John's Green Blog

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  • Hawaii, Hong Kong, Japan

    Trip to Hong Kong courtesy of Millers Outpost

    All credit to Laura for this whole adventure!

    She randomly filled out an interest card at our local Encinitas outpost of Miller’s Outpost….

    Then one day in early 1985 she got a letter in the mail (how quaint! :)) telling her she was selected for an all expenses paid trip to Hong Kong for two!

    That last bit about expenses for two was key of course because that meant that I got to come along with her!

    When it came to planning, the Miller’s Outpost folks were mellow about the details. Once we had been selected as the chosen ones, they just wanted it to go well and for everyone to come away feeling good about it. We did our part to make that happen!

    The plane tickets to Hong Kong allowed for one stopover in each direction. Here is how we worked that:

    • We had a friend of a friend who was doing one of those rich kid things:
      • He was a tennis instructor in a medium-sized town in Japan.
        • Work on your tennis,
        • see Japan,
        • meet cute girls,
        • … a win win win!
    • Neither Laura nor I had every been to Hawaii.
    • So we departed San Diego International
      • Flew to Oahu and spent 6 days.
      • Onward to Hong Kong, where they paid for a week(?) and we I think stayed for few more days on our own!
      • Onward to Narita Airport in Japan where we spent 8 days.

    Pretty good, if I do say so myself!

    Six days in Hawaii

    • Fly out of San Diego International Sunday night – Oct 20, 1985
    • Honolulu — six days of American-style vacation.
    • To get a free rent-a-car I subjected us to the obligatory time-share sales pitch. We actually signed up for it, but used the 24 hour grace period the law requires to change our minds. Whew! We explored every cool place in Oahu we could get to in two days of having the car.
    • We stayed at the Siam Inn.
    • Tu Oct 22 –
      • Endure the condo sales pitch to get the good deal on the rent-a-car.
      • Took a wrong turn on the hike Diamondhead,
        • so we missed the top but had a great day out!
    • W Oct 23 –
      • Breakfast with the condo salesman,
      • lovely counter-clockwise tour of the island!
      • Sacred Falls, 5 mile hike,
      • Sunset Beach
      • Hot squid at Siam’s tonight, a life-changing experience for me!
    • Th Oct 24 – Still have the car.
      • go snorkeling.
      • All the Asian food we’ve gotten here is very good.
      • All the American food is very bad.
    • Fr Oct 25 –
      • Laura got our condo deal un-done – such drama!
      • Lunch at Japanese restaurant
      • See the James Brown Band arrive at our hotel!
      • This got us stoked enough to actually go to the James Brown show that night.
        • Livin large on our big vacation!!
        • They charged an extra $5 for the second set!
    • – – – – –
    • Sa Oct 26 – Narita Airport –> Hong Kong

    Ten days in Hong Kong

    • Hong Kong — ten days in the Shamrock Hotel, a nice little spot in the Victoria district. Rode ferries and took the metro and walked our asses off and did quite a bit in those ten days!
    • Su Oct 27 – arrive, get settled
    • M Oct 28 – Shop till you drop in Tsim Sha Tsui.
      Take ferry to island, hike to peak!
    • Tu Oct 29 – Shop our way down Nathan Road.
      • Wonderful appetizers!
      • I shopped for cameras.
    • W Oct 30 – Public transit to cool temple in middle of high rises.
      • Bus to Aberdeen,
      • floating villages
      • Jumbo Restaurant – enjoyed watching the fish we were going to eat!
    • Th Oct 31 –
      • Dim Sum for breakie.
      • I’m very tired.
      • Laura explored till late!
    • F Nov 1 – Dim Sum again.
      • I discovered a basketball game on a local park!
        • I made a nuisance of myself and they let me play. Nice guys!
    • Sa Nov 2 – American breakfast, hang with some Aussies.
      • New Territories,
        • hike to temple,
        • burn incense,
        • bang a gong,
        • Shatin Mall,
        • Malasian satay+beer,
        • played basketball with the locals!
    • Su Nov 3 – Macao boat with a bunch of Danes.
      • Aberdeen Bay,
      • Repulse Bay,
      • anchor for lunch,
      • swim from boat!
      • Victoria Peak again,
      • hangover again
    • M Nov 4 – My Birthday!
      • Dim sum,
      • ferry to Cheung Chau island
        • Great food: squid and veggies
        • paid too much for binocs!
    • Tu Nov 5 – Picked up new glasses I ordered.
      • Shopped, played basketball!!
    • W Nov 6 – Shamrock Hotel guy fucked up on shipping luggage. 
      • Fly to Japan
        • ->Shinkansen train
        • -> Mishimu.
        • Yamamotos picked us up. YAY!

    Eight days in Japan

    The first stop heading out was easy, we’d both always wanted to see Hawaii.

    The stop coming home required a little more thinking. A good friend of a good friend (Rob) had scored a gig being a tennis coach an a small city in Japan. He was a good tennis player … way better than me … and was helping the good people of his part of Japan improve their backhands while he learned Japanese and they learned American English, and oh by the way he dated a super-cute local girl! I can only assume they had their own cultural exchange!

    In the planning we back and forthed with him a few times via email as one did in the 80’s, and soon it was it set up! We would visit Rob (Robo-san) and the Yamamotos in Japan for a few days on the way home!

    • W Nov 6 – Hong Kong -> Japan -> Shinkansen train > Mishimu.
      Yamamotos picked us up at the train. YAY!
    • Th Nov 7 – Rob lived with a lovely family, the Yamamotos, they treated us wonderfully! (better than Rob did…)
      • Today we visited Rob’s school,
      • ate sushi,
      • ate donuts,
      • shopped with the Yamamoto kids.
      • We went to a calligraphy class.
      • We drank beer
      • (I’m exhausted just making this list!)
    • F Nov 8 – Mama Y took us to Mt Ku.
      • Rob and Takako took us to a waterfall.
      • Volleyball that night – Laura let her inner athlete out and got really worn out. 🙂 
      • They go me way too drunk on hard liquor.
        • I embarrassed myself. It was bad. 🙁
    • Sa Nov 9 – SO hungover … They drink a lot, and on their home turf they hold their liquor a lot better thn I do.
      • We took train to the art museum
    • Su Nov 10 – “Fall leaves tour”
      • Shinkansen to Kyoto
      • Mt Fuji and Five Lakes with Toshio and friends that spoke good English.
      • Supper with Rob at the sushi bar.
    • M Nov 11 – 6:45 AM – goodbye to the Yamamotos.
      • Kuji > elem school, shorts+yellow cap;
      • Erina(?) > jr hi, “sailor” dress;
      • Takiko jr hi black, hi collar, gold button uniform! 
      • They were SO cool!!!!
    • Tu Nov 12 – A couple of more days in Japan on our own!
      • Kinkaku-ji (Zen Buddhist temple in Kyoto),
      • Nijo Castle,
      • autumn leaves
    • W Nov 13 – 8:10 Kyoto check out,
      • store stuff in Locker,
      • 8:30 catch bus to Kiyomizu Temple,
        • SUPER COOL temple high above city
      • 10:52 leave on bus, go to locker get our stuff
      • board airport bus 11:25,
      • arrive Osaka Airport 12:10 
      • Pretty easy after that! Airport by 3 -> leave 4:35

    Back to reality in ole boring Encinitas!

    Thanks a billion to Rosie and Roy, parents of Shannon, who consented to baby-sit Martha for that whole time!

    We 100% could not of conceived of doing it without y’all

  • Great Basin to Home

    Thursday Nov 9  Enterprise UT – Cave Lake SP NV – Ely NV

    I headed out of Enterprise on the wrong road.  After about 10 miles I figured it out.  I checked the map and discovered that about 20 more miles of gravel road would get me back to the road I want without backtracking!!  I decided to go with it. Loving my truck more than ever!

    Soon I’m in Nevada.  Near the border there are two towns.  The first, Panaca, is on the plain and is a straight-laced little farmers community, with this quaint Gunsmoke look and a 100 foot tall green butte in the middle of town Too closeto the Mormon influence I’m guessing. Twelve miles away, up in the mountains is the old mining town of Pioche, which used to be a real wild west kind of place they say, and has an entirely different feel even now.  It had an extremely pleasant little restaurant where I had breakfast, and a sassy little radio station that kept me company most of the morning (“We have a transmitter and we ain’t afraid to use it!”). 

    The forecast is for serious snow, and soon I can see where the clouds meet the ground up ahead (I got a decent photo of this).  Sure enough, about twenty minutes later the flurries started, and soon after that I was driving trough a pretty stiff little snowstorm.  I fell in love with the whole snow thing, and took a while lot of pictures.

    …

    I have had the most wonderful day.  The snowstorm made me stop in Ely at about 2:30 in the afternoon.  I’m getting smarter about this stuff, so I again got a place downtown, where I could walk to whatever I might need.  I got settled, took my little camera and wandered around the neighborhood and took snow pictures.  Ely is a pretty godforsaken-looking place under normal circumstances, but fresh fluffy snow worked its magic and it was enchanted on this day.  In the late afternoon (about 4 this time of year at the eastern edge of the Western time zone!) I walked to the Ely Public Library to read my email, and finish up my super snow day.

    I sure am glad I don’t have to be back at work next Monday.  :))))

    Friday Nov 10  Ely NV – Tonopah – Hawthorne – Mono Lake – Lee Vining CA

    A lot of driving today, but just looking at my pictures from the day confirms that I saw a lot of spectacular visuals today.  The snow, the clouds, the light.  Except for the stretch between Tonopah and Hawthorne when I joined US 95, the drive was very pleasant and fun.  There were way too many stressed Californians on 95.  

    Driving toward Mono Lake as sunset was cool.  I have become a Mono Lake groupie over the last few years, so the plan here was pretty clear — I got a room my usual motel, the shabby but scenic Gateway Motel, walked across the street to eat at the ever-reliable Nicely’s Cafe, and thought I was just going to return to my room and chill.  But it was snowing pretty heavily so I took a little walk.  From previous trips I know you can walk about 3/4 mile out of town to the Mono Lake Visitors Center, so I set out to do that.  It was again delightful to be out there in the falling snowflakes.  By the time I got there the moon, which was one day past full, was up and brightening the landscape despite the snow clouds.  So I decided to just go for it and take this nice little hike down to the Lee Vining Creek and back to town by moonlight.  I did, and it was easy to see the trail, and the moon came out on the way back, and all was great!

    Saturday Nov 11  Lee Vining CA – Bridgeport – Minden NV – Valley Springs CA

    It was clear, cold, and gorgeous this morning.  I was considering driving down past Mammoth to the Hot Creek there for a final soak before I head over the mountains, but decided it was a bit too brisk for that.  I did drive down to Mono Lake and ogle the tufa towers, and also drove the June Lake loop, then pointed myself north on US 395 to, sigh, head home.

    A few miles north of Bridgeport there is another hot creek, you can see it steaming from the road, right behind a fence with a bunch of really serious looking No Trespassing signs.  what a waste.  A few miles north of that is the Walker River canyon, which I think is a really neat place.  There are three Forest Service campgrounds along there that I have marked in my mental book to go back to when it’s warmer.

    Up to suburban hell of Minden – Garberville, then over Carson Pass on 88.  I was 12 miles away from another soaking opportunity at Grover Hot Springs State Park, but was so dazed I didn’t realize it till 50 miles later.

    SR 88 always looks good on the map, but is a real grind to drive as it turns out.

    On all my other vacations, at this time I would have to go ahead and power my way home to go to work the next day, but this is not just any vacation.  This is the vacation where my job died while I was gone.

    Also, I was feeling kind of wimpy about not camping in the cold weather so I looked for a place to camp.  The first place I checked out — xx State Park in Pine Grove CA was a really neat place, but it was still at about 3000 feet, and the nice old guy who was the Camp Host there said it got to about 24 degrees the previous night and he recommended that I drive another 25 miles to the campgrounds at Lake Camanche or Lake Pardee, which are lower and quite a bit warmer.

    I did that, and found that Lake Pardee was closed and Lake Camanche was hard to find in the dark.  Eventually I ended up at New Lake Hodge campground which was just a beautiful physical setting.  It was Saturday night, so there was a crew of noisy but wholesome boy scouts in one direction, and a crew of noisy and unwholesome rednecks cranking up really bad music from their pickup in the other direction. 

    It was also full moon, and just an all around lovely experience.

    Sunday Nov 12  Valley Springs CA – Rio Vista – Larkspur – Mill Valley

    Next morning, up early – COLD – probably got to low 30’s last night.  A really nice little breakfast place in Valley Springs, drove home through the delta , got lost a little bit on  the levees, made it home by about 2. 

    Went directly to Larkspur to see my sweet daughter Martha who missed me (and the truck :), then home to pick up the threads of my so called life.

    Hope y’all enjoyed the ride!

    the end

  • Utah

    From: John Freeman [johnfree@pacbell.net]
    Sent: Tuesday, November 21, 2000 1:58 PM
    Subject: Utah

    Featuring:

    • National Parks,
    • killer hikes
    • Snow!
    • Magic Mormon Moments, and
    • John loses his wallet.

    Sunday Nov 5  Monticello UT – Blanding – Capitol Reef NP – Torrey UT

    It snowed big fluffy flakes while I was loading the truck. Then it rained and snowed intermittently all the way to Blanding, but visibility was good and I could always see good weather a few miles off.  The Abajo Mountains behind Monticello were looking very dramatic as they were wreathed in their own private cloudbank.

    Blanding is the last town for 120 miles where I’m going, so I am banking heavily on being able to get a meal there.  It’s Sunday morning, and I got a bit of a scare as everything including the only grocery store were not open, but then there was a new restaurant on the far side of town that was open.  The food was average, as I have come to expect in Mormon-land, but the cheerful, intelligent kid serving it kind of made up for it (and for the surly BYU football player type who seated me — ease up on the steroids sonny!).

    Well-fed (well, fed anyway), I head off on a part of the trip I’ve been looking forward to since I conceived the notion of this journey, the drive on Rtes 95/24/12 across the interior of Utah.

    The weather had cleared while I was dining, and all vestiges of low spirit in mind and body magically went away and stayed away as soon as I hit that wide-open road, I am pleased to say! 

    The first few miles are the usual mesquite and sagebrush, but then you bust through a road cut into something called Comb Ridge and the fun begins.  It’s one of those up-tilted ridges that is only 200 feet tall on the eastern approach (the shallow tilt side), but on other side drops away in a 1,200 sheer cliff that extends to the horizon in both directions.  The valley below has a little stream and clumps of cottonwoods that are still bright yellow.  There’s a couple of campers down there that are obviously braver about the cold than I, but then they have heaters in those things, don’t they?

    The next 30 miles are generally red sandstone mountains on the left and white sandstone hills and gorges on the right.   I start catching an occasional glimpse of Lake Powell off to my left.  Eventually I wind my way down to lake level and across a nifty bridge over an arm of the lake.  

    I do not like Lake Powell.  In fact, I do not like most of the man-made lakes I’ve seen on this trip — including the TVA-created lakes in Tennessee.  They just don’t seem like they belong.  There is an increasingly vocal movement to get rid of dams whenever possible, and I’m totally for it.  I look at the beauty of the land around Lake Powell and think of the beauty of the canyons that are slowly filling up with muck at the bottom of the lake and it makes me a little sick.  Nuke it, I say!

    As I approach Capitol Reef National Park I pick up the Fremont River, which is pretty much raging down the mountain to join Lake Powell after the snow/rains of recent days.  There’s a place where it squeezes through some harder layers of rock where it makes a really neat waterfall/rapids thing where I spend some time.

    I whiz through Capitol Reef National Park with the notion of getting a room in the town of Torrey then coming back for sunset.  So here I am at 3 PM on Sunday about to stumble on another Mormon cultural oddity.  At the first motel I tried, there were two groups of people leaving as I was coming to the motel office.  One bunch was led by a guy in black suit/white shirt/dark tie, and the other were a stylish young couple.  The couple pealed out of the lot in a hurry.  After the motel woman waved them all goodbye, I had my pleasant smile on, expecting some sort of warm afterglow smile from her.  But instead I got a really intense hate stare for just a second before the mask of formality resumed.  That kind of spooked me, but after I looked at the room and came back and she had her normal pleasant demeanor back in place. 

    I didn’t like the room (or that strange little interlude), so I went to another place, and guess what?  There’s a group of people in their Sunday best leaving that place also! 

    So what is Anthropologist John’s conclusion?  That there is a Sunday visit thing in the Mormon culture that out here in the hinterlands is nearly mandatory.  Three o’clock must be the earliest time it is acceptable to leave, and therefore since no one really wants to be doing it anyway, they all sit around sneaking peeks at the clock till three when they can get the heck out of there.  At the first place the hostess didn’t like the people, but she had to be nice to them, but as soon as she didn’t have to have her happy face on for them her suppressed emotion came out on the first hapless being who came her way — me!

    At the second place, by the way, there were three Mom-types and 7 or 8 kids all over the place and I only saw one guy, so I have a secret theory that there was a little polygamy thing going on, but that is, as they say, “pure speculation” 🙂

    Anyway, back to the trip.  I had asked the nice ranger for a good sunset hike, and he fixed me up with a dandy.  3 1/2 miles, 900 feet elevation, to the top of Chimney Rock.  The moon is waxing half full, so I got to do the thing I love so much, namely watch the sunset from the TOP and enjoy the deepening twilight and then moonlight on the way down.  It was super!  This was before I figured out why my pictures were turning out blurry, so the pictures of this are of uneven quality.  I had this concept of taking a series of pictures of the same landmark at intervals as I hiked along and then putting them together in a crude animation sequence, but it didn’t work out too well.

    Monday Nov 6  Torrey UT – Escalante – Bryce NP – Panguitch UT

    This motel had a kitchy little restaurant, so I had breakfast there.  Same three Moms, countless kids, and no Dads.  hmmmm… More indifferent Mormon cuisine. 

    Within 20 miles I am at 9,200 feet and driving through flurries on a snow-covered road.  It’s beautiful up here, and I feel like Mr. Cool and In Control in my 4WD truck.

    Came off the mountain to the town of Boulder, a pretty little farming and cattle community.  It is one terminus of a 120 mile scenic gravel drive called the Burr Trail (dunno why) which winds into the wilds of Capitol Reef, into an area called Waterpocket Fold.  I’m not driving that this time, but I have a feeling that the Waterpocket Fold is really cool and I am as of now already planning my next trip to this wonderful area to take that road. 

    I climb out of the valley, driving along on white limestone that looks like frozen sand dunes, on the way to Escalante.  I pull off at a harmless looking scenic vista and notice a gravel road and a sign that this is the Hell’s Backbone loop road to Escalante.  So instead of a 27 mile paved road I could take a 42 mile unpaved road.  I’m still feeling unfulfilled about not taking the Burr Trail, so I make one of those classic guy impulse decisions to JUST DO this 40 mile drive and see what the Hell’s Backbone is all about.

    The first 10 miles is pretty pleasant, even a quaint backcountry farming community to drive past, but then the road starts climbing.  By the time I get to the actual Backbone (a narrow ridge with a road on top) the snow is pretty deep.  There is a one-lane bridge spanning the 100 foot deep gap between two parts of the Backbone that is kind of exciting.  The truck is handling the snow well, so I’m pleased.  But the road keeps climbing and the snow is getting deeper.  Finally there is a shaded uphill stretch where the snow is really deep, where the snow in the middle of tire tracks is higher than my clearance (a foot 1/2 or two feet!) and I start to slide and drift to one side and then the other.  That really got the old heartbeat racing, but I made it around the corner into the sunnier side where the snow was less, and soon after that the road started heading downhill and I lived happily ever after instead of having a really interesting disaster story to tell.  I’m still a 4-wheel novice so I don’t know if I was really in trouble or if all that sliding and drifting was just business as usual in the 4WD world.  But I did confirm that my beautiful truck can handle a pretty stiff snow pack, but is not invincible 🙂  Two important pieces of information!

    Ate lunch at the only restaurant in Escalante, where I had today’s Magic Mormon Moment.  As I came in the waitress was deep in conversation with some locals about a local kid who ran away from his mission and his parents refused to let him back into the house, and in fact completely disowned him.  To their credit, the locals thought the parents were being f—ed up.

    Drove on through more red rocks, gray rocks, pink rocks, green rocks, and even a few mauve and lavender rocks.   There’s so much beauty here.  There were sections that look like Death Valley, the subtle colors and subtle patterns of erosion.  There was another section where the layers were wrinkled and eroded in such a regular manner that there these little 300′ tall sentinels of harder rock sticking out of this ridge every half mile like clockwork, for about 7 miles.  Hard to explain but awesome to see.

    Today’s endgame is to do a sunset hike in Bryce Canyon, then find a room on the other side of the park.

    Bryce is at about 8,000 feet.  One of the exhibits says the temperature drops below freezing over 200 days a year here!  This apparently is why Bryce, with the same rocks as other places, is the only place to have the weird formations it does, because of the constant freezing/thawing action. 

    Again a nice ranger fixed me up with a rockin’ hike.  4.5 miles, maybe 700 feet elevation, going down then up, rather than the usual up then down.  The red rocks with white snow on them were beautiful.  Once you are down in those canyons looking up at the formations in the lengthening shadows it gets pretty spooky.  The forms are so weird and plastic and evocative in that Rorschach inkblot kind of way that I would be a little leery of taking mind-altering drugs down here.  It’s plenty mind-altering cold turkey, as it were…

    Again I dawdle until I can see a serious moon shadow, hanging out on the now deserted overlook to watch the formations by moonlight, then I drive about 25 miles to the little town of Panguitch.  There were some Roosevelt Elk munching grass by moonlight near the road — cool!

    Tuesday Nov 7  Panguitch UT – Zion NP – Springdale UT

    Panguitch seems to have quite a bit more personality than most of these little burgs in the daylight — interesting stores, interesting architecture.

    Anyway, I head out of town, back past Red Canyon, the gateway to Bryce through which I had blasted in the dark last night.  I follow the Sevier River upstream until it disappears into a bog, then pick up the headwaters of the Virgin River and follow it downstream toward Zion National Park.  The road takes me past a desolate little community with the scary name of Orderville.  I zip through Zion to the adjacent town of Springdale to get a room before today’s monster hike.  I again foolishly stop at the first place I see, which turns out to be a campground with some tiny little cabins.  

    The monster hike in question is the Angel’s Landing Trail.  Only five miles, but 1,460 feet elevation, it takes you to the top of one of those super-dramatic promontories in Zion Canyon.  Climbing to the top you’re on a ridge that’s maybe 12 feet wide in places, which is plenty wide, except that on each side of that 12 feet there is a 1,400 foot sheer drop!  It’s really exciting, and if you have any secret acrophobia issues hiding in the dark corners of your psyche, this is pretty sure to bring ’em right out into the daylight!  I dawdled around at the top till almost sunset, and had another delightful time in the gathering gloom on the way down.  I noticed something on the way down, I could actually see the shadow of the moon move!  I could stand on the trail just inside of the shadow of the opposite side of the valley, and watch the edge approach me as the moon rose higher.  And pretty quickly too, like a 10 count would clear a bush, and a count to 50 or 80 would clear a whole pine tree!

    Toward the end of the hike I started thinking about how our next president had probably been elected while I was enjoying the moonlight.  Boy was the joke on me on that one!

    Tonight’s MMM isn’t as dramatic, it’s just a couple of beefy young (20-25) guys at the register of the local diner discussing having children. One wants to have a boy first and one wants to have a girl first — the implication being that they will each have many, many kids.  Basically I have this disconnected Stepford Wives kind of vibe whenever I’m interacting with people in the Beehive State.

    Wednesday Nov 8  Springdale UT – La Verkin – St George – La Verkin – Enterprise UT

    Froze my ass off in my tiny little cabin.  I steeled myself to the depressing thought that George W is probably president by now and turned on the TV, only to find instead that Indecision 2000 was in Day 2.

    I hung around Zion for the morning — I did another 2 mile hike, the Watchman Trail, which is supposed to be the best sunset or early morning hike.  I did it at 9AM and it was pretty fine, but would have been even better earlier when the shadows were longer.  I drove to the back of the valley to admire Angel’s Landing one more time and follow the progress of itty bitty hikers at the top with my binoculars.

    I finally left and headed down the Virgin River valley, through the town of Virgin, which recently had its 15 seconds of fame for *requiring* guns of residents.  I got gas at the town of La Verkin, drove another half hour and stopped to get a sandwich, and could not find my wallet!  massive bummer!!  I rummaged and re-rummaged the truck, and still no wallet.  mega-yuck.  I found the gas receipt, called the station and they didn’t have my wallet.  Serious desperation is setting in.  I have $120 stashed in my suitcase, and without my trusty MasterCard, I think my only option is to power drive home to Marin and regroup. 

    The only useful thing to do before that is to drive back to that station anyway, because I am completely  f—ed without my wallet.  So I retrace my path through rush hour St George (no big deal) and the 20 miles of SR 9 to La Verkin (which was actually kind of a pretty drive except for the stress, the canyons of Zion in the distance with the sun at my back), and oh glory be, my wallet comes back to me! :)))  To make a long story short, some honest citizen saw it on the street while driving past, called the station and left his number just in case, and then drove my wallet back when I got back to the station and called his number.  Amazing!  I must have done something retarded like left it on the roof of the truck and drove off.  sometimes I wonder…..  Again I become living proof of the adage that if you can’t be smart at least you can be lucky.

    So I drove back through St George for the third time.  By the time I got through with this little drama it was 4:30, but I don’t like the crowdedness and suburban-ness of St George and I just didn’t want to stay there, so I lit out on SR 18, into yet another bitchin’ desert sunset. 

    Drove to the town of Enterprise, which does have a motel I’m happy to say.  I went to the room marked “office”, which turned out to be a motel room occupied by an elderly gent breathing out of an oxygen tank, with a paper cup of bullets and a hunting knife on his table.  A little weird, but he was a right friendly old cuss after he put his tank on a cart we rolled out to look at the rom.  This funny looking little motel turned out to be pleasant and comfortable, and the little town of Enterprise had a friendly little diner with good food, and best of all I had a wallet to pay for it all!  :)))

  • Mountain West

    Sent: Monday, November 13, 2000 11:06 PM

    Subject: Mountain West

    Wednesday Nov 1 Albuquerque NM – Jemez Springs – La Cueva NM

    It’s 36 degrees at 9 AM, but it is supposed to be mostly sunny today. There are severe storms going on back in western Oklahoma where I was last night, so I am glad to be here instead of there!

    I feel crappy, I think these weather changes have wiped me out. Scratchy throat, run dowwwwnnn 🙁 And it seems SO cold!!! I’m trying to talk myself into a better attitude about the weather. When I started this trip, I was fully prepared for cold weather. But those two or three weeks of unseasonable warmth and humidity in the south got me all soft and thin-blooded. Just three days ago I was scampering around in shorts and flip flops, and here I am now in negative wind chill territory and not digging it at all!

    So anyway, off I go to do New Mexico. I plan to head into the Jemez Mountains and see what develops. After escaping Albuquerque I pass a couple of Pueblos. They are closed to the public today, which is just as well, because I wouldn’t go anyway! At the one pueblo I visited on a previous trip I got such massive waves of Native American hostility that I am happy to leave them to do their Native American thing in peace without me.

    I have loved the Jemez Mountains since the first time I came through them in the 70’s, but today I feel like I’m in one of those troughs where all my biorhythms have bottomed out at the same time. So I kinda just go through the motions. The little town of Jemez Springs is still funky (in a good way).

    There is an unimproved, uncommercial hot springs in the mountains here called Spence Hot Springs. I don’t really feel like doing it, but sick or not, I’ll be darned if I’m gonna drive past a soaking opportunity. So I park at the unmarked lot, walk down the hill, across the creek, and a couple of hundred yards up the other side of the hill, to where this hot water comes out of the side of the mountain. There’s an upper pool about 15′ long and 3-4 feet wide, which flows into a lower, cooler pool. Somebody has mortared a few rocks in strategic places to increase the pool depth, but otherwise it is just as nature made it, and I say kudos to the Forest Service for just leaving it alone. The air temp is about 40 degrees and it looks like it wants to snow, but all in all it felt pretty good.

    I continued to the top of the hill and decided to stay at this little motel at the junction called La Cueva, a well-maintained little lodge with a little restaurant and store in the parking lot. It funny how these little places are often more convenient than the big city places. I mean, there is nothing else happening for miles and miles, but I can walk from my room to a restaurant and grocery store.

    Thursday Nov 2 La Cueva NM – Los Alamos – Taos – Alamosa CO

    I’m at 7600 feet, and everything in the car was frozen solid this morning. Unpacking last night I discovered that my water cube had rolled around and opened itself a bit, and has completely soaked my suitcase with Hot Springs water. bummer 🙁 So there are articles of clothing spread all over my little room, drying out. Another crummy thing happening to a crummy-feeling guy (whine, whine).

    I know there is a lot of super-cool stuff to do in this area, but I don’t feel like doing any of it today. Foremost is Bandolier Monument – on that 70’s trip, I took psychedelic drugs, hid from the rangers at closing and spent the night in one of those hollowed out holes in the cliff wall that the natives used to use — now THERE’s a memory 🙂 But I just pass it by today. The road cuts outside the park were the same kind of really soft volcanic tuff as I slept in, so I at least got a little reminder of the feel of the place.

    Another great thing I didn’t do is take the turnoff for Puye Cliff Ruins. I loved this place three years ago, I found it to be the most spiritual of all the Indian ruin type places I’ve seen.

    So I took the scenic route in to Taos, ate a piece of pie, then took the scenic route out of Taos. Really nice drive, up to 9,000 feet, a big wide mountain meadow. I guess all I have energy for today is sitting on my butt in the truck watching the scenery go past.

    The neatest part of the day turned out to be the drive due north from Taos to Fort Garland CO, then due west to Alamosa. It’s a wide flat plain with the Sangre de Christo mountains on my right, and some unknown Colorado range to the left about 50 miles away. Beautiful sunset!

    I crossed the Rio Grande, which flows through downtown Alamosa, and took a room right downtown, so I would walk from the motel and check out the ‘hood. There were a couple of coffee houses, a cute little hippie store and about five Mexican restaurants. A nice little town, all in all. I’m getting more and more into taking rooms downtown whenever possible. No matter how tiny the downtown, it’s a lot more interesting than being out there on the fringe in a Motel 6 with the McD’s and Pizza Hut and strip malls.

    Friday Nov 3 Alamosa CO – Pagosa Springs CO

    Last night I was at 7,600 feet and thought I was really high up. But it turns out that Alamosa and this whole darned plain is at 7,600 feet!

    My destination tonight is Pagosa Springs which is only about 100 miles away, so I decide to treat myself to a wildlife refuge this morning! I backtrack across the slightly frozen Rio Grande about 6 miles to the Alamosa Wildlife Refuge. It was really nice. The sound of Canada geese honking in the wild is just one of those special things. There was a nature center with a really novel display: a collection of animal parts you could pick up and hold! There were the expected bones and antlers from various critters, but the really amazing (and slightly ghoulish) items were the bird wings! There were eagle wings and owl wings. They were pretty big, a foot or foot 1/2 long, and incredibly lightweight and sooo soft! But it was a little gruesome to hold this piece of a real bird in your hands, with the rest of the bird missing.

    There’s another refuge about 20 miles down the road that is alleged to have whooping cranes this time of year, but I don’t take that turnoff. All this itime in Colorado I have been inn the San Luis Basin, 7-8,000 feet, the largest high altitude basin in the world. There are lotsa marshes and prosperous-looking farms, and impressive ranges of mountains in every direction.

    I follow the Rio Grande up the end of the valley until it is just an itty bitty creek at the side of the road. I continue upward into a 25 minute road construction wait, then through light snow at Wolf Pass (about 10,000 feet), then down the other side to the San Juan River valley, heading to Pagosa Springs.

    What’s the big deal with Pagosa Springs you say? The springs, of course! It’s another one of those geothermal wonder places, with steam and hot water just bubbling out of the ground here and there all over the place. On the banks of the San Juan, right in the middle of town is a spa called The Springs, that I discovered three years ago, and that I like enough to have zigged about 150 miles out of my way to visit. It has 14 tubs, and is really creatively designed. The outflow of the upper tubs flows into this little lake that steams in the winter. The outflow of the lower tubs flows directly into the river, which you are welcome to treat like a fifteenth, very cold tub if you are so inclined.

    I slithered from pool to pool for about three hours. Wonderful. I had sort of thought I’d drive to Durango for the night, but I’m so wasted that it seemed smarter to stay here. I almost didn’t get a room. It’s hunting season, and the places was almost sold out. Hunters seem to be a pretty crusty lot, from what I’ve seen at the restaurants around here. Guys getting into their guy-ness can be pretty gross for the rest of us sometimes. 🙂

    After getting my room I walked the mile or so back across town to party down at the Bear Creek Inn, which was alleged to be the place to go by the towel bunny at The Springs. It was a fun place, but it turns out that three beers was too much for me — who knew??

    Saturday Nov 4 Pagosa Springs CO – Durango – Dolores – Monticello UT

    Hey, it’s my birthday! hmmm… so here I am, hung over and still wallowing in the malaise I’ve been in since it got cold. not very birthday-like 🙁

    But the show must go on. I followed the San Juan River out of Pagosa Springs, as the valley gradually got wider and turned back into the high plains. I drove through the outskirts of Durango, and onward. The land was agricultural for a while, but gradually got more high desertish.

    I drove past the entrance to Mesa Verde without checking it out. I’ve seen it before, and the idea of seeing it again just didn’t turn me on.

    I did take a little side road to get to US 666 (honest there really is a US 666!), and as luck would have it, that detour took me right past the Anasazi Cultural Center, which was a really cool place. There were ruins of a Anasazi village from 1100-ish at the top of a hill from which you could see forever. The museum was cool also, and coolest of all, I arrived 40 minutes before a presentation about Navaho code talkers, with one of the last living code talkers there to yak for about an hour. It was really cool listening to this old guy talk in his cool Navaho cadence. About every third sentence he would say “and that’s the way it was”, like he was at the campfire telling the story of First Mother and Laughing Boy.

    It was noticeably cooler and cloudier when I came out, but clear in the direction of Utah, where I am headed.

    I get to Monticello UT, find my cheap room, drive around the town (about 8 blocks total), notice the library and find that it’s open till nine tonight. I drive a bit up the gravel road into the Abajo Mountains to watch sunset, then order a pizza, and go “home” to eat, then walk over to the library till closing. See, that downtown thing pays off again!

    So that’s my big birthday Saturday night.

  • The Prairie

    From: John Freeman [johnfree@pacbell.net]

    Sent: Monday, November 13, 2000 11:06 PM

    Subject: The Prairie

    Monday Oct 30  Clayton AR – Sulphur OK – Altus OK

    It rained like crazy off and on all last night, and it’s still raining as I load the truck in the morning.  There were a couple of truckers at the Country K talking about snow and rain in Albuquerque, which was not encouraging.  I kind of resign myself to an un-fun, damp day, but it turned out OK.

    Once I’m driving, the rain starts slacking off almost immediately — wahoo!  I’m taking these little roads across the southern part of Arkansas.  I’m having the same navigation problem I had back in Tennessee, namely that most of the mountains in the US run north-south, so most north-south roads are pretty straight, but most east-west roads seem to never go straight for very long before they have to zig up or down to find the next pass.  So my road, SR 7, is good but not fast, and has a right angle turn every 30 miles or so.  It’s mighty pretty country, though…

    After the clouds moved out, it got really hot and humid.

    Late morning I came to Sulphur OK which is the gateway to the Chickasaw National Recreation Area.  This place is loaded with springs.  There are clear water springs and stinky mineral springs both in abundance.  They are all cold water springs — I associate the heavy sulphur smell with hot springs, but these weren’t hot!  This place was also built by the WPA back in the 30’s, so it has an aura of faded elegance about it. 

    Oklahoma appears to be the road kill capital of the country on this day.  Every couple of minutes would be a squished coon, possum, or armadillo on the road.  The countryside is mostly forest, and maybe the rain somehow dulls the poor critters’ sense of the danger, but whatever the cause, it is a smorgasbord of delight for the local crows – yeech.

    More driving brings me to Lawton OK, one of those Sooner land rush towns — its population went from 0 to 10,000 over one night they say…  My only business with Lawton is to go to the local AAA and pick up an Arizona-New Mexico tour book to round out my collection, and after that I head for the hills till dark. 

    These particular hills are the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge, which turns out to be yet another rockingly cool place!   Its claim to fame is as the place where your federal government brought the bison back for the brink of extinction.  It’s a gorgeous place, big round reddish beige rocks, bison all over the place, including standing right in the road looking at you!  They also maintain herds of Roosevelt elks and gen-u-ine Texas longhorns.  I had a grand time watching this big bull elk munching grass for a while through the binocs.  His big rack of antlers appeared to kind of wave and undulate as his head bobbed up and down.  Longhorns are pretty impressive beasts also.  Even though they are just cows, they are really studly-looking cows.

    I drove to the next cheap motel in Altus OK in the last remnants of sunset.

    Tuesday Oct 31  Altus OK – Amarillo TX – Albuquerque NM

    The forecast on the Weather Channel this morning is kind of scary.  It is very cold and snowing in New Mexico (my next destination), and there’s a severe storm watch for the area I’m in now (western Okla. and the Texas panhandle, home of the sudden tornado) for the afternoon.  Outside it’s windy and threatening as I load the truck.  uh oh….

    On the way through the middle of Altus I see a friendly looking Mexican restaurant, so I have my first chorizo con huevos of the trip (a long time between chorizos for me 🙂  It was cheap and good and there was a cool mural on the wall.  It was a standard Mexican restaurant landscape, except it was done with spray cans by some kid with tagger sensibilities.  I took a couple of pix that I hope show it well.

    drive, rain, change to warm clothes ‘cuz it’s cloudy and cold, pee, drive, pee, drive, sun comes out – change to summer clothes ‘cuz it’s hella humid, pee, drive, get gas, freeze and change back to warm clothes, drive, get New Mexico tourist info, pee, drive, stop for sunset ‘cuz the glare is killing me, pee, drive.   More than you really wanted to know???

    No matter where you cross the US, you eventually have to deal with Kansas, which is to say you’ll have to put in a day or so of driving through featureless nothing in the middle of the country (aka the Great Prairie), and today is my day.  There were a couple of possibly interesting places along the 450-ish miles, but I’m still kind of freaked about the weather forecast.  It would be hard to relax with a severe storm coming my way.

    Most of the day I am on I-40.  I’ve probably been within a hundred miles of I-40 for most of the whole return trip from North Carolina.  I flirted with it in Memphis TN, and now I am joining it again outside Amarillo to get to New Mexico.  According to the map there really are no other good choices for getting from here to there.

    The bad weather and I rushed past each other going opposite directions pretty quickly and with no major problems.   The weather made for some fine clouds and a super fine desert sunset that I had to drive right into.  Immediately after the sun went down while the colors were still strong was pretty cool.  I enjoyed the reflection of the lavendar clouds on the molded hood of my white truck as best I could going 70 mph on a crowded interstate.

    I find out later that the temperature on today’s drive dropped from the 70’s to the 30’s.  I found a place in Albequerque and holed up for the night.

    In my plans, I was going to be doing a lot of camping in the area I’m heading into, but lows of 15-20 degrees at night??  I am rethinking this concept…

  • Clinton Country

    Saturday Oct 27  Bolivar TN – Hot Spring AK

    Bolivar is named for the Liberator, Simon Bolivar. He has statues in front of City Hall and in the library (where I was reading e-mail again).  I have no idea what is the connection between this swampy little Arkansas town and The Liberator of Five Countries. I didn’t have the mental energy to ask the librarians, so it will remain a mystery.

    It is hot and flat.  I drive the 60-ish miles to the outskirts of Memphis, which is even more hot and flat.  I decide that I might as well get a little more hot and flat as long as I’m in it, so instead of just blasting across the mighty Mississippi on the I-40 interstate bridge, I decide to take a left on US 11 and do a fifty mile jaunt down the eastern side of the river into the state of Mississippi, so I can soak up a bit more of the Delta thing and cross the Mississippi River at 50 mph on a more intimate bridge rather than some giant concrete freeway span at 70 mph.

    What a great plan.  My spirits rose almost immediately after I got off the freeway.  The drive was fun, with additional unexpected interest because it turns out that there are HUGE casinos springing up in little podunk towns along the river down here in the state of Mississippi.  Not a good thing or a happy thing to see, but kind of interesting nonetheless…

    Oh yeah, in the far ‘burbs of Memphis was a living, still-in-business drive-in movie theater – two theaters in fact, back to back with a shared concession stand in the middle.  Bring ’em back I say!

    I turn right about 12 miles before Clarksdale, Miss, about which there is a famous blues song to the effect of “going down to Clarksdale”…  I crossed the river on a cozy little two lane steel girder bridge into the town of Helena, Arkansas, which styles itself as the home of the Delta blues.  The river itself looked pretty pitiful today; about a third of its width was a big sand bar instead of water.   It looked bigger when I crossed its tributary the Ohio back in Pittsburgh, a thousand miles upstream!

    The drive through the pleasant, slow-movin’ bottomlands of eastern Arkansas was nice but slow since the roads weren’t very good.  There was nothing on my maps worth stopping for, so I basically drove at a leisurely pace all day.  Eventually the land started getting more hilly and less swampy.  Eventually I ended up in Hot Springs, AR, childhood home of President Bill Clinton, and home of Hot Springs National Park.

    I score big time by getting a decent room right downtown, with the National Park right across the street. 

    This place turns out to super-great! 

    When Thomas Jefferson bought the Louisiana Territories from the poor broke Frenchies back in 1803, these hot springs were already known.  He sent surveyors to check it out, and everyone was so impressed by them that they were declared federal property!

    The hot springs were set aside as federal property all the way back in 1832

    850K gallons of water at 143 degrees(!) come out of the ground every day.  They say this water takes 4000 years to cycle from being runoff in these Arkansas hills, to filtering 8,000 feet underground, where it gets super-heated and shoots back to the surface.  It’s among the most sterile water known in the world, and it makes for a heckuva hot tub soak!

    The hot water is all collected in one place and distributed to various bathhouses and hotels under federal control.  Kind of a weird setup. 

    After walking up the Lookout Peak for a cloudy sunset I got a park brochure, from which I was able to find the Libbey Memorial Physical Medicine Center and Health Spa, where I soaked myself to a prune until closing time.  

    It is a GREAT spa.  There were hot tubs, cold tubs, really hot tubs, a bubbler thing, a pool, a hot pool, an outside patio, a steam room and what they called a “dry steam room”, which is of course is the federal government’s way of saying “sauna”.  

    It wasn’t perfect, the place has seen a lot of wear and tear and some of the bubbler motors had the un-relaxing sound of jet planes taking off, but the tools to fulfill most of my hydro-therapeutic fantasies were in place and at my service!

    There are at least three places around town where public spigots are set up so citizens may have as much of this hot water as they can carry off.  There’s even an ever-running water fountain, which goes to show you that your federal government does have a sense of humor, since it is pretty hard to drink water at 130 degrees!

    I filled up every plastic bottle that I have accumulated in five weeks (quite a few!), and also one of those 2 1/2 gallon collapsible plastic water cubes I bought for the still-to-come desert portion of this trip.  The hot water softened up the plastic, so that when I carried it back to the truck it permanently morphed into a water sphere instead of a water cube, and has been rolling around the back of the truck ever since. 🙂

    For everyone’s future reference, this is a really fine place to visit that I completely recommend.  I think the big fancy hotels with their own (federally regulated 🙂 spas are a reasonable $100-ish/night, but I managed to find a perfectly comfortable hovel for $35, only a block and a half from the Arlington Hotel, which looked to be the class of the group to me — I glimpsed its spa on the hill behind the hotel, and it looked swank.  It even had a pretty sweet Lawrence Welk dance party thing going on in the lobby bar!  Saturday night, y’know…

    Sunday Oct 28  Hot Spring AK – Ouachita Mountains –  Clayton AK

    Walked downtown for breakfast (crowded, but hey, it’s Sunday morning), then toured the park some more.

    The showpiece of the park is “Bathhouse Row”, which is a row of eight beautiful turn of the century bathhouses that have been shut down for decades except for two – one is still a working bathhouse, and the other is restored to be the Park headquarters and a Park Service exhibit.  The working bath house was closed while I was there (Sat night and Sun), but the exhibit bath house is just a delightful place.  I read a novel recently set in the late 1800’s that detailed the weird diets and Victorian control freak health regimens that were all the rage then, and the health hardware in this building fit right in.  If you are at all into massage you would find it fascinating.  I got some pix, but my camera batteries died prematurely.

    As with Asheville, NC, this place looks like a place I could live (but maybe I’m being delusional).

    This is the start of the Ouachita Mountains (pronounced “Washitah”), which extend well into eastern Oklahoma.  The are very beautiful — mostly oaks, rather than the maples and birches of the eastern forests, so they aren’t particularly colorful, but they’re still pretty darned scenic.  I planned to take the ridge road, but the weather got ever more overcast, to the point where I had almost no visibility, so I walked down the to the valley for a while, then walked back up to the ridge when it cleared for a nice hike. 

    The forest was lovely and drippy and quiet.  There’s a historical marker that says I am walking on the Old Military Road, which must have been a busy place back in the middle 1800’s.  It connected Fort Smith in the north and Fort Towson in the south, and was built to help the army keep the Choctaws in line.  The Choctaws had been evicted from the southeast (Florida?), and were understandably pissed off about it.  The sign said that U.S. Grant, Sam Houston, Andrew Jackson and other notables I don’t remember traveled this very road (over this very spot!), on various errands involving fighting the Texans and fighting the Mexicans — apparently this was the best way from Texas to Washington DC at that point.  I stood there and kinda grooved on the whole thing… 🙂

    I returned to the truck, and before you know it, whoops, it’s raining, almost dark, and I’m heading into country that looks pretty bleak on the map.  And in fact it is pretty bleak, but I found a little motel in a little town that turned out to be just fine.  It was right across the street from the Country K Restaurant.  I wanted to tell my waitress about the SF band called the Kuntry K’s, but I was afraid she wouldn’t be amused and I would be in trouble in a strange, strange land.

    In between downpours it’s quite pleasant here in Clayton Oklahoma — the TV sucks, but I can leave my door wide open and nobody even walks past.  It’s very dark (i.e. no security lights) and quiet.

  • Tennessee

    Wednesday Oct 25 Asheville NC – Great Smoky Mountains – Gatlinburg TN

    Woke up happy and fulfilled after my big night seeing Eliot Smith in Asheville!

    The good feelings continues as I walked to morning coffee at a little sidewalk pastry shop, then checked my mail at the Library. Returned to the scary motel, I cranked up the truck and went looking for the Blue Ridge Parkway!

    It was overcast and sometimes misting heavily all day.

    But I had a very pleasant day of drivin’, waterfall hikin’, fall color admirin’, and damp forest smellin’, which lead me eventually to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park!

    The park itself is I’m sure a very interesting place, but on this day it is too darned crowded!. The mobs of people at every pullover were only mildly annoying until I got caught in a 15 minute traffic jam approaching Gatlinburg on the far side of the park. There were just so many cars on the road that the least little stoppage backed people up for miles, and these country folks are so polite that they that they seem to prefer sitting on their fat butts in the middle of the road to actually going someplace.

    Gatlinburg is nearly gridlocked, so I stop at the first cheap looking place I see and take a room.

    OK, so here I am, sitting in a lawn chair in front of the Trent Motor Lodge in Gatlinburg TN.
    Gawd what a freak show!
    I am, as of now completely over this unseasonably warm weather thing and wish for for seasonably cold to commence, just to get everybody the heck off the streets and back to the comfort of their easy chairs.

    There are TWO Ripley’s Believe It or Nots in a six block area, along with uncountable foot-long corn dog stands, taffy and fudge stores, Tee shirt stores, and oh so much more. Dollywood is about 12 miles down the road at Pigeon Forge — I have stumbled into Middle America’s fall playground and I want out!

    I have unwittingly headed straight to ground zero of this nonsense like a moth to the flame. If I had it to do over there is a perfectly good road following the southern edge of the Smokies that I’m sure is “almost as good” and has a helluva lot less cotton candy stands.

    On the plus side, many of the motels here have “Vote for Al Gore” on their marquees — which is good to see.

    I’ve kind of had it with “fall leaf viewing season” in the mid-south!
    I want there to be a bitchin’ cold snap to clear the streets!

    Thursday Oct 26 Gatlinburg, TN – Townsend – Kimball, TN

    Breakfast at the recommended local Pancake House sucked. A line of fat middle Americans queued up there for no discernable reason except that everyone else was — a hugely crowded place with bad service and very average food.

    My morning plan was to do this little 11 mile loop drive called Cades Cove. arrrrggghhhh! With my digital odometer, I can say with accuracy that it took over half of a Yo La Tengo CD to go 1.8 miles. I was having an un-mellow time of it, sitting in this endless line of vehicles in the middle of nowhere, so I found a dirt road that would take me out of the living hell known as the Smokies and bailed!

    On the other side of the hill, back in the normal world, I had a great lunch, the special of the day — “steak and gravy” with sweet peas and collards and iced tea. Another charming southern-ism I forgot to mention is that when you order iced tea down here you are often asked: “sweet or unsweet?” 🙂

    I’ve been staying off freeways mostly because it’s just plain nicer to do so, but I also have some serious tire anxiety. I’ll be passing a semi at 75 mph with another semi behind me and I’ll start thinking about my Firestone Wilderness ATs and about tread separation, and what a bad thing that would be to have my treads separate at that particular time. I did get around to calling Freeman Toyota (where I bought my truck in Santa Rosa) the other day, and did not get much information. I called the woman who sold me the car, who had always distinguished herself by being straightforward. She said exactly eleven words “I don’t know anything about that, let me connect you to Service”. I gave her a hard time but she stuck to that, and service said “they have received no recall notice from Firestone”. So that’s all I know about that.

    Chattanooga is in the middle of an “X” of Freeways — I-24 zigs in from the NW, I-59 zags out to the SW, and I-75 makes the “<” of the X on the eastern side, and there is as much serious interstate truck traffic here as I have seen anywhere — surprising to me, as I thought it would be kind of sleepy around here. I decided to forego the world-famous Lookout Mountain and Rudy Falls, which are advertised on the sides of barns all over the South and Midwest.

    I stopped for the night in the town of Kimball, which is an ugly little collection of chain stores situated in a beautiful wide, pleasant valley. From the motel one can look a great distance. There’s a graveyard across the street, then beyond that is the freeway, then fields and the knobs on the far side of the valley. It’s very pretty, and now that there’s less people I like the balmy weather. There is a lot of light industry around here, plastics plants – that sort of thing. I can picture the local burghers selling the place as a manufacturer’s paradise — cheap labor, malleable environmental standards, and all right here in the good old predictable U.S. of A.

    Meaningless aside:
    On a little shopping trip down the hill I bought the lovely blue, worn-out hoodie that I sleep in to this day!:)

    A local guy mentioned a big Nissan plant in the next valley. I’m reminded of how the first thing Cousin Ronnie back in Indianapolis said about my Toyota Tacoma was that it was built in Princeton Indiana!! NAFTA indeed!

    Friday Oct 27 Kimball, TN – Shiloh – Bolivar TN

    Free breakfast at the motel and a foggy freeway.

    Sometimes you start off the day right, and today I made the right driving choice!

    About 15 miles out of Kimball I got off the freeway and visited the headquarters of the South Cumberland State Recreation Area. The chatty guy there talked my ear off for about 15 minutes, but did point me to a good place to check out. On the other side of the town of Sewanee (home of the extremely Baptist University of the South) was a natural bridge that was really nifty. First of all there were no (0, none) people there! I figure they were all still in a line at Dollywood. It was lovely and quiet and there was a great view into the distance beyond the bridge.

    Drive, drive, drive

    Late that afternoon I detoured down to the Mississippi border to the Shiloh Battlefield Military Park. Very moving.

    39,000 union troops were attacked by 43,000 rebel troops, who wanted to pry them off of their position on the Tennessee River. The rebels won the first day, and would have kicked their Yankee asses except that 20,000 more union troops were brought down the river in steamboats overnight to turn the tide.

    It’s a really bizarre place to wander around in — 5-6 miles square, all woods and fields, with statues and placards everywhere, in the fields, in the middle of the woods, everywhere. All these big sad marble and bronze statues peppered all over the place, facing different directions, really eerie.

    I drove through yet more swamps in the gathering gloom and made it to Bolivar Tennessee for the night.

  • North Carolina

    Subject: Jesse Helms country

    Thursday Oct 19 Nags Head NC – Raleigh – Chapel Hill, NC

    Between the Outer Banks and the mainland is Roanoke Island, where I stopped to see history stuff.

    • the first English settlers in America,
    • whatever happened to Virginia Dare?,
    • double crossing the friendly Indians,

    All that making of America stuff. It mostly stars Sir Walter Raleigh around here, but Nor Cal’s very own Sir Francis Drake gets into the act to bust up a few natives at some point.

    I got a score off my Screw 32 tee shirt today! As I was leaving the Elizabethan Gardens (English garden tourist attraction on Roanoke), I hear behind me a hesitant “excuse me sir, but did you see that group?” The clean cut blond watering the garden in her official Elizabethan Garden polo shirt had put up the band at her place a few years ago when she lived in Greensboro, so we talked punk bands and this and that for a while. It was a nice interlude from motel clerks and trading quips with retirees.

    After that, I drove through more swamps for 40 miles or so. Driving through a swamp is strangely exciting to me. They are so mysterious. I would (in theory) love to stop the truck and just go tromping off into the depths of it, but I know in fact it would be buggy and unpleasant. This swamp is called the Alligator River, and it seemed like there was a snapping turtle or three on every log in the swamp for about 5 or six miles. Gosh I love turtles!

    I stopped at the Railroad and Civil War Museum in the town of Plymouth (local pronunciation: “Plummah”). I got the fully battle story from the windy old gent at the desk there who walked me through the exhibits with a running narration. There was a big land and water battle in 1864, the last major battle the South won, complete with a clever rebel ironclad (called the CSS Ram) in the Ablemarle River that sunk every Yankee boat in sight.

    The rest of the drive to Chapel Hill was uneventful, except for a really awful rush hour traffic jam on the Raleigh beltway.
    If I had to do that every day I’d shoot myself.

    Raleigh is growing like crazy, the indicators are everywhere — freeway construction, new malls, TRAFFIC! It was rude traffic too, with people cutting in, driving along the shoulder to merge farther up the line — very bad form.

    My buddy Mike later told me of a suburb of Raleigh called Cary, that used to be a modest bedroom community when he moved here a decade ago and is now the sixth largest city in the state. He says the locals claim that “Cary” is an acronym for Containment Area for Relocated Yankees :).

    Friday, Saturday, Sunday Oct 20-22 hangin’ in Chapel Hill

    This will probably be the last of my ‘guesting’ for this trip. This bit of guesting is why I took the particular route I did, swinging all the way down here. After my intermittently successful attempts to enjoy the Northeast, I am really looking forward to chillin in a real house with my high school buddy.

    I’m visiting my friend Ekim. His real name is Michael, and Mike spelled backwards is Ekim, which is just the kind of dorky thing hyperactive eight year olds get off on (John spelled backwards is Nhoj, which isn’t nearly as fun 🙂

    I think of him as a high school friend, but we were Cub Scout buddies before that, and in fact he was living seven houses down the street when I moved to Louisville Ky at age 5!

    He and his wife Carol and their son Patrick live on a pleasant cul-de-sac in a pleasant wooded subdivision in Chapel Hill. This university town, along with Durham and Raleigh create a little island of enlightenment in a vast area of Jesse Helms electin’ rednecks.

    I devote Friday to getting the oil changed on my truck and cruising around the campus of UNC and the town. Saturday we just kind of hang, go downtown (which ois pretty much the same as going to the UNC campus), throw Frisbee with the kid, and gawk at the football crazies (UNC is playing Clemson at home, so the whole world is either powder blue or bright orange and has a cup of beer welded to its hand). Sunday we watch Patrick’s soccer game and hang some more. Very nice.

    We always laugh a lot when we get together. His folks are southern Indiana hicks from not too far from my Mom’s area.

    But whereas my people tend to be stoic, stolid, and taciturn, his people tend to be loud, story-tellin, and lewd, maybe a teeny bit racist and homophobic but absolutely hilarious.

    As just one pallid example of their kind of country wit come away with after a few days with Ekim: The last time his now-deceased Dad visited, they went to the local Whole Foods correlate and his dad was in the produce going “whew! the prices are higher’n a cat’s ass around here!”. Most of these little zingers offend somebody, so this one is a good choice to relate to a large group since it only offends another species. 🙂

    Monday Oct 23 Chapel Hill NC – Winston-Salem – Linville Falls NC

    If it’s Monday it must be time for me to say goodbye and hit the road again. It’s hard to leave their comfy place, but I do.

    I-40 is extremely crowded. Lots of road widening and shopping center construction — yuck!

    Hungry again. I want badly to not cave in and go to Wendy’s. My goal is to find somethong closer to gen-u-ine Carolina bbq. I get off the freeway at two different places to find a place and fail.

    I depart the freeway in favor of US 421, which eventually narrows down to a two lane road. There is a dusty little “snack bar” that is pretty sorry looking, but has lots of cars and trucks around it, so I give it a whirl. It’s definitely the farmer’s favorite (although now that I think of it, most of most of these big guys were probably working on the road crews). I get a chopped bbq plate with cole slaw and mashed potatoes for $4.75, coffee and tax makes $5.50! It was darned good and filling. So I did eventually succeed!

    Eventually I’m out of the Piedmont, as central NC is called, and into the Blue Ridge Mountains. Here in late October, the lower elevations are “prime” leaf-wise. I head on up the hill to join the Blue Ridge Parkway, which is a really cool thing.

    The BRP is a 1930’s WPA project. It is a beautifully landscaped two lane road that starts in the Shenandoahs in Virginia and follows the ridge of the Appalachians all the way to Georgia. Speed limit 45, with frequent pullovers and lookouts, and all fences, bridges, and buildings built with tender loving care by the unemployed of the Great Depression from local fieldstones that give everything a really classy look.

    I cruise about 30 miles and stop for the night at a US Park Service campground at a place called Linville Falls. I hike to the multiple overlooks of the falls this evening, and plan to take the hike to the foot of the falls tomorrow.

    This campground is serious RV heaven. There are maybe two tents here, and about 25 RVs. Some of the people are sitting outside around their campfires, but about a third of them are sitting inside their vehicles doing whatever they do by the electric lights of their vehicles.

    There’s a great radio station out of Asheville 88.7, WNCW, so I am burning a little bit of car battery to listen to it as I lay here and type on the laptop inside the camper shell.
    Sort like a really small RV! 🙂 They are doing a special on King Crimson on WNCW which is pretty cool.

    Tuesday Oct 24 Linville Falls NC – Asheville NC

    I do indeed do the morning hike, and I’m a little lightheaded afterwards from taking a two mile walk before my morning coffee!

    I eat, then continue dawdling my way down the BRP. I take a bunch of dorky “pretty leaves” pictures.
    Great views, Mineral Museum, Mt Mitchell – tallest peak in the Appalachians (6992 feet), Asheville.

    Oh yeah, this is a good one:

    Those liberals, those trial lawyers, and those union bosses are trying to destroy our way of life

    this is, I swear, an exact quote from a radio ad where Jesse Helms is exhorting the good racist rednecks of NC to vote for some other racist redneck. I swear, I couldn’t make up something that good if I tried!

    Ever since yesterday afternoon when I heard the concert announced on WNCW, it has been looking more and more like it will come together for me to see Eliot Smith in Asheville tonight!

    First was the luck of simply hearing about the show. Then I asked my breakfast waitress if she knew where he would play, and she did, and showed me about where the place is on my Tourbook map of Asheville. She also said downtown Asheville is a pretty hip little place.

    So I get to Asheville, and I find a kind of scary looking motel right next to Asheville’s sorry little downtown freeway. The place has absolutely nothing to recommend it except that it’s about two blocks from the Music Zone.

    So I register, hang in the room for a while then head out on foot to see what Asheville is about. There are many beautiful old buildings in various stages of decay or renovation in the downtown. Eventually I start looking for the music venue. I had smoked just the tiniest bit of dope before I set out, and somehow the act of asking for directions a couple of times boggles me enough that I managed to get screamingly lost in this itty bitty downtown. Two different people told me the name of the place, and both times I managed to forget the name two blocks later. I tell you, adult ADD is a terrible thing!

    Eventually I am able to focus well enough to follow directions and find the Music Zone and purchase my ticket ($15 :).

    I then go looking for dinner, and find just the place I was visualizing — beer and decent food on outdoor patio (it’s about 65 degrees at 8PM). I am finding Asheville to be very user friendly.

    The show was really fun. The first group was Grand Daddy, who said they were from central California, and sure enough they did a Pavement cover to prove it!

    It was certainly a much more intimate venue than I would have seen Eliot at in SF. As some of you know, I have not been much of an Eliot fan — I just don’t see what the big deal is about him. But so many people whose opinion I respect think he’s totally the bomb, and an opportunity to see him has more or less fallen in my lap in Asheville, so I’m checking him out, and I really enjoyed him! The band rocked and the songs were un-boring in person.

    All in all, I think Asheville is a fine place, and one of the few places I have seen on this trip that I could actually see myself living in!

  • Atlantic shore

    Monday Oct 16  – Asbury Park, NJ – Cape May – Lewes DE – Rehoboth Beach – Dewey Beach, DE

    I’m sure that there are beautiful places in New Jersey, and that it’s possible to have a relaxing time on the Jersey shore, but it didn’t happen for me on this trip, so the New Jersey experience still sucks as far as I’m concerned!

    My plan is to hug the Atlantic coast as closely as possible all the way to North Carolina. After I escaped New Jersey, this plan worked great!  But getting through New Jersey just was not a good experience for me. 

    I would study my map, identify a road that went down the coast, and start down that road.  But more than once the road signs simply evaporated after a few miles, and so here I am again wandering the trackless wastes of the endless New Jersey suburbs, looking for a clue as to which is the right direction to go, … getting more and more pissed-off as I sit at stupid, endless suburban traffic lights.

    I am to take the Cape May Ferry across the mouth of the Delaware River estuary this afternoon.  Turns out the last ferry is at 5PM, so at about 1 PM in Toms River NJ, I dutifully called and made a reservation, and was told to be there by 4:30 at the latest.

    This is why I am unusually stressed at the endless traffic lights.

    My best move of the day was to head to the Forsythe Wildlife Sanctuary and take the hour or so required to do the little nature hikes and drive the 8 mile bird-watching loop (yes, 8 miles at < 10 mph takes almost an hour).  There were the usual suspects – the white egrets, snowy egrets and great blue herons – such as one can see from Maine to Florida and on the bike path in Richardson Bay. They are always beautiful wherever they are. But there were also swarms of migrating geese and duckies of various persuasions.  There were these critters called brants, seriously muscular ducks with whitish bodies and black necks, that I would not want to mess with.  They gave the definite impression what they had been flapping those wings for hundreds of miles and had hundreds more to go and weren’t take any s–t from nobody.

    I’m out of there by 2:30-ish, so now I have about 2 hours to do 1 hour’s worth of driving.  I manage to generate more stress for myself by heading to the beach again, to check out the community of Ocean Beach NJ (which looked like a pretty cool place, all my bitching above notwithstanding…), getting lost again and stuck on the wrong side of a drawbridge and generally getting my blood pressure up until finally I got smart and just put myself on the Garden State Parkway and drove to the d—-ed ferry, to get in line and chill out.

    After a really enjoyable 70 minute ferry ride across the wide mouth of the Delaware River, here I am in Dewey Beach, Delaware, at a perfect little motel with everything in the world that I could want. I deserve it! I’ve had some pretty crummy luck with lodging the last few days.)  

    I can look out my balcony at the lagoon or I can (and do) walk 200 yards across the road to the beach for a little nighttime surf watchin.

    Tuesday Oct 17  Dewey Beach, DE – Ocean City MD – Pocomoke City MD – Norfolk VA – Virginia Beach VA

    One reason I choose this route is that I have a lot of history with this area.  When I lived in DC in the 70’s I (we at the time) owned a sweet little A frame cottage on a canal in Bethany Beach right down the road.  So part of today’s morning plan is to drive by and admire it, and as it turns out I get a little misty about paths not taken and all that.  What if I’d stayed on the East Coast instead of moving to San Diego to try for that high tech home run? (which turned out to be more like getting hit by a pitch and sent to first :). 

    The memory lane interlude made me hungry, so I got breakfast in Ocean City, then spend the afternoon on a slow drive through the always pleasant backwater of the Delmarva peninsula, eventually crossing the Chesapeake Bay Bridge.

    I had studied my AAA accommodations book, and determined firstly that rooms were pretty cheap this time of year in Virginia Beach, and secondly that the Thunderbird Motel was among the cheapest.  So that is what I aimed for.

    Virginia Beach turns out to be a pretty big beach town, with 2-3 miles of beach that is basically a solid row of motels, from 4 to 20-ish stories.  The beach is clean and wide, and there is a wide promenade for strolling, with a separate bike path — it’s pretty deluxe. 

    I get a room on the third floor of the good old T-bird Motel.  It’s pretty seedy, but the bed is comfortable, the remote control works, and I can open the door on my balcony and watch the surf and hear it crash as I nod off to bed, so what’s a little grime around the edges? 

    I take an evening beach stroll and play around in the surf a bit, then while washing my feet off at the outside shower I notice that the pool is actually warm and clean (and sheltered from the wind) so I even take a swim!

    Wednesday Oct 18  Virginia Beach VA – Chesapeake VA – Nags Head NC

    It’s still foggy and rainy as it has been since Monday morning, but it’s supposed to clear up tonight.  I am thinking of the irony of rooms costing $80 if you can get em at all in the interior of Massachusetts, and then all the rooms you want for $35 right on the ocean two days later.  I’m also thinking that if I had my druthers I’d rather have had cool temperatures and the threat of rain last weekend to keep the New England crowds down, and sparkling clear warm days during these weekdays at the beach, but then I snap myself out of it and am just glad to be here like I oughta be!

    I try to get fancy driving out of town in the morning and get lost (or rather stranded by a total lack of road signs again) — I’ve been through this area a few times in my life, and have never really liked it.  It’s a heavy duty Navy area (right next to Norfolk Naval Base), so there’s all these jarheads zooming around in their souped up pickups.  They do have a rocking nice beach however…

    All the buzz here is about those poor sailors from the USS Cole, because they are bringing their bodies to Norfolk today.

    After an hour or so of driving, including skirting the edges of the wonderfully named Great Dismal Swamp, I come to the North Carolina border, and instantly things are better!  I was un-fed and un-caffienated so far that day, and I almost stopped at a Hardee’s just to get some kind of food, but held out for real breakfast, and then there was a billboard for Southland’s restaurant in four miles.

    Southland’s turned out to be one of two places right at the state line, whose main purpose in the world was to sell cheap cigarettes.  Once inside the restaurant I find that along with breakfast they are offering a lunch buffet with TWO kind of homemade barbeque.  Boy oh boy, I like North Carolina already.  Among the other goodies is something called Brunswick Stew (pronounced “Bernswick”) which is yet more bbq with corn and okra, and collard greens, and fried sweet potatoes — yee haw!

    As I was paying, the cashier said something like: “singer?”  I say, “huh?”  She says “singer?”  I say “excuse me?”  She says “do you want the singer (i.e. senior) discount?”.  I say, “… uh … sure!”  I’m insulted, I guess…  😐

    I continue the drive to the coast, past the very sand dune where the Wright Brothers took off, to Nags Head, where I get a room, hop across the highway to the beach, and go swimming in the ocean!  I’ve decided not to drive all the way down the Outer Banks to Okracoke and another ferry tomorrow, so this evening I drive down part way the island chain to yet another wildlife sanctuary to take a sunset walk.

  • New York-New Jersey

    Subject: New York, Ichabod Crane Country

    (you English majors out there, please cut me some slack for my chronic and egregious waffling between present and past tense – it’s just that … sometimes I was, and sometimes I is… OK???)

    Saturday Oct 14  Lee, MA – Stockbridge – Hudson, NY – Hyde Park, NY

    Traffic hell resumes this morning just where it left off last night.  I have a bagel then read my mail on the Lee MA Public Library internet computer, then it’s off to the Hudson River Valley, which I have identified as the route by which I will get from north of New York City to south of New York City.

    I drive through Stockbridge, MA, which is a beautiful little town with big, elegant homes and way too much traffic.

    All of these little towns are on a river.  I have been following the Hoosatonic River today.  And at every town the river is dammed to make a nice big pond with a big solid brick or stone building next to the dam that used to be the mill, but nowadays is either abandoned, or an outlet mall, or some kind of office building.

    I hit the Hudson Valley at the town of Hudson.  The architecture is totally different from New England.  The way the row houses smack up against the sidewalk reminds me of Baltimore. 

    After Hudson, the road down the east side of the river is kind of boring for a while, then suddenly gets very scenic.  There are substantial hills on both sides of the river, so that you look out from the heights on your side at the heights on the other side, and with the fall colors, blue skies, sailboats on the river, it’s pretty darned nice.

    I pull off at a state park which is the grounds of a mansion called Cleremont.  I’m so excited by the beauty of it all that I romp around the grounds for an hour or so, sniffing my way around the edges of the place like some kind of crazed border collie.  This place has a bunch of huge black walnut trees, and you can hear the walnuts going whack! if they hit the parking lot, or whomp! if they hit the grass.  I think it would hurt if they hit me.

    At a town called Rhinebeck I leave the main road for a side road that follows the river even more closely, going through an even smaller town called Rhinecliff.  This area is serious Ichabod Crane country.  The Dutch-style houses are really cool.  Also, it is serious Lazio country.  I will make it through NY without ever seeing a Clinton sign or sticker!

    I do a quick once over of another state park with a beautifully situated mansion.  This one looks like a wing of Versailles.

    I decide that this would be another good night to camp somewhere SOON lest I drive too far and get sucked into the NYC vortex.

    My AAA book tells me that there is another conveniently located state campground five-ish miles away that has not closed for the season, right on the heights above the Hudson, so I drive there, stake out a spot, and head to town for foodstuffs.

    Sorry to repeat myself, but the weather is unbelievably fine.  I’m sitting here barefoot, fresh out of the communal shower, with my feet up, typing in the dark!  This is my first experience in outdoor night typing, and the darned gnats walking around the screen make it hard to tell where the cursor is (not to mention having to bend the screen to an acute angle so it will cast light on the keyboard).

    The ranger sez they got too much rain all summer, and this is the nicest weather they’ve had all season. 

    Since I am now a blasé camping veteran, I get out the not-for-resale DVD that Martha scored for me from Silver Screen and watch it in the comfort of my camper shell.  Now that’s livin’!

    Sunday Oct 15  Hyde Park, NY – Poughkeepsie – Storm King – West Point – Fort Lee, NJ – Hoboken – Trenton – Asbury Park, NJ

    The day started out in a deceptively mellow fashion.  I broke camp (i.e. packed the truck), drove about 4 miles to the Vanderbilt mansion, where I enjoyed yet another fantastic view.  These Hudson estates are the wildest examples of over-the-top conspicuous consumption this side of the Loire Valley.  There is probably some profound observation to be made about the American robber barons and the 17th-18th century French nobility, but I can’t quite pull it together to make it.

    Then I drove another 4 miles to the FDR mansion.  This one is a national park, and has a bit of a different feel, like a place where work actually got done as opposed to the robber baron showplaces.  I took a nice little 5-ish mile hike through the woods and meadows and down to the river and back.

    That unfortunately turned out to be the end of fun for my day.  My ill-conceived plan was to follow US 9 straight down the NJ border to get past New York City.  The approach to the city continued to be quite beautiful along the Hudson.  I crossed from the east side to the west side at Poughkeepsie, with the notion that the afternoon sun would be behind me as I looked at the other side, rather than in my face as it had been on the east side.

    A very pretty drive through the little towns and around Storm King, which is a mountain that butts right up against the river, for that extra dramatic Rhine look.  Then drove along the edge of West Point, then more pretty river towns as the roads… get… ever… more… crowded…. 

    Then at Fort Lee NJ, the pleasantness ended.  I was in for about 40 miles of seriously dysfunctional New Jersey traffic.  Crummy 4 lane highway with bad cars, bad drivers, bad traffic lights, bad road signs, and big potholes.  At some butt-ugly intersection in Hoboken (or was it Trenton?) the US 9 signs completely disappeared and I almost ended up in the Lincoln Tunnel.  But I eventually got back on track by getting onto something called the Skyway.  Apparently taking the Skyway is so obvious that it doesn’t need signs for the actual routes that use it.

    I was flashing on Bonfire of the Vanities, where the guy took a wrong turn in a crummy neighborhood that changed his life forever.

    The Skyway shunted me onto the NJ Parkway, by way of which I soon made it to the relative calm of northern NJ.  There is a National Seashore right at the northern tip of NJ.  I could see the World Trade Center towers in the distance from these beautiful wild sand dunes.  It was all very nice, but I was in a bit of a state of post-traumatic stress with a bit of a pounding headache and so didn’t enjoy it too much.  It was also getting dark.

    The Nat Seashore had no campground, so I got lost and more stressed in the trackless wastes of the NJ ‘burbs and eventually took a room at the first motel I ran across, in the home of the Boss, Asbury Park, NJ.