Like Old Times

We left Mill Creek, the tiny mountain hamlet where the Cabin resides, and drove west out of the mountains, Reaching Red Bluff for breakfast. Then we headed south towards Sacramento before taking I-505 towards I-80 and the Bay Area. Through Vallejo, over the Carquinez Strait, past Crockett and Oakland and the Bay Bridges and into San Francisco, we drove. 

We stopped in North Beach, a very nice Italian section of SF nwhere Telegraph Hill and Coit Tower call home.

We ate at an Italian restaurant and walked around, enjoying the glorious weather. We hiked up to Coit Tower, and then hiked up Coit Tower, and took some amazing pictures from the top:

It was easily the most beautiful day I've been in San Fransisco is decades. Warm, but not hot; very slight breeze, even at the top of the tower, but quite comfortable.

Locals must have thought it was scorching. We drove past Corrie's old apartment on Divisidero, and then went up to the Haight. There we found a bakery that served beers and hung out for a while, eating croissants and baguettes with butter and jam. 

We'd booked a hotel in San Jose close by our SJ friends for the next day's rendezvous. We left the Haight a little before 5 pm, drove through the south side of town, connected up with I-280, and cruised to San Jose in less than an hour. Traffic was not an issue...on a Friday evening...in the Bay Area. Who woulda guessed?

The next day we did our regular schtick, like from the before-Cass time. We woke up and got some starch and caffeine, then went and hung out with Donny and Ana, friends from Corrie's architecture school days. They live in a super cute neighborhood in San Jose. We had an early lunch while the kids showed off how cool/fun/rough-and-tumble they can be.

Then we headed down to San Luis Obispo, trying to meet up with Ryan. He was going to be at a kid-friendly brewery most of the day, and we decided, if the timing was right, to just meet him there. Corrie had wanted to do a Montana de Oro hike with the kids, so we drove directly to the state park, south of Morro Bay, about twenty minutes away from SLO proper.

Despite the fog (which is near constant in the hot summer times) it was still magical. This day I saw the largest swing since the Redding-to-Crescent City day back in 2015: It got to 112 as we came into Paso Robles. It was down to 94 when we stopped in Atascadero and picked up Hwy 41, a direct road to Morro Bay, and by the time we got to our parking spot at Montana de Oro, it had dropped to 57, less than an hour from being 112. That's a 55 degree swing.

We didn't do any crazy dune hiking, mostly because we were at the end of nearly a month away from home, and most of us (me and Corrie and maybe Camille) were running on fumes, but we did do a little walk just above Spooner's Cove, which is near the end of the drive into the park. Signs like the one above speak the truth, while the one below may need some manicuring, if one would like it to be helpful:

A funny thing happened as we were walking out: a couple was walking towards us. Cass and I were at the front of our regiment, while Corrie and Camille were bringing up the rear, looking at flowers and enjoying the stiff wind. Looking at the guy in the approaching couple, I thought to myself, "Look at this fucking old dude, trying to enjoy the dunes on a nostalgic trip." Like, 'old dude' was some sort of insult. But I realized that my guess on his age was because of the look of his beard and face, which looked remarkably like my own, and then I realized that I'm doing the exact same thing. I started laughing and Cass asked what was so funny.

Before I could really answer, the girls who had been doing makeup in the car next to us when we parked were finally out walking along our path. They looked dolled up, but also like they were not wearing proper shoulder covers for the weather. They smiled and me and Corrie goofily, and Corrie refrained from saying anything, but it would have been along the lines of, "Oh, I remember coming out here when I was a young co-ed..." They looked very young to me and my current sensibilities, which was jarring.

It's a weird set of observations: I see someone who (eventually) looks like and reminds me of myself, and I think "fucking old dude;" and I see young girly co-eds underdressed at Montana de Oro and I think "they're babies." 

Another reason we took a quick and large path along the cliff's edge was because it was already 6 pm and we still wanted to hang out with Ryan.

Which we did. It was great fun, as the owner of the brewery we were visiting, Liquid Gravity (all time fantastic name, by the by), is in a punk-cover band called Dad Religion---since they're all dads. Camille danced her heart out, we got to see and hang out with Ryan, if only for a few hours. The kids did mob him eventually:

He was a good sport of course. The time came where we had to leave for Long Beach, and that time was near 9 pm. Not great, but not terrible when it comes to the time you'll be driving through the LA megalopolis traffic shenanigans. We made it home just after 12, which was some pretty good driving.

Our second "Summer of Road Trips" is now behind us. We left for Texas on our anniversary, June 21st. We were back for a few days, went to a birthday party, and left again. We finally arrived home for good on July 22, but after midnight, so it was technically in was the 23rd.

Out of pocket for a month. It should give us practice for next summer, when we plan to help Delphine in rural France for 8 weeks.

Can't wait for that! Great to be home! It's how we build appreciation! Or something!

The Cabin, 2023

Drives to the Farm take multiple days (in some cases), but the drive to the Cabin is half as long. We used to make the trip in two days as well, though. We'd drive to my brother's in Sacramento, hang out for an afternoon and evening, and then head up to Tehama County and the Cabin at Mill Creek.

This trip we skipped that, mainly because we're afraid of my brother's dog. We passed Norm and his boys on our way, and since we took Hwy 99 instead of I-5, we passed more symbolically than in reality. We met up with our guest, Lauren, and her dogs in Chico for dinner, then skedaddled the last hour up to the Cabin.

Off the deck, into the wilderness

Trips to the Cabin are always a special time. My mother came here as a kid with her parents, and her grandmother was here often. Then she brought my brother and I while her mom was here. Then I brought my kids, when she would be there as the grandparent. So it goes.

So many memories: the smells; the sounds of the creaky stairs; the feel of the ashy dirt and volcanic rocks under foot; the other parking spot---seen above with our friend Lauren's car. I'm sure I've mentioned them before.

The Cabin itself has gone through renovations before (sorta), but mainly it remains a beacon on the edge of the wilderness for those of us who get to visit. The scale changes as you get older, but the magic doesn't.

During these visits, we always head to the park, and by park I mean Lassen Volcanic National Park. We try to find hikes that we haven't done, or just tool around and check out the sights.

Mt. Lassen behind a meadow's creek

This year on the first day in the Park, we just drove around and pointed out things to Lauren. She brought her two dogs that day, and while the Park is dog-friendly, they're not allowed on un-paved trails.

Besides the Park, we usually walk from the Cabin---sometimes drive---to Mill Creek proper, it's comfortable rushing audible from the Cabin itself.

Creek selfie with Camille

Everything is so picturesque. The creek is fast but not obscenely deep, so finding a spot and getting all wet on the river stones is a nice beatable challenge, if occasionally painful.

Back at the Park and we climbed Hot Rock:

Hot Rock was part of the dacite plug that stopped up the top of Lassen's plug-dome. In the eruption of 1914, it was ejected in the first massive blow. The explosion and excess heat started an avalanche of rock and water, having melted the snow that lingered on the volcano, took the rock above, the Hot Rock, five miles clear of the site. The name, Hot Rock, comes from the fact that it still sizzled in the surrounding water 40 hours after the eruption.

My memories had more cold mornings and warm days, had my grandma making hot cocoa on the wood burning stove. For us the mornings are cool and the days are hot, likely due to our July trips nowadays and June trips as a kid. But it is hot enough and bright enough for the kids to get popsicles after dinner and before bed. Look at this good boy sharing with his little sister:

Cass was definitely luvvy-duvvy with Nelson, Lauren's rough-and-tumble puppy, almost the same size as the Boy. They took a special shine to each other on this trip:

Since the Park's entrance pass is good for a week, making multiple trips to the nearby gem is easily justifiable. One day Corrie and Lauren decided to hike Cinder Cone. A cinder cone volcano is specific type of volcano, one that has very regular slopes and a nearly symmetric roundness. The smooth sides may look nice from a distance, but the terrain is loose shale and gravel, and the lack of trees give you no cover.

We knew that Camille would never finish the hike, and Cass may be able to, but the plan was for me to hang out at Butte Lake, another attraction at the Cinder Cone entrance. One issue was getting there.

The Park's southwest entrance is a fifteen-twenty minute drive from the Cabin, and it takes about an hour to drive all the way through to the northwest exit, about 30 miles away. To get to Butte Lake and Cider Cone, the fastest route is to drive through the park, head east once you're above the park, eventually turning south on a random road that loses its pavement quickly, and driving for six miles back into the park to the Butte Lake campground and various trailheads.

Corrie and Lauren made it all the way to the top, which is fantastic. It was a brutal hike, but they persevered. Me and the kids played in the lake for a few minutes, but found things to do. The lake was frigid and got deep fast, which made getting used to it easy. My phone was dead, so my man camera was out of commission.

The last major hike we all did this season was the Mill Creek Falls hike. The trailhead is at the visitor's center at the south entrance, and the hike is doable if robust. This year, the Dixie Fire remnants were visible, as the last time we did this hike, it was shadier:

The Falls themselves were beautiful, but I expected more water, especially after this past season:

Hiking out follows. Camille, at 3 years old, made it a total of 2.5 miles of the 3.5 mile hike. You can see her with Corrie below, as the indomitable Cass leads the way:

It was around the end of that last incline when she'd finally had enough, and I had her on my shoulders for the last mile. Whew.

Another tradition of any Cabin visit is Reading Time. As kids who wandered inside from hours of forest adventuring, my brother and I were directed to the pile of kids books---or our own---and told that if we didn't want to go back to the woods, we needed to read. This trip I found a couple of books that held my attention for a bit. One was from a stack of kids books upstairs; another was on the adult bookshelf and I recognized a s a recommendation from my literary critic dad:

I seem to remember my brother talking to me about Ice Station Zebra, and inside can be found a boarding pass stub---back before phones had QR codes that you'd use to get on planes there was an actual boarding pass that would be torn, and the stub you'd receive---with Dan's name on it from a Denver to Sac flight he made years back. The book was in a stack of kids books upstairs. Labeled a thriller, I picked it up and felt like I could keep reading it, begrudgingly, if I had little else to keep me occupied. It wasn't bad, it's just wordy genre fiction that uses characters reading newspaper articles to divulge exposition. As I'm American and not British, I identify with the Yankee crew of the submarine and not the first-person narrator, a liar and likely spy/intelligence officer. Alistair MacLean wrote many books that were later made into movies, and he even worked on screenplays, this being one of them. I didn't finish it, or take it with me.

The second book there, Tinkers by Paul Harding, was a book my dad suggested for me, which is why I grabbed it off the shelf when I found it. These two books couldn't be more different, as the only thing similar about them is their slim page count. Tinkers starts with a dying man on a gurney in his living room as his family toils around him awaiting the end. He starts hallucinating the roof collapsing in on him, exposing the room above, and then he goes through the floor, peering up at the two holes above. Then the roof caves in, followed by the blue sky and then the black starry skies of night. Meanwhile there's another strain of narrative that is the dying man's father, and how he used to ride a horse-drawn cart into the backwoods of America selling sundries of all sorts: needles, thread, washers, screws, soaps... It's good and creative, but didn't grip me hard enough to take it home.

Two kids---ages 7 and 3---kept me busy enough that only the best books would have wrested my attention, and since I've been working on my book, I haven't been reading so much...not full on novel commitment anyway.

For the post about the Farm, I summed it all up quickly, as we returned in a single day, 18 hours and two time-zones and all. This trip we did our normal thing, only not seeing as many people as usual. We usually see Dan and Pita, Norm and his boys, then head to the Cabin, then head down the coast and see Sam and Aurrie in Berkeley, Donny and Ana in San Jose, then Ryan in San Luis before heading home. We almost did that, this trip. Well, mostly did, anyway.

The Cabin is magical in a different way than the Farm. Smaller and possibly more claustrophobic than the Farm, the Cabin has more magical wilderness all around. Both are special in birth-right ways for our kids, and that's pretty special.

The Farm, 2023

1. Getting There

We left and drove from the Southland all the way to Gallup, NM:

We stayed at a fantastic hotel, a Hollywood hotel. Like, literally: it was founded by DW Griffith's broher, and many westerns were filmed in Gallup because of this Hollywood connection, as the cast and crew would stay at this hotel, the El Rancho:

It had an old-timey elevator, the kind without a solid door and that you had to manually open and close just to operate. Also, inside was a grand room with its own grand staircase, with Camille walking up one side below as Corrie snaps photos from the middle of the mezzanine:

There were autographed photos all over, and that was a nice Hollywood elemental touch.

We made the rest of the drive the next day:

Because we're us, and "us" are bonkers, we took Picasso with us on the trip:

Why not take a cat on a two week trip to a rural Texas farm?

2. Working

The Farm is a helluva place to have a vacation. Maybe that's "vacation", with the purposeful quotes. Sure, I'm not working at my regular J-O-B, but this is the Farm. Mostly every moment of every day is scripted. When we're there, it's my job to support Corrie in her job of running the construction projects by being on daddy-domestic-duty the entire time. The dance of food, laundry, and entertainment is an ongoing and perpetual deal.

Plus, it was relentlessly hot (as usual), with no AC, and one can only move so well.

Above, Cass helps his Uncle Pete and cousin Colton clean the milk trough so it can be filled with water for the annual swimming hole.

Below Cass and grandpa take a ride on the ATV. They even taught me how to drive it, and I took several rides:

Love the hair on these two

The sunsets out at this patch of panhandle Texas are usually spectacular, but I just wish they happened closer to 8pm rather than 9pm:

I figured out the deal with the cowboy hats, and wore the one assigned to me most times I went outside. They're both parasols and umbrellas you wear on your head, and they keep the sun off you neck, inner shoulders, and out of your eyes, in the event you don't have sunglasses (a rarity for cowboys in the 19th century, I imagine):

Many days are partitioned by the amounts of laundry. The laundry gets put through the wash, then you need to hang it up to dry, then you take it down and fold it. Sometimes it's so windy AND blistering hot that by the time you're done with the fight of hanging it up, it's dry and ready to come down:

How could a place be BOTH this hot and this windy? I'm not sure I'll ever get it.

The town the Farm's technically attached to is Clarendon, and while this year we didn't make it, we do have plans on getting to their renovated cinema at some point:

3. Fireworks

Everybody likes to hear my sad stories of how, as a Caliboy, when as a child my city banned sparklers and the best things we could buy were ground flowers and the showery deals. They laugh and laugh, and show pity.

Then they take me to the truck and buy some real shit. Like this, a Roman candle with 210 shots:

Or these, a nearly $200 box of five-inch mortars:

Those are the real deal, man. Once the wick is going and you've dropped it in the tube, you've got to backtrack with some urgency. They fire up with some noise and then explode directly overhead. Its spectacular, especially for city-bred Caliboy like me. After everything's burned out, you can hear the remnants rain down onto the metal roofs of the barn and farmhouse.

4. Driving Home

We stayed an extra day to get some extra work done, to best complete some projects, which had us leaving on the 3rd instead of the original plan, which would have been the 2nd.

With the cat with us, and with a party to get to the next day, on the 4th, we just ran it all the way back, leaving from the Farm at 10:35 am and returning at 1:55 am, bot local times, albeit two time zones apart. To get a sense of the turns we took, here's a breakdown:

1. Corrie: Farm to Santa Rosa, NM
2. Pat: Santa Rosa, NM to Continental Divide, NM
3. Corrie: Continental Divde to Flagstaff, AZ
4. Pat: Flagstaff to Kingman, AZ
5. Corrie: Kingman to Barstow, CA
6. Pat: Barstow to Long Beach and home

I used to be anxious about long drives...maybe anxious isn't the right word. But prepping myself for a drive from SLO to Sac, or the return from Sac to SLO was something I needed to engage in. That changes when you're "long drives" go from 5-8 hours to 16-20 hours. It's almost Zen, but you need to pay a very specific type of attention.

Anyway, on the way we got to see some phenomena like this: rain forming and falling but evaporating before it hits the ground:

As Corrie barreled on towards Barstow I snapped a picture of the Subaru's console, just west of Needles. I used the phone's mark-up feature to circle the salient points:

Conclusion

Some folks may think that a vacation wouldn't probably be spent at a place with relentless heat, no AC, and round-the-clock work. For us it's different.

For Corrie, it's her and her family's place, it's their birthright, and it's a living, breathing entity, and that entity needs constant upkeep.

For me, it's a place where I know what I'm supposed to be doing at all times. I'm not asked to make decisions, just get shit done. We can all play out this homesteading fantasy and live like it was a different time. It's our opportunity to do that, and it's glorious.

Plus, once you set eyes on the view of the prairie, all the stress from whatever sloughs off, dissolves away, and the peaceful Zen of perpetual labor sets in, and you fully start to get It. The magic kicks in. Once the kids are down and the sun finally sets (by 10:30 pm), and you hear the coyotes howling at the night sky, and then you hear how the howls morph into laughter...? That's when you know it must be magic.

The howls and yips of a coyote pack turning into laughter make all the native coyote stories make a whole lot more sense.

Long Drive Done, Party Attended

We stayed an extra day in Texas to keep working, which made our desire to get to a 4th of July party  more challenging to accomplish. In any case, we drove all day on the 3rd of July, like ALL day. We left the Farm, an hour east and south of Amarillo, at 10:35 am local time. We arrived in Long Beach at 1:50 am local time, technically the 4th of July. We had the cat with us, because...of course we did.

More to follow from the time there, hopefully before we head to the Cabin. 

Here're Cass and I, getting into character:

For the record, in this picture Cass is wearing his grandfather's grandfather's hat, which, for Cassius, would be his great-great-grandfather (for those keeping score at home). Also, I love this picture.