Road Trip 2022: Issaquah, Mon Amor

I sent Michael a link to the first two installments about our road trip odyssey, and he sent back this report:

 

“I’m heading out tomorrow for the northwest again and will cover much of the same real estate the three of us traversed on the way out to Issaquah [WA], where Joah and I will be staying during next week’s event near Seattle.

 

“The trips have become near and dear to me, and my mind busies itself in anticipation of the ongoing adventure and where it next leads. Be sure to point out that while our travels are itinerary possessed, they are heavily influenced by roadside attractions both of natural wonder and of man-made curiosities. The only real place we are supposed to be at any given moment is where we are in that moment. I like to think of us not so much as “easily distracted” (which, to be truthful, surely we are) but, thankfully, as easily entertained.”

 

Ernie just posted his second report about how easily entertained we are (he’s much more concise than I am), and his account has inspired me to add my Part 3. It started with coffee and a mishap. 

 

Michael always drives on these trips. He’s the one who knows those roads the best, and besides, it’s his car. This suits me fine, because it gives me a chance to send my impromptu photos to relatives and to friends on Facebook and Twitter. I document the trip as we go along, and it has the added incentive of taking the place of a boring slide presentation that no one wants to watch. If I can regale people with my witty observations as we go along, they’re less likely to get sick of me and tune me out (or so the theory goes). The ideal place for me to work these shenanigans is in the front-passenger seat. But that’s not fair to Ernie, who would be relegated to the back seat for the entire trip. I value my relationship with him, so we take turns: one day Em is up front, the next day Ernie. On this day, Ernie was in back, which worked out fine until we got coffees to go. We were stopping so much to look at wacky stuff and take pictures, Ernie accidentally knocked over a full 16-oz cup when he got back in the car.

 

Can a car un-christened by coffee truly be called a Road Trip Chariot? We voted no. But the mess had still to be properly dealt with (Ernie felt quite cheated, by the way). We solved one of those problems when Michael spotted a yard sale, and lo, the ladies had paper towels. We floundered several moments when our Spanish-speaking rescuers misunderstood what Michael was trying to buy from them, paper towels rather than pan dulce. We ended up buying both, and finally, somewhat tidier, we resumed our adventure.

 

Baker City is populated by a host of sentry animals who must surely protect the shops from evil-doers. Who would shop-lift a shirt if they might get eaten by a crocodile? Or chased down the street by a tortoise?

Plenty of creatures protect the sidewalks, too. But they seem a lot friendlier.

When we’re not visiting natural areas for hiking and sightseeing, we love to poke around in thrift shops, antique stores, and any other shop that catches our fancy. I especially like to look for used clothing. This place in La Grande turned out to be just my kinda thing.

 

This time around we spent a lot of time in ice cream parlors.

 

Window shopping is also fun. I could do a whole blog just about posters. 

And any tableau that includes a jack o' lantern is at the top of my list.

We found a music shop that had a table piano. I had seen pictures of these square instruments but had never seen one in person. The shopkeeper told us people could use the piano as a supper table. Conceivably someone at the table could provide dinner music. It wasn’t in good tune, but maybe that wouldn’t matter to the right collector. (It would matter to me.)

For the record, some places sell coffee, ice cream, AND sandwiches. Such places also have sharks with feet and pink bows. Now you know what to look for.

By the time we got to Yakima, a new thing presented itself to our astonished eyes – Fruit/Antique stores. This was a thing? 

 

Sure enough, once inside we found both fruit and antiques, but no antique fruit. 

This business model makes sense to me. Diversifying your goods makes it easier to sell more stuff. That was true at the bookstore where I used to work (at the Heard Museum) and it’s true at my current job (Barnes & Noble, where we also sell toys and coffee). 

I love antique stores, probably a lot more than I love fruit stores, but I’ve bought stuff in both sorts of places. And lord knows I’ve bought plenty of coffee drinks, which they also sold here.

We had some gorgeous scenery to drive through, including Snoqualmie Pass, still topped with snow in the heart of summer. I tried in vain to take good pictures from the moving car, especially the many tiny waterfalls that cascaded down the side of the mountains, but it could not be done, at least by me and my humble phone camera.

We checked into a hotel in Issaquah, Washington, for the night. Michael wanted me to book our passage on the ferry in the morning, across the sound from Seattle to Bainbridge. This filled me with trepidation. For what time should I book our passage? What if we were late? But it turned out you don’t have to reserve a particular time. The ferries come and go regularly, and you just buy your ticket and get on. The website was a little glitchy, but I got it done.

 

Or so I thought . . .

 

To be continued . . . (okay, it actually worked out, but there were minor complications. What’s a trip without complications?)

Road Trip 2022: Hotel Cats and Dinosaurs

 

Ernest Hogan has posted his account of our road trip through eight Western states on Mondo Ernesto, and that has prodded me into linking my blog with his and telling my own version of the tale. Road-tripping is America’s favorite pastime, especially post-COVID, but it’s an odd landscape we’re all driving though these days, with high gas prices and wildfires throwing obstacles in our paths. We solved half that problem by picking up my brother Michael’s hybrid Prius in Flagstaff (it gets 50 mpg), but we quickly discovered that our plan to take AZ 89a north to hook up with the 160, which would then take us to the 191, was not gonna fly. Monster fires on either side of 89a forced ADOT to close that highway to everything but emergency vehicles. In honor of that semi-apocalypse, it seems only fitting that I post a photo of the ponderosa outside Michael’s house in Flagstaff, which survived a fire about 20 years ago.

 

Michael had been expressing wonder for weeks that gas prices in Phoenix were so much higher than he had seen them anywhere else (except for California). The Shell station on the corner near our house had the price of unleaded at $5.99 per gallon at one point, but it had settled down to $5.69 by the time Ernie and I started our trip (as of this writing it’s at $4.59, and I’m harboring fond hopes that it will drop below $4 by the end of the summer). Our spirits were high, but we could tell there were some political tensions brewing over the world in general and the U.S. in particular, what with the hearing about Jan 6 being held in D.C., the war in Ukraine, and the Supreme Court getting ready to hand down a decision that looks like it might change the usual course of elections in the midterms. I was happy to be taking a step back from all that, though I couldn’t escape the wildfires up north. We decided to drive east on I-40, then take 191 north all the way up through AZ and Utah. It turned out to be a wonderful (if somewhat confusing) route. We needed to consult our Arizona Road Atlas when 191 fragmented near the northern border of AZ, seeming to go left when we needed to go right. We sorted it out and headed for Blanding, Utah, where we thought we would get the best Navajo Tacos in the world for late lunch/early supper.

 

Alas, we were thwarted in that ambition. Twin Rocks Café was closed for the day, due to staffing issues. The lady there recommended the Cottonwood Steak House, where this Jackalope resides. 

 

Our ambition was to get to Grand Junction, Colorado, by 9:00 p.m., and we made it just about on the nose. Michael had already checked into the room – our intrepid driver was on board, and we were ready to take the road by storm, lattes and fast-food chicken sandwiches in hand. It was odd to have so much sunlight left in the sky at 9:00 p.m., but it turned out to be handy on this trip. We often did so much shopping, driving, and sight-seeing, we needed that extra light as we motored into each stop at the end of our day.

 

On the morning of our second day, we met a hotel cat. We snagged some Einstein Bros Bagels and coffee, and drove north to Dinosaur, Colorado, named after Dinosaur National Monument, which is technically in both Colorado and Utah. The part that people visit is in Utah. 

Considering how hot it is this summer in so many parts of the world, this ice-cream-eating dino must be a popular guy.

 

The formations out of which the dino bones have been excavated were sand bars that formed after a mega-flood, sweeping up the poor, giant creatures and burying them in a mass, prehistoric grave. I’m assuming that eventually the bones in the topmost section began to stick out when the sandstone around them eroded away, and people recognized what they were seeing. 

It was the jackpot, because several intact skeletons were in there. The visitor’s center features some bronze reproductions of some of the dinosaurs that were removed.

 

There’s a hike not far from the old dig site (which has its own museum), and of course we had to trek that way, snapping pictures as we went. 

Michael had his ideas about what we should photograph (he’s a director, not a cinematographer), and once we were done with the dig site, we also had to find the petroglyphs and hike up to them, as well. They were worth the effort. 

We captured ancient spirits in our infernal phones.

 

When we drove to nearby Vernal, there were plenty of things in town that also needed to be documented.

We stayed at the Dinosaur Inn (this was de rigueur) and ate supper at what the clerk assured us was the best Mexican restaurant in town, Raza Mexican. It was kind of a huge meal, and we should have probably split a plate, but it was good.

 

We would be off to Idaho and the City of Rocks the next day. Things were just getting started . . .

 

I admire the hanging baskets you can see on city streets in Northern Utah and in Idaho. We could never get away with those shenanigans in Arizona.

 

There’s a lot more to this trip. Follow if you dare.

Pandemic Road Trip: the Aftermath

West Coast Road Trip 2020 (Pandemic Edition) started as a notion in Michael's noggin. He had spent the last few decades selling drum boxes like a maniac at craft fairs all over the country. He had his favorite routes, and HWY 1/101 was one of the tops. COVID 19 had cancelled most of his scheduled fairs, so he suddenly had quite a lot of free time on his hands. On top of that, my mom turned 99 in July 2019, and I had mentioned to Michael that we were going to take her on her annual road trip to New Mexico. I was pretty sure it would be her last trip, ever. Michael decided he wanted to go with us. It was so much fun, we schemed to do another trip. We knew we couldn't wait another year, based on Mom's health situation, so we decided to go as soon as the wildfires had burned out enough to let us pass.

That's right -- we had to scheme to get around vast tracts of burning territory. It was the basic plot of every adventure movie. Or several of them, anyway.

Our best departure time turned out to be the end of October, and that had the extra attraction of putting us on the road and entertaining ourselves with quaint towns and natural wonders during the election. I've posted a day-by-day account of those most excellent distractions. Here are some of my favorite photos.

First from Michael's workshop, which has a 40s sci-fi vibe.

This is where he makes all the cool stuff he sells on his Hardwood Music site. He gets lost in that work for hours, sometimes for days. So he was ready to meet the Morro Bay Coronavirus shark.

I think my favorite town was Cambria. Medusa has her own Mexican food joint there.

I loved the hotel kitties.

The Avenue of the Giants is Amazing.

And who can forget Shark and Chicken?

 We found a stylish gal in Tillamook.

All of the Sasquatches we saw were properly masked.

Also the dinosaurs. 

This thrift store dog we met was quite adorable.

And this shop cat.

This shot turned out to be the essential road trip pic.

I don't want to leave out Troy, the excellent barista, son of Micah, who was not named after the mineral.

Those are just a few. We started our trip in the afternoon of October 29, and finished it on the morning of November 14. Before we left, I expected the election results would be well-established by the time we returned. They were, as far as I was concerned, but many of the Republicans in congress still have not addressed reality, and Trump is apparently considering declaring martial law. That's not going to work out for him. You heard it here, first.

Anyone who's ever been on a road trip knows one of the first orders of business when you get home is laundry. We had gone thrift-store shopping all the way through the trip, so we had only added to the problem. The pile took a couple of days of diligent attention. At our house, it's also necessary, within the first hour of arriving home, to seek out all of the inconvenient spots that pets have peed and nuke them with cleaner. And of course, there's the traditional run for pizza, and the mail to sift through, and grocery shopping, and notes to take about what needs to be done in the next week.

It's best not to have too many expectations when you're on road trips, because you've just got to let those happen to you if you're going to get the most out of them. Returning home is another matter. Over a month later, I'm still scribbling schemes. I've got a lot to accomplish, like keeping Mom company in her last days. Every night before she goes to sleep, I tell her I love her, because I'm afraid she's not going to wake up in the morning. But really, it's not the worst way to pass out of this world -- in a comfy bed, in your own room with your favorite things around you, knowing that you're loved. 

Ernie and Michael and I have more road trips to do. We're going to see this world out of its semi-apocalypse. In her own way, my mom is too.