Greetings from Grass Valley…

...a place that’s not exactly grassy this time of year after a hot summer...more like straw-colored hills.

So, events since Florence, which was--what, Tuesday? Yah, eons ago.

I’ve clocked 1,100+ miles in a leisurely six days, taken Patchouli on most of it (he had a day off Friday at a hotel while I looped into Sonoma), and had a mini meltdown over Patchouli’s continued and erratic travel angst. He can be fine for half a day, quiet, calm, dozing, then go bonkers for two hours of nerve-shredding meows. I make frequent stops to let him walk around or rest without the engine on while I’m on errands or sightseeing; he’s showing no signs of illness or nausea; and he’s even volunteering to look out the window more.

But all day Saturday he was plotting every way Out Of This Damn Truck that he could find at every opportunity. I was half tempted to leave him on somebody’s doorstep in Colusa just so he wouldn’t have to travel anymore (OK, not an option--I know we’ll get through this).

But what with my worry over his comfort/discomfort, the unsettling rhythm of daily driving and hoteling, the constant change of travel, and my own natural anxiety over moving on with life in a big way, I did what always seems to work when I’m at wit’s end: I pulled into the hotel at Grass Valley, took a short cry, a brief nap, and a long walk through a tree-lined neighborhood, got some chocolate, and felt much better.

Overall, the travel has been getting drier, hotter (80 degrees Friday in Sonoma!), more topographically varied (lakes, hills, valleys, fields). And definitely more touristy-weird in spots.

Squalls-by-the-bucket smacked around the truck most of 101 south from Florence to Crescent City, CA. The spectacular (so I’m told) hills, cliffs, and coastline also insisted on creeping along under the cloak of fog like some foreign beauty hiding behind a burka. The Pacific views I did get were more of those gray waves and grayer horizons, or scraggy black rocks shouldering out of sand like the dorsal spikes of some prehistoric beast taken by the dunes.

I counted more signs saying “You are leaving tsunami area” than “You are arriving at a tsunami area” (go figure), but tsunamis are serious business--as in tourism business: I could have stopped at a Tsunami Gallery, a Tsunami Bar and Grill, a Tsunami Lanes bowling alley...all while racing through tsunami evacuation routes.

I did manage to get onto the Oregon dunes at Winchester (of “the gun that won the west” fame), where Patchouli thought he’d died and gone to heaven in the world’s biggest litter box. (No, he didn’t use it, but he did gawp.) He hated the ocean (“Run away, run away!”), and we spent some time exploring the safer, quieter dune trails, with him leading us willy-nilly over damp sand and blowing grasses. His soft rounded footprints looked tiny and vulnerable next to the otter and raccoon prints that were there.

Crossing into Calif requires an agricultural checkpoint. I was stopped because of the WA plates, and I blithely denied carrying any fruits or vegetables...then drove over the border with forgotten contraband stuffed into the last remaining space at the back of the truck bed...organic Oregon walnuts and honey that I’d bought at The Bee Hive in Reedsport that morning.

Redwoods make an almost immediate appearance after the border, and firs and hemlock all but disappear. One overgrown stump on the side of 101 seemed big enough to park the truck on, and shortly after it, a side road named “Wonder Stump Road” promised more like it.

Driving south of Crescent City was more fog than rain. At times I could see almost nothing of the next turn ahead, and gained a new appreciation for coastal weather conditions. I wouldn’t want to live in all that damp cold. One stop for a Patchouli stretch was at a roaring beach. Big noisy waves throwing themselves on rocks, air that was like walking through the misters in the produce section of a grocery store, the primal beauty and cadence of the sea...Patchouli wanted none of it. He skulked along a rock wall toward the nearest clump of bushes, crying, “Sanctuary!” Even the truck was a welcome respite. (Our third stop at a quieter beach turned out to be much less scary, so maybe there’s hope for the traveling cat, after all.)

I decided to drive the Avenue of the Giants on Wed on the way to Willits (“Gateway to the Redwoods,” but only if you’re heading north; in my direction it was gateway FROM them). This Humboldt State Park really is one of those “must not miss” spots of California. Hwy 101 has been redone here to bypass the 31-mile trek, but they’ve set it up so the Avenue criss-crosses the highway in several places (think of the snake on the staff of the Medical Association logo), so you can get off and on at various points. I drove the entire 31 shadowed and sun-dappled miles, and was glad I did.

Now this place, Patchouli liked to explore. It might have been the soft forest floor so thick that it was almost springy. It might have been the deep, ponderous silence that only an old-growth forest can hold. It might have been the natural warmth and humidity that envelops all comers and drips water from the boughs as from the ceiling of a sauna. Or it might have just been all these amazing trees waiting to be used for their highest calling—scratching posts! (No, he didn’t, but he did gawp.) We spent some time exploring a “chimney” redwood that was really two redwoods that shared the same burnt-out base and core, creating a cavity big enough to camp in.

American marketing ingenuity is alive and well in the redwoods area, and it retains that turn-of-the-century marvel that marked the era of new national parks and expanding interstates. Anything that could be considered a spectacle has been made into a spectacle. There’s the “Famous One-Log House” (I passed two); drive-through trees (including the famed Chandelier Tree, whose pre-SUV tunnel would have taken off parts of The Ruby Falcon, but was cool to walk through); a “Believe It or Not” tree house with a curtained front door entry at its base; the exotic-sounding “Trees of Mystery” complete with a new sky-bucket ride through the treetops; opportunities to stalk Bigfoot (he lives in this region); and something called Confusion Mountain, which also showcases “World’s Tallest Redwood Carving” (the carving-littered entrance was dominated by a totem pole of six huge bears standing in back-to-back pairs, three pairs on each other’s shoulders and--I’m not making this up--wearing pastel painted pinafores and bonnets). Stick a signpost out, put a gift shop near it, charge admission, and the people will come.

And, oh, those redwood chain-saw artists. From wannabes who stockpile RV-sized logs, burls, and ragged root balls next to their junk cars, to folks who pile them next to their finished carvings and studios, redwood in raw and sculpted form is for sale at nearly every widening in the road. Grotesquely elongated human faces, usually native American or Gandolfian; rearing mustangs, parade-waving grizzly bears, enormous wing-spread eagles...

I was surprised to learn that Willits, in addition to being the Gateway to the Redwoods, is the home of Seabiscuit and where that whole story started at Ridgewood Ranch. I missed the ranch tour but would like to do it another time. Actually, I’d like to go back to Willits altogether to see the town on its own merit. I stayed there two nights, but my relax time was spent in much-needed spa time at the Baechtel Creek Inn where I stayed.

The rest of the time on my open day, Friday, was spent (1) getting diesel in Willits (which took three, count them three, stations before I got a complete fill-up--one station was out of diesel, another shut off all its pumps less than a gallon after I started because of a fuel spill elsewhere, and the third finally finished the job). And (2) driving past vineyard after vineyard in the Napa and Sonoma area for the scenery, a visit to the Robert Louis Stevenson Museum in St. Helena, and dinner with an old Aldus/Adobe colleague, Molly and her husband David, at a yummy local restaurant called Fig Cafe in Glen Ellen.

I recognized about a dozen of the bazillion winery names that I passed at 45mph, and have a greater understanding of what this whole wine-growing place is all about. I also wonder why vintners don’t tout the other environmental variables of their varietals, such as the “subtle floral hint of petroleum” and “the under notes of road grime” that undoubtedly add to the region’s soil, sun, and water. We’re warned away from eating blackberries from shoulder roads in Washington because of car exhaust...surely the endless traffic through the valley leaves its mark. Hmmm...perhaps all that sediment at the bottom of a bottle is really tire-tread particulate instead of grape residue.

Getting to Grass Valley on Sat was a short 1/2 tank (instead of 3/4 tank) drive for the day. Cloudless blue skies, shirt-sleeve temps, and orchards, cattle ranches, oak trees galore through Williams, Sutter, and Yuba City. Sutter county is where a certain seedless grape was first propagated in California by a certain William (not related) Thompson. He imported three grape plants from New York in the early 1870s. The one cutting that survived now has thousands of acres of descendents that are putting raisins and grapes into children’s lunch boxes all over the country.

Grass Valley is THE home of the gold rush for the Sierra Nevadas, and one of the few towns that reinvented itself into a farming community after the boom went bust. It’s said that California grows nearly half of the nation’s produce, and I can believe it after seeing places like this. The town has the state’s oldest hotel in continuous use, The Holbrooke from 1851, which hosted the likes of Presidents Grant and Cleveland and authors Twain and Harte.

Like Seattle, the town suffered severe destruction from a fire in the 1880s, so the buildings are two- and three-story brick, which still conveys a precious sense of solidness. Boutique shops by the row, ice cream parlors, white-tablecloth restaurants next to pizza parlors, library, government buildings and post office are all within the same few blocks of old-town downtown Main Street. These blocks merge right into neighborhoods lined with autumn trees and sprawling hedges, Victorian painted ladies next to bungalows and cottages, and yards full of roses that are still blooming in November. Hwy 20 cuts through it but over it, and is hardly noticeable.

Today is toward Groveland, and the beginning of winding travel at the foothills of Yosemite and Sequoia along Hwy 49. Overall I’m getting that a road trip that’s also a relocation trip is great for getting the flavor of a place, but not the best for actually soaking it in. A return visit to many of these locales is in the future, with plenty of walkabouts added in.