Home is where the heart is.

Oct. 4, 2013

Today was the last day of our trip. We hit the road at about 8:30am and drove all the way to Bend, OR, which is about half way to Washington. The reason we chose to stop there is because Ben promised me that I could go shopping at the Ross, and in Oregon there is no tax. I didn’t end up finding anything, but Ben (finally!!!) got a new had to replace the disgusting one he has been wearing.

After we left Bend, we drove for another 5 or so hours all the way to Leavenworth, WA, which is a little town in the Cascade Mountains that is modeled after a Bavarian town, so all the buildings are keeping with this theme. This weekend was actually the first of 3 weekends where they were having Oktoberfest parties, so it was really busy in town and there were even people dressed up in dirndls and lederhosen. 

We poked around through some shops and stopped in one that had samples of all sorts of dips, honeys, marinades and hot sauces. Ben and I made a fatal error in trying one hot sauce, that to be fair had several warnings on it, and we deeply regretted it. It was the most fiery thing I have ever tasted, I basically went around to all the creamy looking dips to try and put the fire out but nothing was really helping. Ben was getting really sweaty and ended up cracking and buying chocolate milk. After a while my mouth started to feel better, but the fire had just moved to my stomach and I was not feeling very well. Ben apparently was fine, however he had eaten about a quarter of the sauce that I had (I dipped my pretzel stick deeper) and he drank milk (of which he only gave me a sip). By this time it was after 5pm and we still wanted to make it home, so we headed back to the car and I drank a coconut water and started to feel much better.

The drive through the Cascades was beautiful; once we got to Steven’s Pass there was even snow on the mountains.

 It ended up taking us much longer to get out of the mountains and to Everett than we had anticipated as we had to go through several towns and the traffic got busier the closer we got to civilization. We finally made it to the I5 around 7:30pm and by this time we were pretty hungry since we hadn’t eaten since breakfast other than a few snacks in the car. We ended up getting off the I5 one exit north of the outlet mall and found this cool sushi place where they have plates of food going around on a track. The food was good and it was perfect because we didn’t have to wait to order anything and Ben was getting antsy about getting across the border.

We made it across the border without incident and there wasn’t even a line. Upon arriving at home, it seems our local neighbourhood cat missed us and had left us a gift of a large rat on our driveway…so thoughtful.

Overall, our trip was pretty awesome. Lots of people commented on Ben’s height and asked about our car and strangely enough I had a few people comment on my ear piercings and say they had never seen ones like mine before, which is weird because I’ve had these piercings for about 10 years and no one has ever commented on them before…

Also, now that we are home we can look forward to our next road trip J

Here is a link to the route we took down the coast and back: https://maps.google.com/maps/ms?msid=210610441625190342087.0004e7ce2329fd4d40400&msa=0&ll=44.699898,-120.146484&spn=10.00959,19.753418

Got a Full tank of Unleaded

Oct. 3, 2013

After a pretty sleepless night, we got the heck out of Crumville and on the road around 7:30am. We got gas and I got a coffee on our way out of town and we ate snacks we picked up a couple days ago for breakfast. Today was pretty much just a driving day, although we did stop and take pictures at a few different lookouts and at another really salty lake that had big mineralized rocks and smelled like sulphur. It was actually pretty cool, Ben said it looked like another planet. There were a couple of guys in their early to mid twenties that had stopped as well and were headed down the trail to be beach just ahead of us. But once you got closer to the lake you could start to smell it (and honestly it really wasn’t that smelly, kinda salty and sulphur-y, and mineral-y); these pansies turned around and left.

Anyways, before we ended up stopping for lunch, I once again fell asleep during the drive. Apparently while I was sleeping we went through a section of highway next to a hillside recently ravaged by forest fire. Ben informed me of this when he woke me up to tell me we were at the Ross just outside of Carson City, NV. I picked up a cute pair of moccasins and we ended up having lunch nearby at the Chili’s.

Part of the reason we took the route north that we did was because Ben wanted to go through Reno because he had never been there (I hadn’t either). All I can say is don’t bother, there is nothing there. We didn’t even get off the interstate. It was very spread out, with large hotel/casinos randomly dotted throughout the city. There was one “strip”-like area we could see, but the hotels didn’t look interesting and it was too far off the interstate to bother checking out.

From Reno we continued north back into California and went through this checkpoint (although there wasn’t actually anyone manning it so we didn’t have to stop). Apparently California doesn’t like produce to enter the state from Nevada, or so Ben told me. I’m thinking “Whaaaat??”, it’s the same country so who cares, but apparently the state of California cares. At some point during our drive (I can’t quite remember exactly where we were…), there was this total d-bag BMW that was passing vehicles very recklessly and just driving like a jerk in general. Maybe 10 minutes after he passed us we saw a highway patrol car coming toward us and then less than a mile down the road we saw another patrol car with the BMW pulled over. It was literally a high-5 moment for us. I love it when you see stupid jerk drivers get pulled over, not just because they are speeding and passing cars, but also because we had also been speeding and he had the highway patrol otherwise occupied.

Meanwhile, Ben likes to wait until the last possible moment to refuel, and with towns on the highway we were on being few and far between, we almost had a run-out-of-gas scare before we rolled into Doyle, CA on fumes. Once we again had a full tank of gas (every time we fill up Ben feels the need to sing this rap song from the 90’s…something about having “a full tank of unleaded”, I don’t recognize the song at all but it could just be his singing…), and we continued north, through Susanville (shout out to my mom), and onto a very quiet little highway through the mountains, past a lake, cow fields, and pretty much no other cars. It had some nice twisty parts for Ben to practice being a rally driver, and some nice scenery.

Once we got through the fun part and into a long straightaway, I felt I should offer to drive again until we got to Klamath Falls, OR, especially since I hadn’t driven at all since we were in Northern California (which we were again, just a different area). All went well and I pulled over on the outskirts of Klamath Falls so Ben could navigate us through town, especially since there was construction and the sun was going down right in our eyes. We hunted down a McDonald’s and callously used them for their free wifi to book a hotel, then left without so much as a thank-you. Because of our horrible experience at the Motel 6 last night, we were much more willing to pay a few extra bucks for a decent hotel.

We ended up at the Shilo Inn, which according to reviews has a really good breakfast. Upon arrival, we got a free upgrade to a king suite, 2 free drink coupons and a $5 off coupon for anything at the restaurant. We also enjoyed the indoor pool, hot tub, sauna, and steam room, although the steam room and sauna weren’t on when we got to the pool, and the sauna was taking too long to warm up so we didn’t end up using it. But we did go down to the restaurant and redeem our free drinks and shared a small meal. We are definitely looking forward to a good night’s sleep tonight.

Land Before Time

Oct. 2, 2013

This morning was another lazy start. We decided not to go to Sea World or the zoo (again because we are cheap like the Dutch) and instead decided to take a little drive through the Gaslight District of San Diego before heading out of the city. At breakfast I saw the old lady from yesterday, but today she didn’t ask me to make her waffle.

Overall we have noticed that the traffic in San Diego not bad at all, I think that there is more traffic in Langley at 9:30am than there was driving through San Diego this morning; definitely less traffic than LA. Also today was the first day was actually got my laptop working for GPS instead of Ben’s phone, which for whatever reason won’t charge while it is plugged in and navigating, so we  had a couple frustrating situations the last couple days when his battery was dead.

Anyways, we headed out of the city and up to a little mining town in the mountains called Julian. We were fortunate enough to end up behind a Sheriff truck that was going super slow. Eventually he pulled off at a ranger station and we were able to have some fun on the winding road.

 Julian itself was super cute and there were lots of shops to wander through. Julian is famous for its apples so of course we stopped to share a pie of the most delicious apple crumble pie with cinnamon ice cream. Unfortunately we didn’t really have time to do the mine tour as it took 90 minutes and we still had quite a bit of ground to cover today. 

Much to Ben’s delight, the road out of Julian through the mountains and into the desert was even more twisty than the road in. Once it flattened out into desert we could see that there must have been some flash flooding recently as there were some trucks clearing sand off the road.

Our next stop was the Salton Sea. We pulled off into Salton City with the intention of finding a beach, but driving down the road was like riding a bucking bronco (I assume, I have never tried), and the whole area was really barren and awful, with poorly kept homes strewn sporadically throughout the landscape. So we got back onto the highway and went down a little further to Salton Beach, where we planned to have a picnic lunch.

 This area was also pretty depressing but we did make it to the waterfront, which turned out to be less than appealing. It smelled really salty, and what from a distance looked like sand was actually dead barnacles and dry fish corpses. It was pretty nasty. Apparently the lake is stocked, but because it is so salty the fish can’t actually survive for very long, so there are a lot of dead fish everywhere. It was also pretty hot, about 32 degrees, so we didn’t stick around and instead went back to the car to turn on the air conditioning and had our picnic in the car on our way out of the most unappealing lake country ever.

From the Salton Sea, we continued north through the desert and I fell asleep in the car again. We stopped briefly for gas and to take some pictures of dinosaurs for Teresa’s benefit. Our final destination for today was Ridgecrest (formerly known as Crumville), which is near China Lake airborne weapons testing and training area.

We mostly stopped here because it was the largest town for a while and we didn’t want to get stuck in the middle of nowhere with no place to stay (for those wondering, no we have not once used the tent we brought…). Ben ended up booking us into a Motel 6, because it was the cheapest option, and really how bad could it be? The room itself was fine, clean, basic amenities. However apparently the Motel 6 attracts all sorts of riff-raff; neither of us got a very good sleep because the walls were paper thin and there were people coming and going all night. We were on the ground floor and our car was parked right outside our room. At one point around 2:45am I actually got out of bed to check on our car because I could hear people banging around outside. Ben was also awake and super irritated with our air-conditioner that was making a buzzing/squeeking sound; to me it was much needed white noise but apparently it was keeping him awake.

Going old town like its 1884..

Oct. 1, 2013

This morning since we were staying another night in San Diego, we weren’t in a rush to pack up and have breakfast. This motel is definitely on the cheap side and the breakfast was limited to pastries, cereal, and waffles. I had a waffle and then felt pretty gross afterwards, probably because our breakfasts over the last several days consisted of mostly carbs, which I don’t normally eat very much of. As we were leaving the dining room and throwing away our trash, and old lady asked me how the waffle machines worked, so I told her how to use the batter dispenser, pour it in the middle of the waffle iron, and flip it over so the timer would start. She was grateful for the instruction and asked if I could do it for her, so I did, and as we were leaving I reminded her to listen for it to beep when its finished, and she looked at me all startled and said, “oh I’m sorry, I thought you worked here”. I’m really not sure what gave her that impression, maybe because I cleaned up my own trash?

Anyways, by 9:15am we were ready to start our adventures in Old Town. On our way across the street from our hotel we located the skunk that had met its tragic demise the previous evening. The real mystery is given the fact that the corpse was in the middle of the lane of traffic, why was it already so flattened? Common sense tells me that motorists would be able to easily avoid hitting the skunk with their tires, and yet it was a pretty nasty (and still stinky) mess.

Unfortunately everything was closed until 10:00am, so we walked up the hill to the Mormon Battalion Memorial Site and Precidio Park Mission. By the time we made it back down the hill, shops were open and we began Ben’s favorite holiday pastime, aimlessly poking through little shops and looking at things we have no intention of purchasing. Old Town is actually really quaint as all the shops are in reconstructed buildings and all the staff were wearing period costumes. 

Every few shops is actually a little museum and entry is free. We wandered the rest of the morning away, I bought a pair of earrings and the shop lady gave us a coupon for a free appy at one of the restaurants in town, which we had already planned to hit up for lunch.

We weren’t really hungry yet even though it was probably close to 1:30pm, so we went to find the Mormon Battalion Historic Site as I had picked up a brochure that said they had free gold panning. The ladies here were also dressed in period dresses and invited us to take a tour. We ended up being the only ones in our group. Our tour started with our guide telling us a little bit about the Mormon Battalion, which was a group of 500 Mormon men (and some women and children) who were recruited by the government in 1846 to march west from Iowa to what is now San Diego. As the Mormons were fleeing persecution (they didn’t go much into why they were being persecuted, but I can think of a few reasons just off the top of my head…) and were planning on moving west anyways, this offered them an opportunity to not only create a wagon trail west, but also be paid by the government for their service in the army so their families could buy supplies. 

The entire presentation was extremely well put together and had us moving through different rooms and displays that followed the theme of the battalion’s journey west. Because our tour group was so small, Ben even got to dress up like a soldier; the musket with bayonet attached was almost as tall as him! The musket by itself was my height and heavy, I can’t imagine carrying that thing through the mountainous desert.

Anyways, the Mormons made it to the coast without having to fight any battles, however many of them became sick and died from malaria and/or the medication they were treating all their illnesses with, which turns out contained arsenic. Plus they had built a road that was passable by carriage and allowed pioneers to make their way west; it was also pretty much the same route that the railway followed when it came west. At the end of the presentation we got an old timey photo taken and we got to pan for gold (pyrite).

Now we were hungry so we went to Café Coyote and enjoyed a delicious Mexican meal, complete with a giant margarita to share. It was probably 3pm by this point and because we started with the margarita, we were both feeling a little tipsy by the time we left. 

We wandered through some more shops as well as a stable that had several original carriages and freight wagons from the area. But due to us both having a touch of the idis, we were both ready for an afternoon siesta. 

So we headed back to our room, where Ben promptly fell asleep and I did a bit of research on what else we should go see in San Diego before I took a nap as well.

When we woke up we figured we better go out otherwise we would just end up watching TV for the rest of the day, which would be a waste. We found a nearby Trader Joe’s and picked up some snacks for the road and then headed down to the waterfront to check out some of the ships docked there. 

Of course we were too cheap to pay to go onto any of the ships, but they were pretty impressive nonetheless. We saw the USS Midway, which is an aircraft carrier as well as the Jewel of India and some other ships that were part of the maritime museum. Plus we had a nice evening stroll along the boardwalk, which apparently is where everyone in San Diego goes for their evening run.

By the time we got back to the car it was dark, so we headed back to our motel to watch a couple shows and went to bed.