I can't believe that my last post was only a week ago - we have covered so much distance since then! When ADC returned the car this morning, he had driven it for about 2500 miles.
On July 29, the first day of our road trip proper, we set off quite early, heading for the Columbia River Gorge. Our first stop was at Vista House, built in the 1920s specifically for viewing the gorge at its finest. The very enthusiastic docent there gave us maps and lists of waterfalls to visit as we made our way along historic Route 30, one of the first roads ever built expressly to encourage motoring to natural beauty spots. ADC, who spent a year in Eugene when he was in fourth grade, remembered many of the names, and the description of the Bonneville fish hatchery, where the fish jump up a ladder ... the and his family then probably made many short trips along the route we covered in a single day. We stopped at Bridal Veils to admire the waterfall, but were unable to stop anywhere else along Route 30 due to the lack of parking. And this was in the middle of the week! As we drove along, we stopped at random places to look at the gorge and/or Mt Hood and for ADC to take pictures. Today was the beginning of a heatwave supposed to continue to the weekend, and we definitely felt temperatures we had not experienced since leaving the DC area. On the other hand, there was very little humidity, so we were able to spend nearly an hour walking in 36C heat. For the first time, it felt like summer should: neither the humidity of DC nor the chilliness of Washington. That was after we had crossed the Cascades into the rain shadow desert of central Oregon. The landscape changed dramatically almost immediately: from green to yellow, looking more and more like the Golan Heights with the basalt rocks and grazing beef cattle. As the temperatures rose, visibility improved, and when we came across a mountain identification plate at the crest of Mt Criterion, we were able to see, in addition to the easily identifiable Mt Hood, also Mt Adams - far away in Washington, Mt Jefferson and the Three Sisters.
We spent a lot of time in the car that day and heard a great deal of music, the "West Coast Playlist" that ADC had prepared in advance (including, as well as musicians from California and Seattle, anyone else who seemed to have been influenced/was mocking them). We spent the night just beyond Bend in the kind of place that ADC has been looking for since our first trip in the USA: a small motel called Rodeway, cheap but clean, with very few frills, but with a room large enough for each boy to have his own bed. It is part of a chain, but not one we had come across before.
Next day we set off for Crater Lake, hoping to escape the forecast heat. In fact, ADC was very worried that we might not be warmly enough dressed and told the children to expect to see snow on the ground (which they interpreted as "it might/will snow", it seems). In the event, there was no snow whatsoever - to the extent that the illustrated signs were false - and the weather was a pleasant low 20s Celsius. Once again, we were in a new plant zone, and on one walk Ariel became quite frustrated by the number of birds he could hear, but not see, and was unable to identify. All the same, I filled over a page in my little notebook with flowers, birds, a rodent (golden-mantled squirrel) and a butterfly (variegated fritillary). Crater Lake itself was an amazing sight - such deep blue water! It seems that even the geology in the New World is younger than what I am used to from Israel, measured in thousands rather than millions of years, but I know that that is an artefact of the volcanic Cascades range. We went on two shortish hikes - we are impossibly thorough in our nature observing, especially me when I'm not familiar with the flowers, so we didn't have time for more than that.
Once we left the park, we were in the middle of nowhere. We passed through a couple of motels at the side of the road just after 5 p.m., but it was two early to stop, and once we entered the Rogue River Gorge, there was nothing for more than an hour. We were just starting to get a bit concerned when we reached Shady Cove, where we found the Platonic ideal of an old-fashioned motel with a diner alongside it. The rooms were cheap enough that Amos and Shaul could have a room to themselves (which turned out to have ants, so they were upgraded to s suite, thus they each have a room of their own), and at supper I had a butterscotch milkshake, which more than made up for the only vegetarian option being a mediocre garden burger.
We reached California just before noon on July 31st, and also reached yet another climate/vegetation zone - to the extent that ADC bought me a new plants and animals pamphlet, specifically for the redwood forests national and state parks. The size of the redwoods is truly amazing. Together with the enormous sword ferns growing on the forest floor, I felt as if I were Alice after drinking the "Drink Me" flask, as we walked along the Stout Grove loop (the grove was established as part of an effort prevent further logging of the redwoods in the 1920s and was named by Mrs Clara Stout in honour of her husband, a lumber baron). We left Shady Coves that morning still in the throes of a heatwave, with added forest fires (the car was lightly coated with flakes of ash). When we reached Crescent City and the Pacific coast in the late afternoon, the temperature was 40 degrees Fahrenheit lower than they had been 24 hours earlier! No wonder there is constant fog flowing from the Pacific. To top the natural wonders of the day, we saw a small herd of elk - females and juvenile males - browsing at the side of the road just before leaving one of the sections of the state park. Our original plan had been to stay at a motel in Eureka along US 101, but when we arrived, they were all very sleazy-looking, so we found a place a few blocks into town, where we got a suite, so we have our own room, and each boy has his own bed. We had dinner at a Mexican restaurant, the first good South American food we've had (the mediocre Salvadoran meal we had as our first lunch clearly had an long-term effect, albeit an unconscious one).
August 1 was a long day, which can be summed up in two words: driving and eating. As our motel did not include breakfast, we decided to eat a few remaining things that we had bought for hikes, and to stop after the Avenue of the Giants for brunch. We set off just before 9 a.m., stopped for brunch two and a half hours' later, and at 3 p.m. really needed another break. We stopped at the closest place Google Maps suggested, Frozen Art in Santa Rosa, where we had some of the best ice-cream I've ever had. The owners are Mexican, and there were some very interesting and unusual flavours - I had a scoop of honey and lavender ice-cream, and another of rose petal. ADC had corn ice-cream! They also had paletas, or home-made popsicles, and there the flavours were even more interesting: cucumber and melon, pico de gallo, and pine-nut were just a few.
At 5 we finally reached our Airbnb in Oakland. This was our first time doing Airbnb, and we didn't really know what to expect - we were not expecting to get the run of an empty family home, including a hot tub! There are also two cats, that come with the house. The only downside is that there is almost no closet space: the family that lives here has gone on holiday for three weeks, and decided that this was better than getting a house sitter. Finally, we went over to ADC's cousins J&L for dinner. It was possibly the best Chinese takeout I've ever eaten - if all Chinese restaurants served food like Shan Dong does, I would have a better opinion of Chinese food for vegetarians.
Much of Sunday and Monday were spent with cousins. We essentially spent all of Sunday with J&L - as BART was not working, we stayed in Oakland. We walked around Lake Merritt, ate pizza from Arizmendi (the original of the pizza place that serves only one flavour in Inside Out), and visited the Oakland Museum of California, which is free on the first Sunday of the month. We spent nearly two hours there, only in the History hall. I had known very little of the history of California previously, and it was good to get the Spaniards, Mexicans and Americans sorted out. It was also very useful to know a bit about the development of San Francisco before going there the next day. At the very end of the hall was a small historiographical exhibition, explaining how curators worked and derived history from material objects. Monday was our first day in San Francisco itself. We used three kinds of transport: BART, the cable car and a historic street car (made in 1948 and originally from Cincinnati, according to the posters inside it). Our first stop was in the Mission district, where we met my father's first cousin W and her family for brunch at their home. I last saw W when I was about seven, and didn't remember her at all. I am not sure we would have met so easily at the BART station if I had not said in advance that I would be wearing my purple skirt! W and her husband T were very welcoming. We talked about all kinds of things, and met their daughter M and her boyfriend J. M is about to begin medical school and J is a chef; I think we persuaded him to seriously consider visiting Israel (he isn't Jewish) by telling him about the goat cheeses made in the desert just beyond Omer. When we left, S asked them to come for his bar mitzvah in two years' time. After over two hours' having brunch, T was very happy to walk us around the upper Mission district, taking us to see Dolores Park and Mark Zuckerberg's house, and pointing out particular architectural features. I must say that the so-called Victorian style in San Francisco is lovely. After we said goodbye to T, we continued down Valencia St, looking at all the weird and wonderful shops, of which the weirdest was surely the steampunk emporium of Paxton Gate. The boys really wanted to buy things there, but we restrained them by pointing out the restrictions on importing animal parts from one country to another. After moving from Valencia to Mission St., we caught another BART to Powell St., where we wanted to get the cable car to Fisherman's Wharf. The line there was incredibly long, but we noticed that the cars were not full when they left - indicating that there were additional stations along the way. We walked just a short way up Powell to the next station, and were able to catch the next but one car, instead of the fifth or sixth car. It's very interesting how people see a line and join it, and very few think of ways to shorten their wait time. We saw a similar phenomenon at Ghirardelli Square, where you could get sundaes either at the Ghirardelli Marketplace (half empty and no queue when you approached the counter after walking past the displays of chocolate bars) or at the Ghirardelli Fountain (queue coming out of the store and around the block, for the same over-priced sundaes). Fisherman's Wharf itself was pleasant to walk along. The boys went down to the beach and paddled for a bit - I also saw small children in puffy coats! We were a bit tired by the time we finished wandering around that area, and took a street car back to Market St., where we wandered more in search of supper. It turned out that Market Street is very like Soho in London, in that the restaurants and the sleazy places are very close to each other. After half an hour, I forced ADC to book a table in an Indian restaurant, just to be sure that we ate somewhere with decent food at reasonable prices. On the way there, we found a jazz bistro called Les Joulins, which is where we ended up eating supper: very good food and even better music. It later turned out that this is one of the premier spots for live jazz in the city; as we had missed hearing a jazz quartet that IB and E like very much in Seattle, this more than made up for it.
Wednesday was a relatively restful day, in that we did not spend all of it on our feet. Instead, we went for a scenic drive (there's something we hadn't done in a while :-)) through Golden Gate Park, over the Golden Gate bridge and along route 1 to Stinson Beach. We had a bit of a late start, and saw the toll change from $6 to $4 while in line at the Bay Bridge at 10 a.m. On the way to the Golden Gate Park we saw some very different SF neighbourhoods from the ones we had seen by foot, like the millionaires' haven of Sea Cliff, where we saw the kind of crescent that in Bath has 18th-century row houses adorned here with mansions, and Richmond, which looked rather like a place we would enjoy living in. The day was chilly and overcast, so we didn't spend too long in the park, as A and S wanted to cross the bridge as soon as possible. We overheard an Irish guide giving instructions to a group of cyclists who were going to cycle over the bridge and A really regretted having to be stuck inside a car! The view from the bridge was as spectacular as promised, and so was the view from the vista point on route 1. I had a bad attack of car-sickness going around all the twists and turns, both coming and going, to the extent that I believe that I made the right decision to skip soft-serve ice-cream at Stinson Beach. Everyone was very sorry for me, and I'm not sure why I was so badly affected while the boys - who also tend to car sickness - seemed perfectly fine. Part of it, I think, was that somehow I was never at the right angle for the win to blow in my face. That aside, Stinson Beach was a lovely day out: we paddled a bit, despite the cold and even drizzle, but were amazed at the people actually swimming! The Pacific is so much colder than the Med, and the posters warning of rip tides and sharks were quite alarming. We found a nice little book shop, and more importantly at the moment, I found a post office, where I picked up boxes so we can send at least some of our books home via media mail and hopefully avoid paying overweight on our flight. The day ended with more ice-cream, this time at Fenton's Creamery, and the welcome news that our flight time had been changed: instead of leaving SFO at 8:30 with a 6 hour layover at JFK before taking off for Tel Aviv, we are now leaving at 13:20 and have only 2 hours' layover, arriving in Tel Aviv at the same time, but hopefully less complete wrecks.
Yesterday we went back into the city, entering and leaving from the Montgomery Street BART station. We began by visiting a tea and chocolate shop we had seen from the cable car, called Spicely. We spent much longer than expected there, and did not walk out empty handed (despite our luggage concerns). If Spicely opened a cafe in Powell's bookstore in Portland, I think we would move in permanently. After that, we resumed walking up Montgomery Street to the Coit Tower. We didn't go up it, but looked at the view. We then took all the steps down through Grace Marchand Garden to Battery Street and began looking for lunch. That took longer than expected, and we ended up at The Planet, an organic cafe where the men each had a different kind of sandwich and I had an interesting tomato and watermelon salad. ADC and I had juices (and I remembered why I actually prefer them without food), and Amos expanded his horizons and had a smoothie. We then went to the Ferry Building marketplace, and bought artisanal bread, cheese and salami for an early supper - ADC and the boys went with Jeremy to see Ant-Man. A and S enjoyed themselves greatly, especially S; ADC, as usual, was distracted by the bad science involved and its inner inconsistencies. I stayed home, began packing, and tried to get T-Mobile to unlock our phones so we can use them in Israel but was defeated due to not being ADC (in whose names all the lines are). This was after we'd made a special detour to a T-Mobile shop in town, having understood that the unlocking could be done there on the spot. I did make some progress, though, and as I used the chat, the agent assured me that we wouldn't need to give all the information again. I think chat helplines are brilliant: I'd tried calling, first, and ended up unsure if the agent had understood me properly, or I him. With chat, everything is much clearer and you can go back and check what you said much more easily.
I'm writing this after getting back from supper with J&L, with whom we spent much of the day today. We got a relatively late start, as there were several errands that had to be done before we could go into San Francisco one last time - mailing books (it turns out that media rate does not apply to boxes, so that was $87 - but paying for overweight luggage and having to check both trolley suitcases would probably have come to more), finally getting the unlock codes from t-Mobile, and returning the car to the rental agency. We eventually met J&L at noon, and went for a walk through Chinatown. L didn't grow up there, but her parents still have close connections and apparently her father takes two buses to go shopping there almost every day. She attempted to haggle with the seller at a jade shop where A bought a small elephant to add to his collection, but he was too quick and paid without question. We had lunch at a place whose name I didn't catch, and whose clientele seemly evenly divided between Chinese and non-Chinese. It was very good. especially the deep-fried salt and pepper eggplant we had as a starter and the garlicky pea shoots. After that, L had to go back to work, and J took us to City Lights, Lawrence Ferlinghetti's bookstore, still a mainstay of radical San Francisco. There were some interesting titles there, but this time we weren't buying ... Everyone humoured me and went into Britex Fabrics, an entire building that is one of the West Coast's meccas for anyone who sews. There is a floor of silks and woollens, another of cotton, linen and more, an entire floor devoted to buttons and trimmings of all kinds, and the fourth floor (which we didn't reach) is remnants and novelty fabrics. I was overwhelmed - I don't know how you can go into a shop like that with the intent to buy without a sewing plan. There is so much choice ... A picked out a couple of silks that he would like me to make into shorts for him; I said I would aim at making him a cotton shirt by S's bar mitzvah (giving me two years to improve my sewing), and see how we went from there.
At 3:30 we went back to our Airbnb, finished packing except for what we still needed to use before packing up, and went to Dr Comics & Mr Games, the local comics shop, so that S could get one last fix before going home. At 7:00 Jeremy came to fetch us for supper. During supper, L asked what the highlights of the year had been. It was a surprisingly difficult question to answer, but in no particular order, my top five were meeting Patricia Crone, learning to sew, visiting Savannah, cultivated flowers (the Hoyt Arboretum, the bonsais at the National Arboretum, Portland Rose Garden and the cherry blossoms in Washington), and the Tenement Museum in New York. The list could continue, but I need more time to reflect. I'll revisit the question in a month's time, everything is too close now.
In less than eleven hours a taxi will come to take us to the airport ... next post will be from Israel.
eumelia , she was by herself in a honeymoon suite / 2-person igloo, including a jacuzzi, which meant an extra kitchen and fridge, as well as empty floor space for the traditional board games played by the boy cousins, ADC and myself in the afternoons. We also had a slightly different location from the usual one, and it was even more peaceful than in past years.