Adventures in driving

Moving to the Northwest has become an adventure in itself for me. I am learning all the ways to stay warm in the cold and damp. And I have to tell you I am not bad at it. For the most part I like it. I can bundle up and I can go inside if it gets too cold. I have always loved rain and storms as long as I didn't have to drive in them. Well, now I get to learn that too. I only work about 10 miles from my house and most of it is driving through town so it isn't bad. I only have to get on Highway 101 which is about three blocks from my street and follow it to the turnoff for my work and I am there. There is a stretch that takes me over the Seiletz River and Bay. Now, I used to commute to San Francisco every day over the Bay Bridge, so going over two very small bridges shouldn't be any problem right? But I have always had an overwhelming fear of drowning or being trapped in a car in the water. So, of course, for those that know me well, I learned to sail, and love to be on the water in a boat. Am I a good swimmer? No. Am I strong? No. But I keep putting myself out there subconsciously I think to do those things that I fear most. Like crossing bridges every day. Living at the ocean. So, now I am reading up on all the defensive driving techniques when driving in the rain. I must admit, at 6:30-7am in the morning there is very little traffic to worry about here. In fact, before 7am, the only place to get coffee is at the 24 hour Safeway that has a Starbucks, every other coffee drivethru place doesn't open until 7 or after.
So, I try not to get distracted when driving in to work first thing in the morning. But some mornings it is hard when the fog or clouds begin to dissipate and the pinks and mauves and orange begins to blur together to make this collage of colors that light up the sky and the calm straits by the bay reflects it while the drift wood creates this drama of textures. I had to pull over and watch a group of migrating birds come together in a V shape and head south over the water while the reflections of colors changed from pinks and purples to firery reds and ocher smudged with brilliant coppers as the sun made its debut. The waves in the distance began to come alive from just light shadows to white flashes that caught a bit of color themselves as if hearlding the coming day. I sat there watching without thought of anything but to remember how vivid it all was at that single moment. If I had spent the time pulling out the camera and adjusting the lens, I would have missed the play of colors as they quickly changed from one to another.

I am sure that people passing by me wondered at what I was doing at the side of the road, but sometimes, that is where the magic is. It isn't always on the rim of the Grand Canyon, or standing in a forest of ancient trees. Sometimes it is in a moment of time that comes from nowhere and leaves just as fast. Sometimes you are the only one to see it. Doesn't matter if no one else does, it just matters if you feel it in your soul. Something clicks and it feels right. I know that I have always found that even the smallest of drives have divulged some great wonders and there is always something to be seen and learned and be in awe of  if only we take the time to look. So stretch out your wings, your feet, and your tires and see whats in your neighborhood, or around the next block from you. I would love to know what you have found.

I once found a big purple house when I was driving around. I was amazed at how very big and very purple (I mean grape colored purple) this house was! Then there was a time when we (Cal and I) got lost and found a great craft fair in a tiny little town in Nevada. Cal still doesn't let me live it down, but we bought some wonderful handmade Christmas ornaments. We also took the loneliest highway in the US. Highway 50 I think it was across Nevada to Ely. We learned that the trantualas were giving birth and that they then migrated to somewhere(That's another story!). They were crossing the road by the thousands as we were driving over them! Yuk! But it was very interesting at the time that we found out. So, there can always be an up side to driving to your destination.
I truly believe the old saying, It isn't the destination it is the journey that makes you wise.

Rain, rain, go away, come again another day..............

Alot of you asked me when I said I was moving to Oregon if I would be bothered by so much rain. It is so damp up there! It's so cold and wet! Aren't you going to miss the sun? Well I haven't survived the whole winter yet, but I think my sense of adventure has kicked in.
I live in a two story house that has a small view of the ocean from our upstairs deck and when there is a storm I can even see the waves if it clears up. Since it is two stories we feel the 60-75 mile an hour winds and hear it when we are watching TV.  I have a bay window in the dining room and I can see the rain hitting it sideways sometimes (but not for long periods of time). The rain is here and it is raining almost every day. It is cold but still it hasn't gotten as cold as to freeze yet. But when there is a cloud break, it is spectacular! Being at the coast has it's advantages. I am buying a lot booof sweaters and hoodies, and  boots, but I have to tell you that I love it when it clears and the air is fresh! There isn't the dust, everything is clean and green and vibrant all year round. I drove to Newport which is like going to San Luis except I go past Cape Foulweather and it is a spectacular view when I do.
I do admit to missing my friends in Paso Robles. I miss you sorely, no ifs, ands or buts about it. But if I have to be somewhere else, I love it here. And it is so exciting to explore the area and see the beauty that is here. It is everywhere around me. And now that the new year is here I am finding that I am cold all the time!!! But I have not lost my sense of adventure, no siree! I am still sticking my head out on my days off and seeing if we can move around without an arm or a leg freezing off.
Last Tuesday Cal and I took the dogs and ventured off to McMinnville to pick up some wine (what else?). It had been clear for a few days but very cold. We wanted to get back as it was supposed to start raining again that night, and when we got out to walk the dogs only 60 miles inland, the temperature had dropped to 35 degrees there. In Lincoln City it was a balmy 40. We about froze. We came back before dark so as not to worry about snow or ice. I really have to say that I don't like the continuous cold and damp. But I am not melting so the Good Witch Glenda will just have to find another way to be rid of this wicked witch. So, let us hope that the weather will give us a day or two of warmer weather soon so I can actually feel my feet again. I am going to invest in socks with little batteries in them I think.

Daylight Savings Time Again!

I have never been a big fan of Daylight savings time. I say leave it alone! When traveling I hate the time changes and the different ways of having to change around your schedule even though your body doesn't know that just because you have flown to the east coast it is now later or earlier or whatever it might be. You are still hungry at the same time and I want to sleep at the same time. But now you have to get up earlier or get an extra hour of sleep and make sure the clocks have changed. REALLY?
But, today, I have changed my mind about it all. I got up and when I left for work there was light instead of dark. And there was this glow of pinks and light blues in the big marshmallow clouds that brought on the noontime rain. I even stopped on the way to work to take some pictures by Sieltz River where it comes to the sea because it was so beautiful to be there at dawn. Then coming home I stopped at almost the same spot to take another couple of pictures of the last rays of sun catching the tops of the thunderheads moving out over the ocean as the sun set. It was incredible that I was able to be there for it. No, I was only traveling to and from work, but I think we forget in our daily busy life to notice the beauty around us in our own backyard.
I always want to see far away places, but I also know that I just have to look around and I will find a park or a beach or someplace close that I have not explored (especially now!). So, if I can't take a vacation, I can get to know my area and make sure that its natural beauty of the everyday things do not escape me. Even in the dead of winter or during a rainstorm there can be something that can restore and replenish your soul. With all the negative things going on in the world, I for one want to find the positive and the beauty and see if it will make me feel good. I want to laugh and enjoy them and share them with all of you.
I will really learn how to put pictures on here one of these days. Oh well, for now I will just enjoy Oregon's liquid sunshine.

Dreaming of Vacation

I have started my new job this week and as with all new positions there is a lot to learn. My head is swimming in acronyms and new systems on the PC and what goes where, not to mention names of people I have met once. I have two things in my favor right now. My age and my philosophy. I know that I can conquer the work because I have done harder jobs in the past. And I don't take it so seriously as some of the younger ones do. I find that people that are half my age take it soooooooooooo seriously that you would think they were going to DIE if it didn't work out. I would just find another job. Now that is not to say I WANT to lose this job, just that my life would not end. My identity is not with my job as with some.
So, when I am getting too tied up in what has turned out to be 10 and 12 hour days my first week on the job, I take a break and think of where I want to go next on vacation.
Let's see will it be Yellowstone? Or shall we take advantage of being here in the Northwest and go up the coast of Washington and see British Columbia? I have seen this part of the world and it is spectacular! Then if it is as cold and rainy as they all say it will be all winter long, maybe I will want to go someplace more warm like Hawaii or New Orleans? Or Florida? I would love to see the Keys.
I will only get a week next year so it will have to be either close to home or we will fly in and stay in one place, no driving around. So, now I get to imagine all those places and what Cal and I would do in all of them. It is a great game for a gypsy like me. Almost like a mini-vacation in itself.
I have always found that the planning and learning about all the things that are at our destinations to be 50% of the fun of vacation. So I will begin to find out things about all these places over the coming months.
What's the best seasons to see them in. (I hear Yellowstone in the fall is beautiful!)
When is it less expensive? (I hear the week either just before or just after Thanksgiving at Disneyworld is discounted)
When is it just after tourist season but still good weather? (We like Feb-March for Hawaii when the Whales are there but not so many people)
What other things are there to see that isn't the obvoius things that you normally know about? (In New Orleans I would like to take a cruise of the Mississippi on a riverboat)
What tours are available and who does them? What's the pricing? Do they have off season discounts?
(In Hawaii they always have discounts and competative pricing on just about everything! We wait until we get there to look into it, but normally I make calls and start checking things online)
I also start checking out books from the library about the area that I am going to to learn about the area and its legends, folklore and any State Parks and local scenes or festivals that may be happening during the year.
I also will contact the Chamber of Commerce or the Visitor's Bureau when I have decided where we are going.
I like to know as much as I can so that we can enjoy all of the area. Cal likes to just go and be surprised so I usually don't share all of this with him till we are there. Then we decide on things we want to do and see. But at least I know all there is around.
When I get there I talk to all the locals I can to find out what they think. That is usually what makes the trip more special to me.
So, for now, I have my first days off in my first week of my new job. Already I am planning my vacation.
I guess I work to live, not live to work. Sounds a lot more fun don't you think?

Camping in the Sierra's

Due to the fact we never had a lot of money, my Mother would make it a point of taking all of us camping. She would work at tents and food and all to make our trip a good one. We would go up on the Oregon Creek past Grass Valley at North San Juan to camp most years. It was a beautiful place with swimming holes and friendly people and a small stream that that opened into a wide sandy bottomed swimming hole under the over pass for the raod. There was a covered bridge into the campground that some used to sit in the rafters with water balloons waiting for the cars to come through.
I loved that place. My Uncle Pont and Aunt Norma would come with my cousins sometimes, or we would invite other friends to come along. We would swim all day and eat food cooked on an open fire. Smores, hot dogs, hamburgers, fried potatoes with onions, and eggs in the morning with bacon sizzling in an iron skillet. Makes my mouth water. We would drink the water from the creek after boiling it and get the meat from Babe's market in town. ,
We also made alot of summer friends both the locals and the ones staying in the campground. It was the place of my first innocent summer romance.  His name was Bill Butterworth and he worked at the lumbermill that summer. He had come on the weekend with some friends to swim at the falls, They were about a half mile up stream from the campground. I was 15 and it was the first year I was allowed to go there. I had met other kids my age and we were all there swimming and having a great time. He and his friends pulled up in an old yellow pick up truck and they noticed us and the flirting began. It was so fun to talk to someone who knew the area, and Bill could track and had lived there all his life. He knew all the back woods areas and offered to show us the local spring to get water, and all the places to go to swim and hike. He was going to go to college in another year to be a Park Ranger and was into conservation. He loved the wilderness and was a bit shy until he talked about it. We were two peas in a pod.
That day he drove us back to camp and stopped to meet my parents. He talked with them for a while then asked if he could take me to the falls the next day after he got back from church. My parents said yes and we then spent the rest of the week hiking and swimming every free minute he had. With the back drop of the Sierra foothills, the clean air, the cold clear water, and at night no lights to blur the millions of stars, we had a picture postcard week. It was hot during the day, and cooled off in the late afternoon. The summer breeze would come up about 4 o'clock and it was like your skin was being wrapped in a blanket of warmth. It felt so good if you had been swimming in the icy cold water that flowed down from the higher elevations. We would have dinner and sit around the open campfire roasting marshmallows and then stretch out and watch the stars move through the night sky picking out the constellations and one of us usually knew the legends behind them.
The day before I was to go home he took me to a place he called Blue Hole which was a couple of miles down stream that we floated to on inner tubes. It was off of a fire trail, and down a gully but it was so beautiful. It had a small waterfall that fed into it and a deep pool that had two big boulders in the middle that were flat on top so you could lay on top and sun bathe and a small sandy beach on the far side. It was peaceful and not a sound but birds and the water. We pulled the innertubes onto the beach and swam and sunned and played there most of the afternoon. Then we started to walk back to camp.  Bill and I were both feeling a bit sad that the week was over and I was going home, but he finally got the nerve to kiss me (not my first kiss but certainly one of the sweetest) and hold my hand walking back. It was a perfect day so we walked slowly in the heat not talking much. We even passed up a ride home so we could draw it out a little longer. We got back to camp and took a last swim in the stream and then he was gone with promises to keep in touch. Neither of us did.
It was years before I ever went back there. I just didn't want that perfect week to be altered in any way so I didn't go back with my parents ever again. It will always remain a week of perfect summer fun in my mind. I think we probably all have a summer vacation that was just that good that you never want to spoil the memory of it? It will remain untouched always in my memory as such an innocent and perfect moment in time that you can't recreate. Like a rainbow or sunset that you come across unexpectedly.You just have to take it as it comes, not run for the camera, not wish that it could be more than it is, just be one with it and be thankful that you are there to have had that moment. Right then, it was yours, all yours, and know that in your minds eye it will always be there for you. After all, that is what made it so perfect and special.

Weather when traveling

Although I have never been farther away than Hawaii or Mexico, I have had some interesting weather related adventures while traveling.
While living in Laughlin I flew into Las Vegas coming back from Oakland from visiting family to find that we had to circle McCarren airport for half an hour as a thunderstorm was raging below us. Then we had to wait while they basically squeeged the runway so we could land. It was an experience I will never forget to get a birdseye view of Las Vegas as we circled round and round watching the clouds hover over the south end of the strip and airport. It left me to deal with flash floods on the way home for 90 miles and rerouting through some interesting areas that I would never ever have seen of Nevada, Arizona and California to get back home that day. I learned where the high ground was at Searchlight, Nevada was and found my car could do more than 90 mph across the low flat part where I was trying to stay out ot the way of any flash flooding.

Then there was driving back from Tahoe when a freak snow storm hit the night before we left. I was with a group of women from work in my girlfriends mother's Lincoln and no one had ever driven in the snow. The carburator froze up twice, (once in the middle of highway 50 in downtown South Lake Tahoe while it was snowing) and once as we were leaving the next day. I lied and said I could drive in the snow because they all looked so scared and tired as we had not gotten much sleep the night before. They had closed Highway 50 the night before, we didn't have chains and we all needed and wanted to go home. We were broke, hung over, really, really grumpy and none of us wanted to spend another minute in each others company. It was not a fun 4 hour drive home. But it makes a good story now! My friend Beth found a phone booth (pre-cell phones guys!) to call AAA when the car died the second time while we were leaving Tahoe. We were trying to get over the "hill" as they call the beautiful Sierra's and there was a phonebooth but it was full of snow. Poor Beth climbed in up to her butt in snow to make the call. I stayed with the car and a nice man came by and got it started. I looked like a getaway driver when I careened around the corner to pick her up and keep the car running so we couOld get out of there. We fishtailed through the snow there and back on the salted and well ploughed Hiway 50 and I prayed all the way to Placerville where we stopped to eat get coffee. (Tea for me even back then.) What an experience that was!

Cal and I also were leaving Tahoe and taking the back way to see his Mom up in Arnold so we had decided to take Highway 4 across. It was October I think and there hadn't been much weather anywhere so he was going to show me the lovely eastern side of the Sierras. We got caught in a snow storm at night on this little two lane road over the mountains. They close it when it snows, and all I kept thinking is they would find us in the spring frozen to the car. Cal kept telling me it was fine, we didn't have chains but we didn't need them. I was so scared because I couldn't see in front of us or either side of us. When we got to his Mom's he was telling her how bad it was. I wanted to shoot him!!!! Then when I did get to drive it in the Summer, I have to tell you I was even more elated that we had made it at all! The road was even smaller than I thought, barely wide enough for two cars to pass, and the drop off on my side was straight down into nothing but more trees. It is a road I love in the summer but never any other time.

The last adventure that I had was one of the earliest. My girlfriend Anne and I had gone down to housesit for her grandmother in Pasadena while we were on spring break one year in college. She had just lost her husband in an accident about a year prior to this so we had planned to go to Disneyland and Knotts Berry Farm and do all the tourist things to have a good time. We went to the Ice House and saw some comedians that went on to become very big and hit some clubs while we were there. She had purchased a new super Beetle VW. It was beauty! On the way home, we were coming to the grapevine and we heard there had been snow but that it was still open. Anne was beginning to freak out as she couldn't drive in snow. I told her we could do this, they weren't requiring chains yet so we would be fine, just needed to go slow. She was still nervous, so I drove. We did fine going up. On the way down a 18 wheeler, lost control and started going down sideways. We had left plenty of room between us so I started doing what any smart person would do...I started to brake so I would slow down and stop. The ice decided we were going to go around like a top. Everyone else had pulled off to the shoulder so there was no one to hit, so we kept spinning around and the truck was like a wall coming at us. All we could do is sit there and swear! At least that's what I was doing. Anne hid her face in her hands and kept mumbling about her car. The car slowed enough that the only dent was in the hood where it kissed the underside of the box on the 18 wheeler. The nose cozyed right up under it and put that small dent in and stopped us. Didn't hurt anything else and we were fine. The trucker was fine, and police showed up minutes later and helped unwedge us from the truck and we were able to go on our way. As soon as we got to the next town we went and had a drink. I think we both shook for an hour after we got out of the snow. But then we had a good laugh and another good story to tell.. Hey, maybe I can drive in the snow!
Most of these people I have lost track of as it was so long ago, but these things, well, they make up the fabric of my life. Without them I would have had a lot of empty space. I hope you all have lots of stories of friends and places. How about sharing them?

Thunderstorms!!!!!!

Last night I sat in my living room and watched the awsome power of Mother Nature. We had a storm come in that had gusts of 65 to 75mph and what I hadden't expected was the thunder and lightening that lit up the sky. When Cal and I moved to Laughlin we were looking forward to the Monsoon season (July to September) where the big thunderheads would move across the vast expanse of the desert we lived in and from our porch we could sit and watch the storm hit the small line of jagged peaks. The lightening would bounce all over and it was like being in the middle of a 1960's light show. We would open a bottle of wine and sit out there watching for hours until it was upon us. The rain would pound down and rage for a while then just a quickly as it came it would be gone. It would be soaked into the sand and a couple of hours later you would hardly notice that there had been any storm at all.
Here at the ocean, it is more wild. The waves are huge! I can see them crashing and building up farther out in the changing gray of the sea. The rain sounds angry and then the lightening was all around us at once. I am surprised with all the wind we had we didn't lose power. I watched the power lines outside swinging as if they were a jump rope. All my windchimes were working overtime and this morning I took most of them down as we have another one coming through tonight. Best safe than sorry I guess. We had snow in the mountains and it will be beautiful if I go out and look. I pity anyone that had to be out in it last night, but it was beautiful to watch from the safety of my home.
Cal and I have traveled through a few storms in our travels, and I will write about those in the coming days now that I have remembered them. But we were in the southwest in Mesa Verde with his sister Patty. Driving out to one of the sites there. It had already been a great trip with Patty. The road was on the top of a mesa, and it was a straight stretch of road when we saw the clouds gathering. Then at the end of the road where we were headed, a big bolt of lightening struck a tree right in front of us. We were all three dumbfounded. Cal pulled over,and we were deciding to turn around when we saw the smoke begin. Then came the ranger telling us to evacuate and go to the visitors center for instructions. Well they were so prepared for these types of fall storms they had it out in an hour but it was very scary for us. That was an amazing moment for us all and we had a great story to tell everyone at the Visitor's Center later. But I was awe struck at the raw power and yet amazed at the beauty of Mother Nature. She sure knows how to put on a show. I for one sure like to watch...from a comfortable distance and inside...I admit, I am not going to chase storms. But I do love the pictures of those that do.
Enjoy the winter. I think it just arrived.