USA: The West and the Rest

22.5.08

Arrived in SF and met Lucie - all going swimmingly so far, except that the hostel is a bit of a party place, with ‘kids’ whooping, hollering, shouting and playing various instruments (like a loud horn) late into the early hours of the morning. Means no sleep and a grumpy Jake today. Glad I finally managed to find the hostel: it was scary going, not getting into town (via the BART sky rail system into the city) until near 11PM, then getting lost in scary neighbourhoods, hulking my bulging bags around streets laden with bums and druggies (people bent over in odd positions in doorways or in the middle of the sidewalk, lots of them black; police crawling the curbs, forcing tramps and beggars to move on). Such a relief to finally find the place - the directions were a bit weak and I’d forgotten to take a note of the exact address of the hostel (doh) - but on doing so, I said a quick hello to the extremely jet-lagged Lucie and grabbed myself some freakily enormous slices of pizza from a local Italian around the corner.

27.5.08

Ok, so the blog has taken a real backseat to enjoying my high life living crossing the States in a red shiny convertible (a fuel guzzling Ford Mustang) with Lucie. Unfortunate, but true: traveling with someone else is in most ways preferable to traveling alone - it’s definitely revitalised my love of sight-seeing, having someone to share it with - but at the same time is a distraction, meaning less time devoted to writing and more to doing. Speaking of doing, we’ve done plenty, barely stopping to rest until now, having reached the glamourous sights and sounds of Las Vegas. In the two full days we spent in ‘cisco, we fitted in a couple of cable car rides (amazing how many people can squeeze into the cramped, aged carriages, operated by a lever-pulling driver overly and hopelessly enthusiastic about clearing people out of his way and forcing everyone to the back), a trip to Fisherman’s Wharf (multiple piers, the most famous and touristy being Pier 39, brimming with cafes, restaurants and tourist shops: have been in more of these with Lucie during the week she’s been here than during the entire rest of my trip) and a boat ride out to a tour of ALCATRAZ (need I say more; well I COULD say that it once imprisoned some of America’s most notorious criminals under one roof, we partook of an excellent included audio tour, walked around and got a feel for the inside of the cells, the exercise yard, offices, kitchens, library, behind the walls - where several criminals escaped to the roof, having burrowed their way through their cells’ rear walls using handmade equipment and spoons! - and finally took in an awe inspiring view of the city and bridge).

We met a couple in the noisy hostel (it appears as good as USA Hostels are, with their free pancakes and wifi, they don’t have a curfew and they do play home to many under-21s, who are forced to party inside rather than out) called Josh and Leah (or ‘Ross’ and ‘Laya’ as I jokingly and absentmindedly called them, to Lucie’s utter despair), who we went out for some drinks with and accompanied on an organised tour of San Francisco: ‘Dylan’s Tours’. It was a great half day out in a van, taking in the business and government districts, as well as different parts of the cities belonging to different ethnic groups - Salvadorans, Latinos, Italians, Chinese (enormous Chinatown) - and a huge, dedicated homosexual neighbourhood (where the colourful stripy flag was invented and is still proudly displayed on many houses) and downtown hippy-ville (the corner of Haight and Ashbury, home of the swinging sixties, Janis Joplin and the Grateful Dead). The cumulation of all this was a trip across the Golden Gate Bridge (so called because of the look of the land across the bay from the city and also presumably a reference to the gold mining that formed California’s beginnings), swinging by the ‘bay’ that Otis Reading famously wrote a song about, a hilltop viewpoint offering the most staggering views of the city and suburbs yet (San Francisco is possibly the most picturesque city I’ve ever seen, thanks to its sometimes impossibly staggered blocks of streets comprising of a multitude of brightly coloured, wooden Victorian buildings - these, by the way, go up and down at forty five degree plus angles seemingly arbitrarily). Before finishing the tour, we travelled a little way out into ‘the valley’ to see the Muir Woods, home to some neck craning-ly tall, massive Californian redwood trees. It was quite a day.

29.5.08

About to hit ‘the Strip’ on our last full day in Vegas, having spent the morning burning in the thirty degree sun.


15.6.08

Sat on one of two humongous beds in a motel in the swish town of Jackson - Wyoming’s most trendy residence - just south of the Grand Teton National Park (containing mountains that Teddy Roosevelt once said looked how mountains should).

30.6.08

It’s 10.22 AM and I’ve just had my first lie in since Vegas (over a month ago). Feel particularly good as I was terribly hungover yesterday, after spending my first night alone in six weeks at McMenamin’s ‘Edgefield’ hotel/winery/bar/brewery/concert resort, drinking an exorbitant amount of their excellent IPA (not to mention a couple of ‘Maker’s’ Bourbons) and chatting with as many random people as time would allow. I had dropped Dad off at Seattle Airport just prior, and after a three hour journey of nothing but highways and incredible heat brought on by a sudden heat wave (the journey we shared during our last few days in NW USA has been more on the bleaker side: grey, cool and cloudy, with the occasional few hours of blue sky and mild sunshine), I was more than ready to cool off.

Whilst at Edgefield, I managed to take in a couple of sights that Dad and I missed there during our stay a week ago, including a Jerry Garcia statue (very surreal monument, easily missed amongst the trees it lay situated amongst on the edge of a golf course, it looked like ‘Barnacle Bill’ from the latter Pirates of the Caribbean movies) and the distillery (a dimly lit, smokey, entirely wooden ‘shed’ of a bar, host to plenty of liquors - as they call spirits here - and, fortunately, beers too, a groovy, bearded hippy of a bartender, and a small television showing old reruns of Woodstock). Whilst there, I also took in a wedding reception party on the edge of a grassy, picnic tabled clearing, into which a fiddler and his band piped merry music until the wee hours (sitting there also had the advantage of being near a large, central bonfire, which wasn’t really needed until after midnight). I got chatting with many Americans - some staying the nights, others braving it with taxis or by driving - and even an English bloke, there on a working holiday.

Have just spent the night in the cheapest US motel I’ve ever stayed in: $38.50 for a decent, clean, pretty large room, right on the corner of the Crater Lake National Park in southern Oregon. Am trying to eat the cold pizza remains from last night’s tea for breakfast, but it’s not working as the in-room fridge has turned it into a huge, pizza flavoured ‘popsicle’. Yuck. Got to pack up now as its nearly kicking out time.



2.7.08

Sat in the cafe of the H.I. Fisherman’s Wharf Hostel in San Francisco, looking out of a window that overlooks the currently very foggy bay. It’s been a busy day today. I dropped off the car - said a weepy goodbye to the beautiful V8 driving deity the has been my trusty steed these last six weeks, in both red and white guises, clocking up 5,400 miles with Dad and almost 2,000 miles with Lucie. It was incredibly dirty both inside and out after such a magnum opus of a journey, having wrestled with so many hills and mountains, as well as the occasional dirt, stoney track: I gave it a once over with a hostel loaned towel and plenty of tissues, but it was all a waste of time in the end, as the Budget Rental people didn’t even bother leaving their desks to look at it. Had a heck of a time getting to the Hyatt Hotel (where this particular Budget office is based) to drop the damn thing off: I’ve never seen such a maze of one-way streets. Fortunately got it there with minutes to spare.

I spent a lot of time walking to and fro between the hostel, which is located on a state owned ‘national park’ campus called ‘Fort Mason’ (looks like an old fashioned army campus, sitting on a hill, between the wharf and a marina), and ‘North Beach’, San Francisco’s cafe-filled Little Italy. There I had lunch, took in the warmth of the sun and blue skies - what little of it there was, flitting between heavy bouts of California’s infamous creeping, coastal fog - and got a hair cut (at last!). I also confirmed my flights to Philadelphia for tomorrow, sorted out an early minibus collection to the airport (5AM: yawn!), mailed Courtney to arrange meeting her at the airport, booked myself into a hostel in New York for next week and contacted Qantas to bring my final flight home forward. I’m set to fly out of New York’s JFK Airport at 6PM on Friday 11th July, nine days from now. Decided I couldn’t wait another week for the original date, I’m wrapped up with this trip, very much ready to come home and besides, out of money!

Last few days traveling south, I’ve covered a heck of a lot of miles as well as a tonne of sights. It’s been a bit of a roller coaster ride, with me barely having time to assess what I’ve seen before flying onto the next attraction. Southern Oregon was awesome: having left the busy and boring Interstate-5 a hundred miles south of Portland, I entered the ever thickening woods of Willamette National Forest. To the south, these turned out to be on a larger scale and denser than even those I saw with Dad, lush with deep greens and rising as high as five thousand feet, where the forest fell away to reveal America’s, now, trademark snow-topped peaks (that of ‘Diamond Peak’, to name but one). Then it was a steady descent back to a hot, dry, sandy dust bowl close to Crater Lake, where I spent the night in the aforementioned cheapest motel I’ve ever been in. That same day though, even having driven over four hours with a hangover, I simply had to go see Crater Lake.

The drive to it was completely bonkers: a super straight road that would make the Romans proud, barrens gave way to yet more thick forest, sprawling for miles in ever direction. Though the road bobbled up and down over the fourteen miles to the northern entrance to the park, I don’t remember climbing a significant way up, but on entering it, all of a sudden there was snow everywhere. A heavy cloud also appeared out of nowhere, blocking the sun and sending the hot, steamy temperature I’d been experiencing yet minutes before plummeting to freezing. Madness. The park surrounding Crater Lake was almost as stunning as the lake: great snowy vistas, trees dotting the landscape and rocky jaggies protruding regularly to force the road off course. The snow was almost as thick as it was on the ‘Beartooth Pass’ in Montana, in fact the scenery was very similar. Leaving the park, and for what must have been hundreds of square miles surrounding it, forming a significant portion and southern Oregon and Northern California, there was nothing but uninterrupted tall, wild forest. Some of the twisting and turning and undulating roads (marked as ‘Scenic Byways’) were fabulous, the superb cornering on the Mustang making them a real pleasure to drive. But the biggest impression that the area made on me - especially around Crater Lake, before I hit the busier Highway 199 - was that of complete, vast solitude. There wasn’t a person, let alone a car or building, sometimes for miles, and looking into the depths of forest I could see only more trees and only for a short distance too, the shrubs being so closely packed the light barely filtered through. I heard Dad use a phrase - a ‘cathedral of trees’ - a few weeks back, and that’s certainly how I felt: traveling through a snaking, narrow valley of foliage, the only source of a light a narrow strip above me.

Crater Lake itself was a humongous, water filled, spherical, sudden drop in the ground, like as if a giant, circular scooper had been used to rip a city sized chunk out of the earth. It was surrounded all the way around by dramatically jagged peaks, rising steeply on both sides, which enhanced the overall strikingness of the ‘cavity’. It was so large, I couldn’t get far enough away to fit it all in one picture, so had to make do with several dozen instead.

The drive down to the northern tips of the coast of California the next day was another long one, mainly through lots of forest (as mentioned above), later on following a stunning river which carved up a increasingly narrow and steep valley. The temps really dropped as I got closer to the coast, from the thirties down to the mid teens, as I eventually hit the coastal fog (brrrr). Before hitting the fog, I made a stop at the ‘Jedidiah Smith Redwood State Park’, as recommended to me earlier in the trip, particularly focusing on ‘Stout Grove’. I was going to get to it by entering the park through the traditional entrance, but the lady at the gate explained I could enter via a back route, drive all the way up the the grove’s entrance that way, take in a six mile gravel road through the redwood forest all the way to the coast (she assured me it was in tip top condition and well worth it - it was too, great snaking corners, trees growing into and over the road, ethereally lit by dappled sunlight) and to top it all off, avoid paying the $6 entrance fee. It was a no brainer!

‘Stout Grove’ was a large collection of incredibly tall redwood trees, mentioned in Lonely Planet’s top twenty things to see in the States. The trees were massive, though their bases were not as thick as some Dad and I had seen, they made up in height what they lacked in girth (though don’t get me wrong, they were still several feet thick). What really struck me was how familiar that section of forest looked. It wasn’t until that night, checking into a hostel which was perfectly located right on the coast, opposite a stunning section of volcanic sanded beach, that I found out it was where George Lucas filmed the setting for Endor, the moon on which the Ewoks lived in Return of the Jedi!

Last day of driving to San Fran took in mainly Highway 101 - the fast freeway that bisects California north to south, where I saw the tree populated, green landscapes turn ever yellower and drier, then into vast swathes of grape vines as I entered wine country - as well as a three hour detour to the coast on the fabulous Highway 1 (I’d previously traveled several hundred miles of this scenic, mainly coastal hugging road north up from LA to San Francisco with Lucie, past places such as the bourgeois Santa Barbara and the sensational cliff sides of Big Sur), where I tempted fate by heading back out to the coast for a while, into the occasional clutches of ‘the fog’. (That particular journey was well worth it, by the way. The stretch of hill hugging, forest road that formed the part of H/W 1 leading out to sea was the most devilishly twisty one I’d ever been on, and brilliant for swinging round in the Mustang with the top down, each blind bend bringing with it a perfect blend of adult fear and childish excitement. Finally got to see what the car could do.) On hitting the coast, I lapped up the cliffs, ocean views and cool weather for a while, eventually giving in and headed back inland to the welcoming heat (extreme difference in temp. in just a few miles, yet next to no difference in altitude) on an equally bendy road.

Finished with the west coast now, off to do the east, catch Independence Day in the city it transpired in (Philadelphia), shop till I drop in Manhattan, then catch a plane home.