Washington and the pull of home

Not my bike but a kindred spirit. Kevin (At least I think that's what his name is. Man, I am bad with names) from Ontario, traveling on his Valkyrie for the summer.

So I rode today from Castle Rock, Washington to Eatonville, Washington. It was only 80 miles and I was hoping to see Mt. Rainier but the clouds would not allow it. It was overcast and drizzly all the way through.

I've been feeling the pull from home pretty strongly. I've crossed a line. When I had left on this trip, I was a traveler. Now, I'm a tourist. I no longer seem to feel the need to run up every hill I see just for the view. Now I'm content to pull to where I have a good view, snap a picture, and move on. There's a difference between seeing a place: the way most people travel on their vacations, and experiencing a place: the way I've been trying to travel.

Rushing saps the purpose out of visiting a new place. If you're rushing, you're missing things. If you're rushing: it means your mind is elsewhere, and if your mind is elsewhere then you can hardly live in and experience the moment.

I've learned something about not rushing. It doesn't matter where you are, if you're not rushing through, you'll never run out of beautiful amazing things to see. I could spend the rest of my life on my bike circling the country, and never get bored of any one place I've passed through.

Meanwhile, on the home front, life is moving quickly. And when life moves quickly, shouldn't those on the move head home?

For the first time in a while, 80 miles seemed like a little too much time to spend in my own head, still heading away from home. Of course, I haven't seen a patch of blue sky in 2 days. Could my mood be accounted for by the grey skies; Seasonal Affective Disorder - S.A.D.? It's only been 2 days though. Sudden Onset Seasonal Affective Disorder? S.O. S.A.D.? Do I need a special lamp that plugs into my bike and mounts on my handle bars to prevent me from getting S.O. S.A.D.?

I'm getting to Vancouver. I'm almost there. That is the farthest point that I am getting to, and then I am turning home. There is not nearly as much on this part of the trip that I want to check out as there was on the first part. Vancouver, Mt. Rushmore, The Badlands, some friends in Missouri and Indiana, and Nova Scotia. 7 places. I think I'm going to up my daily cap from 150 miles to 250 miles. It's time to get home. Just need to stop at a few places along the way.

Northward bound!

I have successfully left San Jose. I went through Sacramento and Redding into Oregon where I passed through Ashland, Crater Lake, Eugene, and Portland (where I currently sit).

Sacramento is a cool little city, and I didn't really spend any time in Redding to get a feel for the place.

San Jose is hot. It was around 85-90 degrees when I was riding out, and I was eager to be heading North, because North = colder, right? Wrong. Inland North California is hot as hell. I left San Jose at around 8pm because I was told it's typically 10 degrees warmer up in Sacramento.

I met my host at their workplace, an Irish Pub called deVere's. It's a cool bar with a good atmosphere and a good selection of beverages. Check it out if you're in town and looking for a decent bar to go to.

It was pleasantly cool at night, but when the sun came up it was that drain-the-life-out-of-a-man kind of hot. It's a good thing I left at night because that day it had been over 100 degrees up there. I hung around Sacto for a day (despite the heat) and walked around taking some pictures.

Of painted rods outside of what used to be a paint shop:


Of a park:


Of seven vehicles parked in a single parking spot:


And of a U.F.O/Airstream RV:


I left at 5pm. Well after the hottest part of the day but it was still rather warm. Shot this photo at sunset somewhere between Sacto and Redding:



I was glad to be heading North because I know that eventually, North does = colder. Just not quite yet.

I got to Redding and hung out with my hosts there for a bit, and left the next day for Oregon.



I was told to stop in Ashland, Oregon because in the nearby town of Phoenix, just a few miles past Ashland, is Debbie's Diner. I was told by a biscuits and gravy connoisseur that the best biscuits and gravy in the country (and that likely means in the world because I'm pretty sure they don't do biscuits and gravy anywhere else) is in Debbie's Diner. After trying them myself, I wouldn't doubt it. If you're going to order biscuits and gravy at Debbie's Diner though, be forewarned that 1 biscuit is about the same size as 3 pancakes. You do NOT need to order anything else. Expecting a biscuit to be a small fist sized item, I ordered a couple of eggs and a couple of pieces of toast and ate until I could not manage another mouthfull, and still ended up having to leave food on my plate.

Ashland, Oregon itself is a cool little town. I happened to be there for the Juneteenth celebration organized by the people behind the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. There was a cool little music/poetry show followed by a whole lot of home cooked BBQ.



I then went for a walk in the park which was quite pleasant. Ashland is a cool little town.



The first night I stayed in Ashland, my host's daughter and son were in and we all had dinner together. When it was heard that I was about to roll through Oregon and not see Crater Lake, plans were quickly made to rectify this. Seeing as that's where they both worked, I planned a detour to Crater Lake before moving on. Crater Lake is up high enough that there is still snow on the ground up there.



And while some of the roads were still blocked, you could get up to the rim. I am glad I got to see this because it really is beautiful up there.





I spent a day in Eugene, Oregon but that was just a stopover on my way to Portland. Ah, Portland.





Portland is a very cool city. Of course, I like any town with a famous book store that takes up an entire city block.



I met up with some good friends of mine from Japan (they're from Portland, we were neighbors in Japan), and they took me around to some of the various Portland sights. Like Voodoo Doughnuts:



(Worth a trip if you're in Portland.)

The world's smallest park:



And this thing:



I'm not really sure what it is.



I'm still not sure what it is.

We also went to Ground Control, a retro arcade/bar. Which is possibly the greatest idea for a bar ever.



They had the old Tron game I used to love. It was still hard as hell. They had an original Mario Bros. cabinet:



And quite the selection of pinball machines:



I like Portland.

The next day my host took me to the Saturday Market where you can get anything under the sun.



I had my first "Elephant Ear"



which is basically a piece of fried bread topped with something. I believe Cinnamon and Maple Syrup is the "traditional" way to go, but never being one to adhere to tradition, (and on the advice of my host) I got half with peanut butter, and half with strawberry cream cheese. The Strawberry cream cheese is definitely the way to go.

The rest of Saturday was spent playing Arkham Horror, a Lovecraft themed board game with friends old and new.

Sunday found me at the Portland CouchSurfing Annual Picnic. Portland, you see, has a huge couchsurfing community, and they do things like this.



It is a very cool crowd. When people ask me to describe couchsurfing, I tell them it's like a secret club for all the coolest people in the world, because that's pretty much what it's amounted to in my experience.

Someone did Van Gogh's "Starry Night" in cupcake frosting.



If that isn't the coolest pan of cupcakes you've ever seen, I have to start hanging around your bakery.

Ah, Portland.



I left Portland this "morning" for Castle Rock, Washington, where my host took me to see Mount Saint Helens and Coldwater Lake.





Now if the tone and pacing of this blog seemed a little disjointed and distracted, it was because I let too much time slip between the experience and the writing. I will try to write my blogs more frequently, so things are definitely going to speed up around here.

On the road again, sure as your born, natural born easy on the road again

Well I have finally picked up and gotten a move on once more. It has been an eventful...5 weeks?! Things are going to be picking up again now that my wheels are set to rolling. Let's catch up, shall we?

Bay To Breakers

My last post was 2 days before the Bay To Breakers 12k. We can blame B2B for keeping me in California past April. I was told not to miss it. "What's so special about it?" Well, if you're a runner, you get to the starting point on time and run 12 kilometers. Everyone else arrives not so promptly and it turns into a massive party that crawls across the city. A lot, if not most, of the people who go to the race show up in costumes.

I was in a group of about 10, 6 of which were dressed as dinosaurs:





It was a lot like Halloween in New York City.



Some people wear nothing at all, so I did see some boobies.

Yosemite

The next weekend, I went on a group ride with some local riders to Yosemite: A great and beautiful national park here in Central California.

Now, the scenery out here in the hills of Central California is a little alien. Back in April all the local riders were saying we should go riding while it's "still green", because apparently the green of spring only lasts about a month. After April, all the grass turns golden. Now Californians are a little jaded to it and I can understand getting sick of it after a couple years, but for this North Easterner, it creates a weird green and gold color scheme that looks pretty cool:



On the way up through the mountains, at the end of May, there was still snow on the ground:



Yosemite itself is gorgeous.





The other bikers stayed in a hostel, but I chose to couchsurf as I do. While everyone else went home the next day, my host took me back in to the park to explore it a little more in depth. As we were going in they pointed out that from this particular entrance, the trees on one of the mountainsides forms a natural Grateful Dead bear:



Dead center of that picture. I think that's pretty cool and appropriate.

We went right up to Bridalveil Falls which was overflowing at the time, so much so that the path leading up to it was like a river unto itself.



We got to the base of the falls and got thoroughly soaked.

Last Hurrah: Los Angeles

The weekend after Yosemite, I went down to Irvine again for one last visit with my friend down there. This time, it was Palomar Mountain or nothing. But before we went to Palomar, we went to a showing of "The Room" at the Sunset 5 Theater in West Hollywood.



Now you may not have heard of The Room, so allow me to enlighten you. It is, perhaps arguably, the worst movie ever made, but therein lies it's saving grace. It is comically bad. Watch it alone and you're in for nothing but painfully bad cinema, watch it in a group and it's comedy gold. Such has been my experience. I had heard that it is screened on the last Saturday of every month over at Sunset 5 on 5 screens, and better yet: The Writer/Director/Star attends every screening! Me and one of the people I went with got our picture taken with Tommy Wiseau.



Too bad my camera is just awful in low light conditions. You'll just have to take my word that it's him.

Tickets sell out on a regular basis. Just take a look at the line to get in. The front of the line is to the left of the picture, and the line extendeds behind me by another 100 people or so.



"The Room" is the new Rocky Horror picture show. It's constant audience participation kept us laughing almost non-stop from beginning to end. Few events have been more fun than that.

The next day, Alex and I finally made it out to Palomar Mountain.



People talking about Palomar Mountain often call it the most technical or most difficult road in California. California riders will tell you otherwise because whoever said that hadn't ridden too many roads out here. Now it was fun, but only because I was riding with a friend. I would have been sorely disappointed if I had ridden all that way (90 miles from Irvine) expecting this amazing road only to get there and be let down. Expectations aside, a good time was had by all.

U2

Hey remember a few paragraphs earlier when I was couchsurfing in a town next to Yosemite? Well my host and I got along especially well and she just so happened to have a free ticket to go see U2 in Oakland in 2 weeks. I may not be the biggest U2 fan out there but I don't know what kind of a fool I'd have to be to not leap at this opportunity. The original plan was to leave California on June 2nd or 3rd after getting back to San Jose from my last visit down South.

Instead after returning from SoCal, my new good friend Heather came out to San Jose to hang for a few days.

Around San Jose, we went to Kelly Park, saw the "Japanese Friendship Garden" there:



Also, what appears to be a real live Truffula Tree:



The Lorax was not present.

We also went out to the San Jose Heritage Rose Garden because sometimes it's important to stop and smell the roses.



Sometimes it's also important to get a job, hippie!

Then of course, there was U2. It was a pleasant surprise that the opening act was Lenny Kravitz.



It was unfortunate that the crowd seemed dead for Lenny Kravitz, but luckily U2 lit the place up. Both literally and figuratively.











Now again I say, I've never been much a fan of U2, but they put on one hell of a show. It was a great time.

We were lucky to be going by motorcycle because it was estimated that 2000 people missed the concert do to this awful California traffic that we were able to just slither our way through.

The Great Lick Refractor

Our next adventure took us to the Lick Observatory which at the time it was built, was home to the world's largest refracting telescope.



The Lick Observatory was built to honor James Lick, who's body is interred right below the Lick Refractor. James Lick was a piano builder who apparently became so wealthy that he could decide to have the world's largest refracting telescope built as a memorial to himself. And so he did.

"Words" to live by?

But who needs a fire starter when you have electric grapes?