Why now, and why this particular trip? Why Hickeyfest of course!!  A modest little indie rock festival along 101 in Leggett CA, on the patio of a roadside hamburger join called PegHouse, with camping right across 101 at the Standish-Hickey State Park Campground, nestled on the bluffs high above the scenic South Eel River.

It wouldn’t have occurred to me to go on my own, but Chad was super stoked, so I got stoked also! Turned out to be altogether rad, a perfect little nugget of rock star heaven. More on that later. The point here in the intro is that it starts Friday evening, and I want to take at least two days to get there, so last day I can leave is Wednesday.

I must see my Heart Doctor on Monday – lead time for appointments with busy, busy Dr Kedia is so long that I cannot really afford to punt it and reschedule. The short report on the visit is that I am too fat and don’t exercise enough, but all my various heart-related numbers are pretty good! … shockingly enough … And since I must be home Monday for that, I might as well stick around Tuesday, to watch my Golden State Warriors have a chance to close out the NBA Finals!!! That worked out awesomely! I would’ve DVR’d the game and seen it anyway eventually, but I was able to bask in the next four hours of interviews and celebrations and replays, over and over into the wee hours of the night. So satisfying …

Wednesday (Jun 17)

So today finally, is leaving day. Up at about noon (sadly, about average lately), hoof over to the Jungle for a coffee before I go, then finish up the usual preparations for closing down the condo for a couple of weeks – shower, shave, clean out fridge, turn up thermostat, clean toilet, clean kitchen (even a confirmed bachelor slob likes to return to a clean kitchen), order a sando and a salad for pickup from the deli, then BOOM! I’m on the road at a tidy 3:10 in the afternoon. Not everybody’s style I know, but it works for me.

Part of my traveling style is that if I am driving for > 2.5 hours, I have planned the day poorly, so 3:10 isn’t as depraved as it sounds. I-80 to Truckee, Route 89 north past Sierraville – I REALLY wanted to turn off and go to the hot springs, but not today, then Route 49 west through oh so picturesque Sierra City and Downieville to Rocky Rest CG on the enticing North Fork of the Yuba River.

I swam! It’s pretty buggy here, so my choices are to eat in the dark or close the van and turn on the lights. I choose the latter, so it’s a little stuffy, but bugless. Later I took the short walk back to the bridge to look at the stars in the pitch black, no moon darkness.

The neighbors are stlll weird. Maybe I’m just being cranky, their music is too loud, but at least it’s pretty good music, a couple of designer-drugged out City hipsters passed me on the bridge playing LCD Soundsystem, of which I am a complete fan-boy, so it could be way worse.

Didn’t get to sleep until 2:30-ish. No problems, it’s just that is my schedule nowadays. I slept nicely until I turned over around dawn and realized …. I FORGOT THE F—ING HICKEYFEST TICKETS!!! Oh fuck, I believe were my exact words to myself. Even though I’d had only 4-ish hours sleep, I couldn’t sleep any more, so I laid there a while, got up, walked back over to the river for a while, and with grim determination started very early on a much different day than I’d planned

Thursday

Looking back, I remembered to remember the tickets a few times, but never when I was at home, and for some reason, never with enough urgency to elevate it to a thing I MUST remember. Anyway, I waltzed right out of the house and 100 miles down the road without them. So … get up early today and drive 100 miles back to Reno – BIG sigh….

I took a different route back. Also, the route from Reno to Hickey will be quite a bit straighter than my previous plan, so it’s not all lost miles and time, but still this sucks pretty hard.

Got home noonish, the tickets were exactly where I picture them to be. I grabbed a couple of other things I’d forgotten (there’s always something…) and laid down on the sofa for a nice nap. I kinda knew that four hours sleep wasn’t going to get me through this long day, so the nap might as well happen on the comfort of my own sofa.

Left at 2:50, which oddly enough was a little earlier than I left yesterday. I’m weird.

The drive was really not that big a deal, in terms of normal – gettin places ‘cuz I gotta be at work on Monday – kind of trips that normal, not retired people do all the time. Five hours and 400 miles. But I’d already gone two hours and 100 miles as an appetizer, and besides I hold myself to a higher standard of leisure for my road trips.

Blast up I-80, past the annoying California Agriculture Checkpoint before Truckee just like yesterday (grrr!), blow past the 89 turnoff this time, all the way to the Route 20 turnoff. Nevada City, Grass Valley, Marysville, Yuba City, Colusa, Williams – I just blasted through all of them. Diesel in Colusa, then a stop at Granzella’s in Williams to acquire one more sando, eat some soup, and stock up on web pages for tonight.

Clear Lake was quite pretty and enticing in the late afternoon light, and I wish I had the leisure to stop and soak it up.

I got to my original destination, Lake Manzanita a little before sunset (6 hours and 335 miles), got my spot and settled in. Again I did not do the arcane check-in procedure. I am happy to pay someone if they come around or if they give me a non-insane procedure (such as that at every other campground I go to) but I ain’t calling no 800 number to give them my credit card. That is way too stupid to actually do.

For all that my detour home for the tickets was a huge pain and a time consuming waste of time and gasoline (roughly 170 miles and 3 1/4 hours), I don’t really feel too badly about it – in fact I feel pretty good! Go figure…

Instead of awaking and lounging in bed as is my usual wont, I awake and just get going. Lounging loses its charm when I am worried about getting busted by the campground police! I found a nice coffee and wifi place in Willets, then before you know it, I’m in Leggett, where Chad is already waiting for me!

Ha ha, joke’s on me!. We are basically the first civilians to check in for the festival. No one even looks at our tickets, or tears off the stub. All they do is notice that they are really pretty … since these are the first they’ve seen! Their whole security was to check our names off a list. AARRGH.

We spent the afternoon chillin’ at the campsite. I am NOT even tripping on my wasted 170 miles and 3 hours, really I’m not. :-\

The swimming hole here is just about perfect, except that it is without shade. It is as noted, down a steep 200-300′ path to get from the campsites on the bluffs to the river, it’s kind of a project to get to, so you pack for the day. It’s a lot of work to hop back to the car for your sunscreen. Chad went and had a nice swim. I walked down a little later and got to the edge of the trees and looked at the 40 yards of shadeless gravel, turned around and went back. The sun was too much for me.

Then it was time to walk across the road and check out the bands. The Friday bands I heard were:

• Lost Luvs – girl band from Eureka – I liked them!
• Everyone Is Dirty – really liked them
• White Manna – feedbacky and really good (sadly heard most of it from the campground ‘cuz I couldn’t get going)
• Blank Tapes – the very definition of burnt out rock stars – Chad didn’t like them from before, but I thought they were pretty good

Saturday was Lazy day. Chad went swimming early afternoon, and I embarked on a little adventure. The park map showed that there was a closed off road and even an unused section of campsites at river level. I walked down that road with the notion of following the river bed dowm to the pool and thence to the pool trail. Worked great. Picking my way over the rocks in the sun for a half-mile or so was kind of a death march, but I swam in my own private spot, then swam in the great pool, so I did it all!

Saturday bands I heard were:

• Mile High Club – pretty good – I wish I remembered who was who
• Sugar Candy Mountain – good clean psychedelic fun
• Vetiver – the only band I’d actually heard of – really liked them
• Range of Light Wilderness – love the name, the eastern Sierras – my favorite place is “Range of Light” country. These folks were my favorites I think.

Knowing my obsession with the Sunday SF Chronicle, Chad snagged on from the Peg House, bless that boy! From about noon onward, we are in “waiting for Martha” mode, so we hung around at the van, no hikes to the swimming hole. I turned on the propane and made us coffee on the van stove. Around noon I walked over and got us sandwiches, then Martha rolled in about 4. We all hung out for a while, they went down to the beach then left, leaving me to finish out the festival on my own.

Sunday bands I heard were:

• FpodBpod – dance party
• Cool Ghouls – tequila made these bands a little hazy
• Dead Meadow – ditto, see below

I had brought a half gal of margarita mix and a bottle Trader Joe’s tequila, but having had no ice I had not inflicted that particular potential disaster on myself until today. BUT … here on Sunday afternoon after the kids went home I noticed that the next door neighbors in our little hipster ghetto had emptied their cooler before the left. I hustled over there and collected enough ice to party out tonight! If only I would master the art of moderation when margeritas are involved. Anyway, I had a raging good time Sunday night, but do not actually remember much about the bands I enjoyed.

Monday – Saturday

Finally time to end this perfect weekend and rejoin the connected world. I am hung over from my tequila party, so it’s a slow morning. I knock the leaves off the awning and and roll it up. I think the awning is cool. I think I’ll use it more. Chad left some food among which is a banana, which is perfect hangover food – electrolytes and all that.

The coffee line at the Peg House was way too long. I clearly am not the only hungover hipster in the block, judging by the grim, dour faces and sullen silence of the folks waiting for their lattes. I punt this scene and hit the road. Eventually getting my coffee and a sando at a real nice little lunch spot in an industrial park outside Garberville, where nobody was hungover on Monday afternoon!

I have a nice six days in Eureka!  The only useful thing I did was use the convenience of a nearby garden hose to de-winterize my van – a fancy way of saying I put water back in my van water tank – I am ready for summer now!

Other than that I hung out with the family doing the usual family things until they left on Thursday. The two grownups and two kids piled in the family van and headed off to Marin, leaving me to enjoy their house by myself for a few days. On my own, I went into tourist mode:

• Friday – Morris Museum, shopping at Picky Picky
• Saturday – Fort Humboldt

and most interestingly to me, I went to the beach for sunset both nights I was on my own, proving again that that’s pretty much my favorite thing to do..

The fact that it’s triple digit temps in Reno and most everywhere else east of the Coastal Range changed my plans for these days. The idea of a few beach days in Oregon had sounded good, but the loop back through central Oregon and Norcal in a serious heat wave was not so appealing, so I just stayed in Eureka!

Sunday

I have been putting off leaving the coastal climate, and now that I have, all the awfulness of the Central Valley in summer comes back to me.

At 1pm I’m reading my paper and drinking coffee at Old Town Coffee with the high-end street people, the tourists, and a cross section of Hip Eureka. Temp is an oh so pleasant 67°. After a few hours winding along on 299, at 5:30 I’m parked in my own little white-lined parallelogram in a giant shadeless parking lot at Oak Bottom Marina, temp is 99°. I am in the relatively quiet uncrowded RV lot, but right across the curb the Sunday boating crowd is just starting to pack it in and head back to their real lives. The super loud noise of one-ton diesel pickups backing up to the boat ramp is the predominant sound

I go swimming twice between 6pm and sundown, why? because I can! Evening in these superhot places really is magical, almost but not quite worth the awful days. It’s a 300yd walk from my parking spot to the swimming beach. I walked over once to check it out, then walked over again at sunset to watch the reflection of the waxing gibbous moon in the water.

In addition to the excellent moon in the east, there are a couple of very bright things a little above the western horizon. Because my phone gets decent bars here I was able to inform myself that the really bright one is Mars, and the lesser light up and to the left is Jupiter. They were there my next two nights out also, and they made me very happy.

Damn that sun heats up the inside of van way too early in the day.

After being packed with so much noise and activity yesterday, the parking lot on Monday morning is back to its usual state of quiet emptiness. Going out and sitting outside in the shade of the van makes the heat a little more bearable, but inside, the van is cooking. When I pull the pillow away from the wall, it is quite hot to the touch from the outside heat radiating through the wall. First time I’ve wished I had a white van!

I leave this heating-focusing hellhole around 11 and make the short jaunt to Redding. I spend much of the drive heaping mental scorn on the dipshit Park Service cop who pulled me over last time and tried to make a federal case out if it – ha ha.

The Sandwichery is right on my route and gets good reviews, so I ease out of the traffic stream and grab a just-in-case sando. I won’t see much in the way of services for the next two days so it won’t hurt to stock up. Then I whip around the corner a few blocks to coffee at Brew, my go-to stop for wifi and a little dose of NorCal hipster vibe.

My plan is to create a little adventure for myself. Instead of the usual 44 east to Hat Creek, I take 299 east to Burney. I see a different part of Redding, which is as boring as the rest of it, but I cross the Sacramento River on a different bridge, which is kind of cool.

Today’s goal is to check out a BLM campground on the Pit River east of Burney. The direction 299 takes around here means that it is not quite on my way to anything, so I might not ever in my life drive down on this stretch of road unless I make a point to do so, so why not today? The directions to the campground are not awesome, but after a couple of false leads I find it and decide to stay. The notion of continuing onward to the cool shade at Hat Creek is enticing, but it’s probably 98° there also, and I will have better swimming here. Even in peak summer heat Hat Creek is too damn cold for me. So here, at 2:25, I’m putting down roots for the night.

The Pit River is kind of a big deal around here turns out. For such a modest river, it drains a ridiculously large part of the northeast corner of the state. Its headwaters are in Goose Lake. It flows from the Warner Mountains to the mighty Sacramento via Lake Shasta – 2425 miles long the info sign says! Apparently there’s a dramatic canyon a little upstream from here which I want to check out tomorrow.

Unlike Hat Creek, the water seems a little murky here, not the most sparkling in the world, but it’s plenty clean enough to swim in. I’m picturing my little river running through 400 miles or so of cow pastures between Goose Lake and here, and it’s not a pretty picture. The spot next to the picnic area is the most alluring -a little backwater lagoon with a small rill of rapids feeding it from the far side. Up 50 yards is a more dramatic line of rapids, just water over rocks dropping into quiet water in a straight line about 70 yds long. I was just enjoying it, but my addled and slightly worrisome camping neighbor told me it the whole landscape is basically mining waste, the straight line of quiet water is an old mining trench. Makes sense.

Strange people here, some sketchy stuff going on with the camp host. The fee here is $8, but a few of the sites are leaving the envelope with $7 attached to the site post where you normally clip the receipt. I finally figured out the host must be working a deal where you can either drop $8 in the paybox as usual or you can pay the host, a nice but again slightly creepy old man with a cane $7. Not a big deal, it adds to the feeling that this is just a sketchy place.

There was a large group of campers that radiated hostility – I tried out my failsafe disarming grin and hello. I got a little pulse from the cute girl, but all her dudes had their hard looks gangster going.

But the most disconcerting camper was the big friendly fellow at the next site, with his young but very large un-leashed or collared pit bull. When I was swimming first time he walked right up and started talking. The dog was cool. The guy kept trying to convince it to follow him across the deep water to the other side, and the dog was just not into it. As soon as it couldn’t feel the bottom it was very unhappy and would come back and sit next to me. Mellow dog.

But when I went back to the falls at dark to watch the swallows the dude (and dog) followed me down, and it started getting weird. He finished his can of soda and tossed the can in the bushes, and I said that wasn’t cool and harangued him a little bit about respect for a public place. He got a little huffy, told me I wasn’t really looking at nature as I had claimed, since this was just a big mining ditch (see above :). Eventually I asked him to leave me alone, which he did and that was that. But is was a little creepy. In retrospect, I think the guy was dumb as a sack of hammers. I think the dog realizes he is the brains of the outfit, so he has to be poised and attentive and non-threatening to set a good example to his owner. But perhaps I am projecting a bit :)

Tuesday

Partly cloudy today, which is mitigating the evil summer sun somewhat. Here at 11am it’s still a little cooler in the van than the outside, so I’m keeping the door shut for now.

Why do I have phone bars here and almost nowhere else in the great emptiness that is northeast Cali? My guess is the power station a mile upstream. Just a guess…

Before this trip, I think I used the awning only two times in the five years I’ve had the van. We set it up for the three days of Hickey and I kind of got the point. It’s not just the little spot of shade outside the van, it’s the fact that it’s keeping the sun from blasting into the van interior. So here, in the 100° Pit River Canyon, I decide to trot it out again, for just one night. I think I like it!

When I made it out of the canyon to 299 (exactly 2 miles), I drove east another 2 miles to an overlook on the real Pit River Canyon, a pretty impressive site. Then backtrack a few miles to head to Mt Lassen. Yelp says there is a breakfast place with wifi in Burney, so I take another 6 mile detour to hop over to Burney and do that. The Blackberry Patch had a nice waitress, an adequate omelette, good coffee and good wifi, so good choice.

Soon I am driving along Hat Creek, one of the prettiest runs of water in all the land in my opinion. Won’t be sleeping there tonight, sigh, but I did stop at Bridge Picnic Area a while just to take it in for a while.

Flash my Senior Pass to the nice man at the park gate, then mosey my way up the south side of Mt Lassen to South Summit Lake.

Went swimming and rather than going back for shoes, I ended up doing the loop walk around the lake in my flip flops. back to camp for dinner, then back to the lake for sunset/moonrise, in long pants and a hoodie – mosquitoes!!!

Wednesday

This is two days before the Fourth weekend, and the place is starting to fill up! Time for me to get going.  I stop at my favorite pull-off, the Mud Pots, because I love them. It is very hot today. I do not stop at the Visitors Center because I do not want to walk across the parking lot in this heat.

If I could replay the day I would have stopped at the park Visitors Center, dined in antiseptic but air-conditioned comfort. But instead I exited the park, took a left and stopped at Childs Meadow, a run-down but still functioning resort a little east of the park entrance. It’s in a charming little valley with a postcard-perfect view of Lassen. Generally I enjoy the place and the nice lady that runs it, but today it’s so fucking hot I just can’t get comfortable and enjoy my food. I do mange to eat it though :) and it gets me so Susanville.