That Road Trip: Part One

Back from the road trip I had blogged about a few months ago.  Many hours of driving lends itself to quite a bit of thinking, and now and again a few revelations, or at least novel thoughts.

We set off from inner Southeast Portland, heading across the Ross Island Bridge; a cooler of drinks, yummy car snacks, a big stack of CD's and the atlas.  On the road!  We sat in a classic Ross Island Bridge traffic jam for 45 minutes.  So much for our big start.  A bit of humility is good for us all.

Day 1 took us to Crater Lake for a late lunch, ending in Yreka - a favorite stop over.  I had only been to Crater Lake once as a child and remember the squirrel stealing my sister's hotdog more than anything else.  We still talk about it.  It had even been years since I had been over Highway 58 and on Highway 97 that far down.  When you turn on Highway 138, heading toward Crater Lake, the pavement stretches out before you; over ten miles of straight, gradually rising road.  And then, pop, there you are perched above the lake with the first breath taking view.  As we were aiming for a late lunch, we resisted the many incredible overlooks and made our way to the Lodge.

Arriving at the Lodge at 2:07 pm.  We had just missed lunch service in the dining room.  Thanks Ross Island Bridge.  They were though, serving soup and salad in the lobby.  Fed and bathroomed, we set off to sight see.  We didn't have time to take the boat trip around the lake, and have put that on the list for next year, but got some great views and a real since of scale - as in how huge it all is and how tiny we were.  The rock formation, Phantom Ship, appears to be about the size of my two story house.  It is actually about 500' long and about 200' tall.  We really need to take that boat trip.

 I was also reminded of how recent of a formation Crater Lake is.  They say the most recent, caving in of the mountain to form the lake occurred about 7700 years ago.  Holy Cow!  In geological time that must be less than a second.  Feeling tiny and a bit out of breath, we made our way down the west side to I-5 and our evening destination.  My daughter had not yet mastered the art of taking a  picture of road signs while speeding down the interstate, so we have no photo of the "Welcome to California" sign.

Day 2 took us through California's central valley and up through the Sierra foothills and gold country to our hotel at El Portal ( I have trouble writing that without writing Portland instead).  If we endeavor to eat food grown locally, we may want to move to the central valley.  I grew up in California and travelled through the valley lots in my child and teenage hood.  And yes, Oregon has plenty of agriculture, no doubt.  But I had forgotten the huge scope of agribusiness in California.  Wow.  We were most impressed with the fields and fields of sunflowers, clearly being grown as a crop for the seeds and such, not for the floral value.  Somehow this seems sad and a waste.  Our route took us down I-5 to Stockton (one of the worst real estate markets in the country), down I-99 to Highway 140 and over.  That stretch of I-99 is a rather awful part of America; old freeway travelling through semi-abandoned factories smattered with cookie cutter strip malls.It was so nice to leave I-99 at Merced, though we could have done without  the closure of the Yosemite exit, absolute lack of detour signage and plethora of construction that flummoxed I-pad maps and the GPS.

My sister and niece were about an hour ahead of us, having left that morning from Los Angeles.  We had gotten texts of them passing through "bleak, dead, brown fields of nothing" on Highway 140.  The Highway 140 we were on (same stretch) was beautiful rolling hills of golden grass dotted with gorgeous aging oak trees.  I guess beauty really is in the eye of the beholder.  We arrived at our hotel, the Yosemite View Lodge in time for a quick dip in the pool before dinner.  It didn't take us long to realize we were quite the minority at our hotel, as most of the guests were speaking other languages, primarily french.  The girls seemed to enjoy the handsome young Frenchmen.

Transportation around Yosemite has grown up a lot since we visited in the 1960's and 1970's, go figure.  I had remembered the open air trams that served as the park shuttles.  First off, YARTS (Yosemite Area Rapid Transit) is a thorough bus system with service from Merced to Yosemite Valley, and on to Tuolmne Meadows and Mammoth; full size coaches with luggage compartments and air conditioning.   Picked up at our hotel, we took YARTS into the valley and connected to the valley shuttle service (now also air conditioned buses) that did a great job of getting us around.  Yosemite was not nearly as crowded as we had feared, nor as hot.  There was though, a forest fire nearby(started by lightening) that made for smokey views.

Check back for the second installment: some Yosemite activities and the long road home.