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Road Trip: Day 1 (covering 9/22/07)
Dateline: Ft. Klamath, Oregon; Current odometer: 199608 (trip start: 199191); Miles travelled: 417; Current location of writing: a pleasant pine-filled meadow that forms the public space of the Crater Lake Resort (a somewhat grandiose name for a dozen cabins and a row of RV hookups).
I'd been thinking that I'd probably wake up early and just hit the road when I figured I wasn't going to sleep any more, but I had a very pleasant sleep up until my usual work-day getting up time. This was because I was occupied with me and a bunch of other people in transit in a train station. On of the other people was Queen Elizabeth (the current one, not the Renaissance one). No entourage or anything, just an elderly gray-haired lady with a profile familiar from coins and stamps and things. The train station was large and elaborate and involve a large number of one-way gates and escalators that didn't come in convenient pairs. Train schedules were not posted; at the last minute a harried station attendant dashed through the various waiting rooms yelling for everyone who was taking the train to wherever-it-was should follow him. As he plunged down one of the escalators with Queen and me an all in pursuit, I realized that Queen Elizabeth had left her luggage behind (perhaps assuming that someone else takes care of these things), and I spent the rest of the dream dashing around attempting to push upstream on the escalator, or find a different one that would get me back to the level where the luggage was, and shouting at all in sundry in frustration that this was a hell of a way to run a train station.
Deep symbolic meaning: unknown.
So I left the house around 7:30 with coffee in hand, bridge toll stowed within reach, a limited assortment of healthy snacks in the seat beside me, and the iPod hooked into the car stereo with a new album I hadn't listened to yet. Now my first brush with Songs from the Labyrinth was on some recent tv sitcom whose name I forget but it was one of a couple of shows with the underlying concept of a show about making a tv show. At any rate, the show-in-a-show was some sort of late-night variety thing, and in that episode Sting was on the show promoting his new album of Dowland lute songs. This was such a peculiar concept that I didn't immediately suspect that the embedded fiction was actually factual, until I happened on some PBS "making of" show about the same album. Well, ok, it's mostly (all?) some other guy playing the lute (and quite impressively), but the voice was -- well, he does have a rather nice voice, doesn't he? And not at all what you'd expect in the way of "rock star does Renaissance music" in the way of interpretation. So I picked up the album if only because I love it when some pop performer totally turns your expectations inside out and says, "Look, here's something else I happen to do -- never would have guessed that, would you?" I'm not equipped to review the album from an early music performance standpoint, and quite frankly the sound system in my car sucks even when I'm not blasting it driving down teh freeway with the windows open. But I like it; so there you are. The performance is clear and pleasant, the song choices include some old favorites. (Wait a minute, I have old favorites of Dowland? Who woulda thunk it?) And I like the overall album-concept which includes interludes of excerpts from Dowland's correspondence that give a brief sketch of his life and career.
There's always a point when a road trip clearly diverges from just driving somewhere -- a point when you move beyond the fields you know. It doesn't happen on I-80 because I'm always going towards Sacramento for something or other. For that matter, it doesn't happen when heading north up the valley on I-5
because what with my parents living in Redding for several years after they retired, that was practically a regular commute. I pretty much have to get past Lake Shasta and up into the mountains before I'm "on a trip".
At this point, I've been driving for 200 miles and three and a half hours -- about half the day's travel. Mount Shasta itself was still in bed with the feather comforter pulled over her head, but the cinder cone was out and about, pretending that the wisps of cloud were a burp of erruption.
And then it was time to turn off on highway 97 at Weed.
Childhood traditions have a reality of their own that are independent of how much actual basis they had. Any time I find myself thinking or saying, "When I was a kid, we always ..." I stop and try to remember: did we do it once? twice? every year? every year for four years? Does it matter? There was a trip-template that happened often enough to have created a reality in my memory. We would drive up from San Diego and stop to visit the cousins in San Mateo. My dad liked to drive at night so we kids would be asleep and not driving him crazy, so we'd leave San Mateo just around bedtime and at dawn I'd wake up while we were driving along the shore of Klamath Lake.
I'd always wake up then: no sooner, no later. And the lake always seemed endless -- we'd drive along it for hours. Impossible -- it only takes about half an hour from one end to the other. A separate reality with it's own temporal rules.
I turned off hwy 97 towards Crater Lake and started looking for motels with vacancies and got the last available cabin at the Crater Lake Resort (see above note on the name) at around 2:30 pm. The rest of the plan involved getting the bike out and shaking the kinks out of my legs, which the proprietor was able to promote with suggestions of routes and sights. I ended up with about an 8-mile out-and-back on a nearly traffic-free back road, with side trips down a dirt road to see where a local tributary of Wood River sprang full-blown from a heap of boulders at the base of a hill (there were pictures, but the phone-camera didn't deal with the shadows well -- see tomorrow's regarding the digital camera), and to take a scenic path along Wood River itself, where a network of wheelchair-accessible paths proved very bike-friendly. Then I drove back to Chiloquin for a spot of dinner and so to bed. Nah, it's only 7:30. And so to write up a blog entry, fiddle around on the computer (without net access, alas), and maybe start in on the book I selected out of my immense to-be-read stack: The Hidden Queen by Alma Alexander. (Yes, yes, I'm sucking up to one of the people I'm visiting. So sue me. It was there in the stack -- it just jumped the queue a little.)
I'd been thinking that I'd probably wake up early and just hit the road when I figured I wasn't going to sleep any more, but I had a very pleasant sleep up until my usual work-day getting up time. This was because I was occupied with me and a bunch of other people in transit in a train station. On of the other people was Queen Elizabeth (the current one, not the Renaissance one). No entourage or anything, just an elderly gray-haired lady with a profile familiar from coins and stamps and things. The train station was large and elaborate and involve a large number of one-way gates and escalators that didn't come in convenient pairs. Train schedules were not posted; at the last minute a harried station attendant dashed through the various waiting rooms yelling for everyone who was taking the train to wherever-it-was should follow him. As he plunged down one of the escalators with Queen and me an all in pursuit, I realized that Queen Elizabeth had left her luggage behind (perhaps assuming that someone else takes care of these things), and I spent the rest of the dream dashing around attempting to push upstream on the escalator, or find a different one that would get me back to the level where the luggage was, and shouting at all in sundry in frustration that this was a hell of a way to run a train station.
Deep symbolic meaning: unknown.
So I left the house around 7:30 with coffee in hand, bridge toll stowed within reach, a limited assortment of healthy snacks in the seat beside me, and the iPod hooked into the car stereo with a new album I hadn't listened to yet. Now my first brush with Songs from the Labyrinth was on some recent tv sitcom whose name I forget but it was one of a couple of shows with the underlying concept of a show about making a tv show. At any rate, the show-in-a-show was some sort of late-night variety thing, and in that episode Sting was on the show promoting his new album of Dowland lute songs. This was such a peculiar concept that I didn't immediately suspect that the embedded fiction was actually factual, until I happened on some PBS "making of" show about the same album. Well, ok, it's mostly (all?) some other guy playing the lute (and quite impressively), but the voice was -- well, he does have a rather nice voice, doesn't he? And not at all what you'd expect in the way of "rock star does Renaissance music" in the way of interpretation. So I picked up the album if only because I love it when some pop performer totally turns your expectations inside out and says, "Look, here's something else I happen to do -- never would have guessed that, would you?" I'm not equipped to review the album from an early music performance standpoint, and quite frankly the sound system in my car sucks even when I'm not blasting it driving down teh freeway with the windows open. But I like it; so there you are. The performance is clear and pleasant, the song choices include some old favorites. (Wait a minute, I have old favorites of Dowland? Who woulda thunk it?) And I like the overall album-concept which includes interludes of excerpts from Dowland's correspondence that give a brief sketch of his life and career.
There's always a point when a road trip clearly diverges from just driving somewhere -- a point when you move beyond the fields you know. It doesn't happen on I-80 because I'm always going towards Sacramento for something or other. For that matter, it doesn't happen when heading north up the valley on I-5
because what with my parents living in Redding for several years after they retired, that was practically a regular commute. I pretty much have to get past Lake Shasta and up into the mountains before I'm "on a trip".
At this point, I've been driving for 200 miles and three and a half hours -- about half the day's travel. Mount Shasta itself was still in bed with the feather comforter pulled over her head, but the cinder cone was out and about, pretending that the wisps of cloud were a burp of erruption.
And then it was time to turn off on highway 97 at Weed.
Childhood traditions have a reality of their own that are independent of how much actual basis they had. Any time I find myself thinking or saying, "When I was a kid, we always ..." I stop and try to remember: did we do it once? twice? every year? every year for four years? Does it matter? There was a trip-template that happened often enough to have created a reality in my memory. We would drive up from San Diego and stop to visit the cousins in San Mateo. My dad liked to drive at night so we kids would be asleep and not driving him crazy, so we'd leave San Mateo just around bedtime and at dawn I'd wake up while we were driving along the shore of Klamath Lake.
I'd always wake up then: no sooner, no later. And the lake always seemed endless -- we'd drive along it for hours. Impossible -- it only takes about half an hour from one end to the other. A separate reality with it's own temporal rules.
I turned off hwy 97 towards Crater Lake and started looking for motels with vacancies and got the last available cabin at the Crater Lake Resort (see above note on the name) at around 2:30 pm. The rest of the plan involved getting the bike out and shaking the kinks out of my legs, which the proprietor was able to promote with suggestions of routes and sights. I ended up with about an 8-mile out-and-back on a nearly traffic-free back road, with side trips down a dirt road to see where a local tributary of Wood River sprang full-blown from a heap of boulders at the base of a hill (there were pictures, but the phone-camera didn't deal with the shadows well -- see tomorrow's regarding the digital camera), and to take a scenic path along Wood River itself, where a network of wheelchair-accessible paths proved very bike-friendly. Then I drove back to Chiloquin for a spot of dinner and so to bed. Nah, it's only 7:30. And so to write up a blog entry, fiddle around on the computer (without net access, alas), and maybe start in on the book I selected out of my immense to-be-read stack: The Hidden Queen by Alma Alexander. (Yes, yes, I'm sucking up to one of the people I'm visiting. So sue me. It was there in the stack -- it just jumped the queue a little.)