Hickeyfest

Friday – Sunday (Jun 19)

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.