Fall Sojourn-al

Frank and Michelle left on an 85-day cross country journey on October 2, 2006. Follow along across 11,000 miles, 33 states, 3 oil changes, and 50 bags of pita chips.

Wednesday, November 08, 2006

Leap Forward

We have reached San Francisco! I will try to touch on all the places we’ve visited and the things that we’ve seen and done up until now, but we have obviously gotten caught up in the trip and behind on this journal. Michelle and I have both been fighting colds but she might have bronchitis and need to see a doctor before long. I think it is easier to get sick when traveling, as we never know what we will eat and we don’t keep to any firm sleeping or other schedule. Anyway, here is a quick summary of the last couple of weeks, followed by photographs.

After leaving Colorado Springs, we drove north to Denver to see Michelle’s friend Maureen, whom she has known since preschool. Before we reached Maureen and her husband Stephen’s house, we went to Red Rocks amphitheater on the west of the city. Awesome place. The amphitheater blends in with the astounding rock formations all around it, and from the stage you get an acoustic quality that many bands, musicians, and fans can find no where else.

We talked into the evening with Maureen and Stephen and then traveled the eighty-seven miles to Cheyenne. The next three days showed us the biggest part of Wyoming, as we drove across a surreal, serrated landscape that grew steeper and more jagged until we had reached Jackson Hole. In our visit to the Yellowstone area, we saw moose, elk, clots and clots of bison—always in the middle of the road, making a driving trip a chance to stop and enjoy, offering no other choice, really—mule deer, falcons, hawks, and even a lone, playfully zigzagging coyote, as well as a number of thermal pools, mud pots, and geysers, including a well predicted eruption of Old Faithful. We enjoyed ourselves a little too much given the chilly air and occasional snow flurries, once pushing ourselves and hiking around a blue, green, purple, red, and orange thermal lake, both of us coughing like crazy but taking photographs. Road closures meant that we saw more of Idaho than we would have, as the only way into Yellowstone was through the western entrance, taking us through Sun Valley and a gorgeous reservoir area with wooded islands and sudden mists.

To get from Yellowstone to Anacortes, Washington, to see my mother, we could have taken Interstate Ninety and made good time. Instead we spent the night in Spokane and then took Highway Two all the way to the coast north of Seattle. That was an awesome drive. Washington has scrub desert, thick evergreen forests, buttes, canyons, crystal clear lakes carved by volcanic activity, and countless mountains; and our route brought us through much of this diversity. We had lunch in Leavenworth, a town that sits along a mountain pass and is modeled after a Bavarian village. We reached Anacortes and had a great visit with my mother, grandmother, baby niece, sisters Blair, Brianna, and Erin, as well as Erin’s fiancé Dan.

We left Anacortes after a day and a half of visiting family and then took the ferry to Victoria, British Columbia. I think the Royal B.C. museum is one of the best museums I’ve visited. It educates on the geological, ecological, and anthropological history of the area, and ties the three into one story of adaptation and interconnectivity. The Haida, Kwakiutl, Saamish, and other coastal and inland Peoples represent the first wave of human migration to this continent, and the museum tells many stories in authentic voices, offering dwellings, masks, totem poles, tools for hunting and gathering, as well as documentaries made by modern day descendents. Moving from the First Peoples to European colonization, to the Gold Rush, to the lumber industry and today’s forests, and then portraying a web of animal life and the geological and natural occurrences that have supported such diversity—the B.C. museum zooms in to depict the threads that compose British Columbia. And I think that by showing interconnectivity and telling this story so well, the museum does an amazing job of helping the visitor to consider other relationships between land, animals, and people.

Other Victoria experiences included afternoon tea at the Empress Hotel, a neat hike right behind our hotel, a visit to Buchart Gardens and its dozen zones of flowers and plants cultivated in what used to serve as a rock quarry, as well as a trip to the movie theater to see Marie Antoinette, a great movie. Part of the plan was to rest in Canada as we had reached our western most point and would soon drive south to California. We left feeling refreshed and ready for the rest of our journey.

We stopped in Redmond, outside of Seattle, and visited Michelle’s cousin Dave and spent the night catching up with him and playing a crazy board game called Robot Rally that takes your capacity for spatial reasoning into new territory. Portland has a lot of qualities that interest us, being of a manageable size but offering many city activities, while preserving great parks, views of the foothills, and a nice riverfront. I liked that city very much. Next we drove to San Francisco via highways 101 and 1 in Oregon and California. The drive becomes the destination for these roads, especially since you have to maintain absolute vigilance as driver, steering around almost 180 degree turns on cliff sides, momentarily breathless from view of clinging fog over the ocean and its piercing shore line of rocks and crags, and then plunged back to a torturous turn into a tree lined tunnel that grows taller and taller, some of the red woods outgrowing the National Monument. We reached San Francisco two days ago in near shell shock from the steep road and dramatic cliffs that end only ten miles north of the city.

I celebrated my birthday here, going somewhere I’ve been thinking about since we started on this trip, Chinatown. This is the biggest one in the country and it really has much to offer. I’ve read stories that take place here, as well as a few biographies and fictional biographies (Jack Kerouac’s stories with Jack Duloutz filling in for the author) that pass through a place that is both very American and foreign at the same time. We left Chinatown for a small tour of the city, ending at Fisherman’s Wharf. Crowds gathered around the marina and took pictures of a hundred California Sea Lions hauled on the slips, arping, playing, showing off, or sleeping in piles of bodies, oblivious to the tourists. We sampled a local specialty, soup in a sourdough bread bowl and then made our way back to the hotel via cable car. I had a great birthday!

Well, today we check out of our hotel and head for Lake Tahoe and then Yosemite Park. I will try to post again within the next week, by the time we reach Phoenix. Because our internet connections have as a whole been weak at the hotels we stay at, we might need to post our digital pictures some place other than our blog. Thank you for reading and thank you for your patience. Bye for now!

3 Comments:

At 1:12 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Glad to know you missed the terrible flooding in the Northwest. I hope Dave and Frank's family fared well through it all. Hopefully the dry Phoenix air will clear up Mishelle's bronchitis. Be sure to visit the Herd Museum. I'm looking forward to more pictures!

 
At 2:15 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

update! update i say!

 
At 2:16 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

oh, that was me, andy, btw.

 

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