Hello from San Diego…

Well, I made it. 2,100 miles, 10 days, 8 overnight accommodations, 1 neurotic cat.

I’m now ensconced in my Mom’s house in (very) sunny San Diego, still unpacking and setting up house in a large portion of the enclosed patio. Boxes in all condition surround me…stacked for storage, opened but half-full, empty and in my way, collapsed and waiting to be cut apart for recycling. Their contents have been regurgitated and are slowly finding proper places to abide in for the next five or six months. I do have the bed set up, some clear space on the floor, and a corner cleared for the computer. An IKEA is only 5 minutes away for rugs and a semi-portable wardrobe setup.

No steady Internet access yet, since Mom is on dial-up with WebTV--a system that doesn’t support a computer (requires a TV) and won’t let us type in non-“www” URLs (so I can’t check my own web mail without going through the secret basement door of my godaddy account which, given the arcane, keyboard-only WebTV interface, is just too painful to contemplate). So I’m writing this report at home in Word and sending it from an Internet café as soon as I find one. Monday we’re activating Time Warner’s Internet service, edging this house address one technology closer into the 21st century.

And, yay, I am finally reunited with my sandisc hard drive, which I had packed for shipping. I can now extract photos from my Pocket PC and post them to this blog now that I’ve resurrected it.

Mr. Patchouli has had a rough time accepting that he is to now live with three other cats. They are all very mellow, very quiet, and very curious about him. He, returning the favor, has been going “yeeooowwwlll grrwwwlll ffffffftttzzzzzz puff up yeeoouwwwlll ffffttzzzz” at any cat sighting in the house--including statuary, a black-and-white stuffed tiger (not real) near the fireplace, and his own reflection. Because the cats have conspired to investigate our space in hourly shifts of silent lurking, his gracious, refined response has sent me leaping out of deep sleep, heart pounding, brain disoriented, several times a night since Thursday. (The other cats, baffled by all this high drama, merely blink at him and wander or skitter off, depending on age and disposition.) Last night I managed to close off our space with curtains, and today Patchouli is finally starting to relax and have a sense of his own place again.

Let’s see. We left off heading for Groveland, in the heart of gold country. Shortly after I left, the curving road took me past an "oooh, I have to stop there" place: a beautiful old bridge over the American River at the Placer and Eldorado County line. Reaching it requires parking on the shoulder of a narrow mountain highway and hiking a short trail along the sun-drenched river (oh, darn).

I found a spot among dozens of other cars lining the road, left Mr. P. to sulk in the truck, and took a welcome escape for half an hour of walking.

Turns out that the span that caught my attention is the very famous (to some) Mountain Quarries Railroad Bridge. Built in 1912 for lime quarrying and no longer used, in its day it was the longest concrete bridge ever built, and was the first to use steel-reinforced concrete. So strong is this bridge that it has withstood every major flooding of the American River since, including a complete failure of the Hell Hole dam that wiped out two newer bridges upstream in 1964. Stats: 70 feet high, 482 feet long, 15 feet wide for one set of train tracks (they were removed for the metal in WW2). Today it beckons hikers down miles of trails, and is the final leg of an annual 100-mile endurance horse race. A definite place to come back to.

To travel to Groveland is to travel through some of California's most colorful history. Gold was discovered in 1849, and statehood came in 1850--any connection, you think? Even the highway through this country of the Sierra Nevadas is Hwy 49, perhaps named in honor of the ’49er gold-panners? Like tin mining in Cornwall, England, gold mining defined this region. Hills are riddled with tunnels like fields are with rabbit warrens. Two thousand, four thousand feet deep and more...half the height of the Sierras’ highest pass (Tioga) inverted into the earth.

Today’s road took me through Calaveras County, of Twain's jumping frog fame (road markers indicate that highway 49/108 is part of the "Mark Twain, Bret Harte Trail"--another good reason to return). Several McCain/Palin signs are still up...no Obamas to be seen.

It was surprising to see rolling hills and so much green: cattle, horses, valleys, rivers widening into lakes that seem to be 50 feet or more below their usual waterline. Several varieties of pines and oaks predominate, with autumn colors provided by other trees I don't recognize by name.


I stopped at Sutter Gold Mine for a Patchouli walk-break, just missed the mine tour that departs on the hour and decided to forgo it. Good thing, as we would have been pulling into the last 8 miles to Groveland--all uphill, winding, 20mph roads toward Yosemite, with a 2,300 foot gain if it was an inch--at night.

This area is worth staying a month in, even without the siren call of Yosemite. Caves and mines to tour, river trips to take, towns like Angel City and Sutter's Creek to wander around for a day, and parks like the Marshall Gold Mine interpretive site. Oct and Nov seem to be great off-season times: no crowds, but enough business that I wouldn’t feel weird being the only one present.

Overnighted at the Groveland Hotel, a big old B&B that’s been a hotel since 1850s, with its own resident ghost, Lyle, a gold panner from the ’20s. Victorian rooms, cushy everything, onsite restaurant run by Chicago chef. Patchouli got to roam all around the upstairs parlor on his leash, which he liked, except for the residue of dog smell he found in the carpet...yowl, yowl.

He has also discovered the delights of a three-and-half-foot high, foot-deep feather bed for lounging, although the first time he leapt onto it, he puffed up in his famous bristletail warning pose and growled. The object? A painted plaque of roses on the window sill across from the bed...or maybe it was Lyle pacing the roof of the hotel's second building.

Dinner at Groveland Hotel lived up to the chef’s reputation with an amazing "three little piggies lasagna" of pulled pork, Italian ground sausage, and sliced Andouille sausage in a flavorful sauce--Cajun spicy and tomatoey instead of sweet. Nicely paired with the E.O.S. petit sirah that the chef chose as part of my four-course red wine sampler. The best thing about eating at the same hotel where I'm staying is that I don't have to worry about drinking and driving...just about getting myself up the stairs and my room key into the keyhole.

Monday’s drive from Groveland (“Gateway to Yosemite”) to Three Rivers (“Gateway to the Sequoias”) was tedious and tiring. I listened to Harry Potter 1 to drown out Patchouli’s complaints. Two thirds of the trip (the beginning and the end) was on mountain roads that had too many windings to count, too few turnouts for breaks, and too many tarantulas crossing the roads for my comfort.

In between, on the east side of Clovis, are acres and acres of fruit orchards--grapes, fuji apples, pears, Sunkist oranges, lemons, peaches. The citrus groves made me yearn for the Los Angeles/Orange County/Anaheim of my childhood, their tidy rows of bushy trees, dark green glossy leaves dotted with bright orange globes. They were welcome after rolling hills of brown grass, scattered boulders, and clumps of oak and cattle.

Other areas offered spiky pine trees, skewers of evergreen firs and cedars, sprawling maples and oaks, California buckeyes that drop kiwi-sized husks all over the road...post offices the size of small huts...horses grazing in country settings from pastures to front yards wrapped in chain-link fence.

Driving my last road at dusk, a bit of sunset backlighting made the truck’s shadow look like one of the tarantulas on the road...hulking body slung on elongated shadows of its tires. I barely arrived at my B&B before nightfall.

The River Dance B&B in Three Rivers is, as expected, on a sparkling, burbling river. Unexpectedly, it’s ON the river...the water (more a brook here) is the boundary of their backyard, replete with boulders to sit on and soothe one’s feet. It is less than 10 miles from the entrance to the Sequoia National Forest. I stayed two nights, and was glad for it, despite the lack of onsite Internet that put me into another email blackout.

This B&B is actually a personal residence in a quiet neighborhood...I parked right alongside the owners’ cars and hose bibs. It used to belong to the Catholic church, and was lived in by seven very community-oriented nuns. The current owners, Sharon and Dan, bought it about five years ago and have created a space of warmth, welcome, and great ease for guests.

I was the only one there in this off-season time for both nights. This usually puts me off because I feel awkward and intrusive in what feels like a private home, and B&B hosts often hover too much with one guest, but I truly felt like one of the family here. Sharon and Dan chatted with me while they cooked and while I ate, invited me to join them for a wine break and dinner on Tues night, and had breakfast with me on Wed morning--all experiences that are nearly taboo in the B&B world, where the lives of guest and host do not intersect except for the business of B&B'ng. (Sharon and Dan also used to own a restaurant and really love food, which means that even a spicy meat sauce over spaghetti or a spinach frittata is worth writing home about.)

I left Patchouli in our room on Tues for five hours of cat-free heaven at Sequoia National Park. The entrance is a straight shot out of Three Rivers, as long as you don’t drive off the road gawking at the town’s roadside art of a Paul Bunyan size steer (which used to be a walk-up burger joint), and an enormous blue pig (which its drug-lawyer owner uses as a camper shell on his trips to Burning Man).

From the entrance to the park, it’s a rough winding drive for 15 miles that takes almost an hour, with multiple hairpin turns at a crawl. Lots of delightful wildlife sightings this time of year...woodpeckers flitting, a four-point mule deer buck grazing, a mule deer doe sidling across the road, a wolf (seemed too big for a coyote) gazing and yawning at me at a T intersection, chipmunks darting, and even two youngster black bears gamboling in the grass by the side of the road!

As I went higher, I kept looking for these fabulous sequoia forests everyone talks about, but all I saw were the usual firs and pine trees and buckeyes of the region. Turns out that sequoias actually live at only a certain altitude and in certain conditions. Like the redwoods of the California coast, they have very few areas that are favorable for their multi-century growth--the groves in the Sierra Nevadas are all that exist. And thanks to preservation efforts, the most likely way you'll get to see them here is by driving to a parking lot and taking brief (or long) walks among these giants.

The unique thing about sequoias is that they're a conifer, but their trunk stays thick at the top like a club, instead of tapering off to a point like firs, hemlocks, and the like. This continuous thickness, along with bark that can be up to three feet deep, is what gives them so much mass, as well as resistance against fire, disease, and storm damage.

I visited the General Sherman sequoia, the largest living tree (greatest mass) on earth--so big that to stand at its base and look up is analogous to a mouse looking up at a 6' tall person. (If you look really closely at the largest photo here, you can see a sun-washed man about that height walking to the left of the tree; he barely stands higher than the far fence.)

I'm really glad I also climbed the 400 amazingly engineered steps of Moro Rock for stunning views of the snow-dusted Great Divide (east) and the Middle Fork Canyon (west). The museum and park headquarters were worth the stop.

With a target arrival of Thursday (Nov 20) in San Diego, Wednesday found us moving from Three Rivers to Big Bear Lake on a drive that I made sure took us on roads that were as long and flat and straight as possible. Straight south. Straight southwest. Straight through oilfields with their bobbing drills. Straight past hills that were pincushions of windmills, most of them idle in the heat. Straight through acres of orange groves, olive groves, and vineyards. Straight through cattle country of polka-dot black steers on fields of pale brown. It was two- and four-lane most of the way, blissfully cruising at 55-65 mph, raising my mpg to 17.3 average for the trip.

The Ruby Falcon had been carrying a layer of mud and dirt since the Avenue of the Giants a week ago, and I wanted to make a gleaming impression when I pulled into San Diego on Thursday. So I stopped at a car wash in Apple Valley.

I had expected a two-minute drive-through--the Brown Bear Wash kind, with whirling brushes and wet carpets crawling up the windshield. Instead, the Falcon got a half-hour personal treatment in which two men soaped and scrubbed the whole truck by hand (even the wheel wells and inside the front doors), dried it, and buffed it until she looked new. Mr. P stayed in the truck, meowing and hiding under the seat, and the guys were careful not to open the back doors and let him out. Next time, I’ll take him out with me while we wait in the lobby.

Dined at the Peppercorn Grille in Big Bear Lake for my last big supper on the road. The place was crowded for a Wed night (nice to see), and I got waited on by the hostess (charming) instead of the table’s usual waitress (a bit harried and surly). Crusted chicken with aioli sauce, steamed broccoli, baby squash, long carrots, and garlic potatoes pierced with a “tree” of sage for some interesting height in the presentation. It was all yummy, but it came with a large pat of wasabi, which sounded good on the menu but was a poor choice for the chicken.

The décor in this “fancy” mountain-town restaurant makes the most of filigreed sconces and chandeliers, all stamped-metal leaves and flower petals, with oil paintings of fruit and flowers sitting in fat curvy urns framed by more metal leaves or ornate gilt. Fake ivy wraps the corners of the mirror at the far end of the room, and rosy flowered fabrics like you find on Victorian sofas drape the tops of the windows like 4th of July bunting. Between this place and my lodge’s cabin (which is done up in 100% nautical shtick right down to life preservers in the bathroom and a painting of an old sea captain in the living room), I realize--amusingly sadly happily poignantly--that I’m definitely not in Seattle any more.

The next morning, a very fed-up Patchouli literally needed to be dragged out from under the bed to be put into the truck. I couldn’t blame him. I was just as tired of being on the road: tired of 40mph driving, tired of turning 125-mile crow flights into meandering 250-mile journeys, tired of a new place to sleep almost every night, tired of not being settled anywhere, tired of not being able to walk for miles instead of driving everywhere. RVg will definitely be even more laid back than these past 10 days.

So I broke my rule of avoiding highways for the trip, bagged a 300-mile jaunt through Joshua Tree and El Centro, and hoofed it west on the shortest way possible to the fastest, most direct path south: I-215 and I-15 into San Diego.

I stopped only long enough for breakfast at the Old Country Coffee Shop outside of Big Bear, a down-home diner with cracked varnish on the wooden slab of counter, a clutter of short-order stainless-steel toasters, coffee pots, and pie cabinets, and a long galley where I could watch a young skinny guy pull five breakfasts at once out of the chaos of skillets, pans, and bacon presses on a desk-size griddle and eight burners.

A sign above the counter showed a happy 1950s housewife smiling over a coffee cup: “Drink coffee. Do stupid things faster and with more energy.”

Hmmm...maybe I haven’t left Seattle, after all.

(And, I might add, I did finally get Internet access this afternoon at Old Faithful itself, Starbucks.)