swears he’ll never wear that pair again because they “get” him.