7. South Bound

(2006 August 10)

1711 2423.5 101 65F

At Waldport we came back out on the coast highway. I was ready to go camping again tonight. Bob Larkin had suggested several places to stop and see things. I remembered and recognized a few of them. One was Oregon Dunes, great sand Dunes on the southern end of the Oregon Coast. It being after 4 p.m., the time of day when we could decide such things, we thought we would try to camp at one of the campsites near there tonight.

1749 2448.7 photograph the Dunes 62F

It wasn’t long before we were at the northern end of the dunes. We stopped for pictures.

Talked about the stress of living on not much money – family across social classes. Not rescuing them as us – didn’t even realize choice.

For example, we had a lot of money compared to my mother, but she lived on what she had, very frugally, never complaining, never asking for anything. Indeed, if she were to complain it would usually be about a person having too much, not too little. Having too much was wasteful. There was some level at which she might ask for help and of course we would provide it, but to date she had always said that she didn’t need it. She would usually bring this up, not me.

Many families had stress across financial classes like this. It didn’t always play out this way. Sometimes it was much worse, in a variety of possible ways.

1845 2485.9 Umpqua River Lighthouse

Sometimes the road would be just above the beach. Sometimes it would climb thousands of feet up a ridge to go around a point then wind back down. Occasionally it would cross grassy plains near the water’s edge. This in turn was occasionally interrupted by a river. Typically you’d drive up stream for a while, a mile or ten miles, to the place where a bridge had been placed, then cross the bridge, then drive back out.

One such place was the mouth of the Umpqua River. On the south side of this mouth was a light. We drove in and took a few pictures. This appeared to be more than just an historic site; it appeared to be a working lighthouse. There were dormitories nearby and several buildings that appeared to be operating shops. Anything open to the public was closed by this time of day though. We and other tourists came and went. The campgrounds nearby didn’t look quite like what I was looking for.

1904 2494.6 60F Campground $17 + $5 wood

I didn’t even note the name of the campground, if I even saw it. It was somewhere in the vicinity of Lakeside. John picked a site down at the end of the main loop. We started unloading. The campground host came up right behind us, sold us a bundle of wood and the permit for the site. She had alcohol on her breath.

Further south and in a stand of trees, it was going to get dark before we could really get finished. We’d go to the dunes tomorrow. I’d reconfigure the radios tomorrow.

photographed Klamath Ice, cut watermelon

Send Bob the link to -2

We’d bought a watermelon a long time back. I was worried it would go bad so we cut it and ate pieces. I tried the Coleman lantern. It blew out its new mantels. I decided to give up on it until we could get the right part. Made a note on the shopping list to look for it at a sporting goods store.

Bob, W7PUA, hadn’t quite gotten the APRS web link right. Made a note to send it to him. Maybe he had gone to the site and didn’t know what he was looking at. Different skill set!

In the Igloo there was a small, one-pound size, remnant of that 20-pound block of ice we’d bought in Klamath Falls.

2006 August 11

Did not feel dread this morning, just hunger.

This is Friday. No coffee since Tuesday. 4^th day

Waking up this morning I had no anxiety but was hungry. I’d been off coffee for a week, just about right now. There had been no withdrawal headaches, we weren’t pushing our sleeping or activity schedules enough for that. I couldn’t tell whether or not my other symptoms were coffee related or coffee withdrawal related.

Eel Creek Campground, John Dellenback Dunes

Not hearing a 3818 net, if any, 50F

Once it was light I was able to walk about ten campsites worth down to the sign where it said where we were – Eel Creek, right by Lakeside according to the map. The restrooms were down by site 28 and the dunes trailhead. We were in something like site 19. By the time I was back to our site, I’d forgotten all this and went back to read it again for the record, paying better attention this time.

I’d thought to make a clean break with the DSP-10 net now and just go on home and resume e-mail correspondence from there when I could get back to it but I turned on the radio to 3818 anyway from 8:30 to 9:00 local. Nothing heard. Bob had said something about being gone late in the week.

While most of the camping gear was out of the van in a campsite it was relatively empty, an opportunity to have the space and access to reconfigure the radios for the rest of the trip. Took the 2-meter handheld off of APRS and stowed it, restoring this function to the big 2 meter radio on the mag-mount antenna. Put the shortwave rig on the big antenna and changed it to the 20-meter resonator. Properly stowed all of the N5BF-10 equipment so it wouldn’t get lost or have goo spilled on it. Left the system actively transmitting our position so we might get a fix from here.

Getting low on milk, Lucky Charms

We had our traditional camping breakfast, for me that was Lucky Charms and milk. The one gallon of milk we had brought from home was still holding out and wasn’t sour yet but we were into its last quart. The Lucky Charms were getting low. I was getting tired of eating them.

~10-11 Dunes hike and pictures – “The Hustler” “Cool Hand Luke”

Before doing anything else, we went on the hiking trail through the dunes. We studied the map at the trailhead kiosk and I took a close up picture of it so we could study it (on the camera display) later if needed.

There was a loop through the campground and wetlands area and a spur extending up into the dunes themselves that kind of drifted off into free-form oblivion towards the ocean. We thought we might walk out toward the beach and test the water again.

It wasn’t far from the trailhead until we were out in the dunes: loose sand, hard walking. I stayed towards the low points; John climbed a dune to our right. He had just the right shoes (sandals) and energy for this. Other people were up on the dune too.

We went on west through a few valleys, past a few more dunes. As far as I could see ahead, it was more sand. I didn’t see water at all. I did see a pine tree growing in a little oasis up ahead and took a picture of it. After discussing not going to the water right here but later down the road, we turned back.

Other campers had found a good place to slide down the hill and climb back up. John joined them from a short distance. I got some movies and still shots.

Essay on taking the cellphone on the hike.

“We’re looking at flowers”

vs.

“I’m going into the court room” (Jury Duty)

My phone rang.

It was Viann about to go into the courtroom. She had been on jury duty for about a week now. They were still seating a jury. She didn’t think she had time for this.

It occurred to me that I should write an essay about taking the cellphone on the hike. Here we were on vacation in the sand looking at flowers when everyday reality intrudes. I’d often quipped that the people you’d see in public on cellphones just didn’t want to be where they were, they wanted to be somewhere else, presumably wherever was on the other end of that phone.

The trail wound back into vegetated areas, one area where they were trying to preserve some sort of grass, another with a small lake and bog and a paved area with a bench for viewing. We consulted the map in the camera. Someone was in the little cove attempting to do good photography.

We sat on the bench and talked about Paul Newman for some reason. John couldn’t quite place Paul Newman. “Oh, you know, The Sting, The Hustler, Cool Hand Luke. He still didn’t place him, so I related the opening scene from The Hustler and the end of Cool Hand Luke. “What we have here is a failure to communicate.” Then there was that scene in the middle where they had the prisoners out as a road gang and they had gotten into a race and finished their work way early that day. This had netted the Paul Newman character unfair extra punishment.

John still wasn’t placing him. We were back at the kiosk.

1152 2494.6 90255 77F drive

We broke camp and loaded up for what would turn out to be the last time. The policy had been not to decide until after 4 p.m. what we were going to do that night then try to get into a campground by six or a hotel by seven. This had never actually happened; usually some real or perceived constraint had caused us to head to a certain place. That would happen today too. It did mean that at this point we didn’t know where or if we would be camping anymore.

No bicycle action on this stop. We would have them out again down the road.

I kept trying to collect for the archives our camping permit that the host would put on our site to show that it was paid but they would typically come around before we would leave and take it up. Maybe there was some problem with fraudulent use of these signs. We drove away just before noon.

1252 Brandon DQ 2535.9 64F $18.87

“Big Rig” QRP amplifier, choke fire,

minimalist “not the same thing”

We drove right through Coos Bay but, still striving to have a somewhat normal eating schedule, stopped at the Dairy Queen right on the road in Brandon.

Unable not to talk about ham radio, I was trying to describe to John the concept of “big rig.” A ham might have many radios (as I did) including some “hand helds,” some mobile, some specialty or experimental radios, or some “base stations,” but the serious ones also had, usually in fixed operation at their house, the “main” radio, the “big rig.” In the way I was Elmered (mentored), this was the high frequency (shortwave) radio, probably with an amplifier, and as big of an “antenna farm” for various shortwave bands as the amateur could muster.

My “big rig” was this TS-680 sitting here on its home-made mount between us. It had been my “big rig” since I impulse bought it at an AMSAT-related meeting in 1989. Well, “impulse” was a little strong; I knew I wanted a TS-680 because it had 6 meters in addition to the shortwave bands. As with all amateur bands that I didn’t have equipment for, I wanted to have equipment for them. Six meters had been on my short list from the beginning.

But, for years I’d been a minimalist, in part because that was the only way you could be on very limited resources. For years my “big rig” had been the Ten Tec Argonaut 509, a five-band (the main five at the time) rig with five watts output. I also had the “shoes”, the 50-watt amplifier, which made it roughly comparable to the TS-680, but not really.

With a lot of help from my Elmer, I’d built my first transmitter. Crystal controlled with chirp, around 20 watts, Morse Code only.

It was kind of like those racing trucks, semi tractors outfitted with jet engines, that we’d been watching on, what show was that? Something we’d seen on cable in a hotel room in the last few days. It was kind of like the difference between those and bicycles. Some guys would go for the power, the maximum possible. Some would go for doing it on the minimum energy possible, so low that you could provide it yourself and get exercise at the same time.

It was the same sort of thing that went into the minimalists versus the power hungry in ham radio. Some had acres of antennas, as big and as high as possible. They wouldn’t consider running less than the legal maximum power limit, or more.

I could do this. I’d decided after a couple of years in the “Top Band” contest that you needed power on 1.8 MHz. I was interested in the contest for historical reasons. Ham radio started out around these frequencies, anything higher was thought useless at the time, before ionospheric skip propagation was discovered. “200 Meters and Down” was the name of the book by Clinton B. DeSoto describing the early history. The closest band we had today was 160 meters, 1.8-2.0 MHz, but I’d found that the typical 100 watts wasn’t enough there. I had an amplifier borrowed from Ralph, W0RPK, my AMSAT predecessor, mentor, and collaborator. With his consulting help (mostly over the air, on 17 meters) I’d modified it for 1.8 MHz operation. This had made a big difference in the next Top Band contest. This modifications had involved dealing with special high voltage capacitors, high voltage wire and, worst, a new “choke.” I’d learned what it was to have “choke fire”. Also, you had to be very careful not to electrocute yourself. I’d managed to grab the 300 volts in my first transmitter a few times decades ago. That was enough. Three thousand could easily be fatal.

Working with five watts it was hard to start a fire. You didn’t mind operating all day. If it got stuck on it would get warm but wouldn’t burn up anything. At one or two kilowatts, you could start a nice, impressive fire in a fraction of a second.

So, I could do the stuff at high power and wouldn’t mind doing it again in the future should the “need” arise, but I preferred to work at the low end. Kind of like my very low power moonbounce experiment. I’d demonstrated that Venus bounce was within reach for the big moonbounce guns by establishing a new low power level for returns from the moon. For me to do it personally would take at least two obsessions, mine for minimalism and theirs for high power, to pull it off. Maybe at the upcoming AMSAT Symposium I would inspire the right set of guys. I had submitted a paper.

Enough of that….

There were plenty of other tourists coming and going for late lunch too. We’d bought a dessert too but didn’t get it. They were continuously busy and I didn’t want dessert now anyway so we dropped it.

A couple pulled up on a good-looking motorcycle. Another cyclist came out and started looking it over. I watched. They shook hands, obviously strangers until now. The owner started pointing at things on his bike and describing them to his new friend.

“Look,” I said to John, indicating this conversation, “A friend in every town. Common ground.” Other people had hobbies … obsessions too, with different values, different applications. I always felt better about my own quirks when I saw the lengths to which model railroad hobbyists would go, or the guys who restored old cars, or motorcycle nuts

1342 64F

Along the coastline it was consistently cool. Fifty at night, sixty-five during the day.

1443 2580.9 65F

Ophir State Beach – check the water

We stopped to check the water at a place that called itself Ophir State Beach. There was driftwood a few dozen yards back from the water. We picked up a small souvenir piece. Later, we saw a van with a large log of the stuff strapped on top, doubtless heading for their front yard at home, maybe far from the coast.

The water here wasn’t as bad as it had been up at Newport, but it was still cold, colder than you’d want to stay in for more than three minutes.

Up at the car I got a picture of a fat seagull. Sitting (not standing) there it reminded me of my fat cat, In-debt.

1503

1523

Gold Beach Post Office 2591.7

I needed a place to mail the letter I’d most recently written to mother in the campground this morning and I wanted it to have an Oregon postmark as this would be our last day in Oregon. Right there in Gold Beach on the highway was a sign pointing to the Post Office. We went down the street and found many things, apartments businesses, industry, but no Post Office. On the second or third loop around the area I finally found it. The stiff sea wind threatened to blow my mail away.

This was also the last chance to get a photo of the road sign showing schematically someone reading a book. “Library,” this meant.

We stopped a few more places along the drive to photograph scenic rocks, some up in the surf. This was not like the ocean I had grown up near.

1609 California 2627.1 73F chickens.

And then, there was California. No river, no bridge, no landmark of any special kind, just the border, apparently at 41 degrees 59 minutes 47 seconds. They were probably shooting for 42 degrees and established the boundary, then modern survey technology refined knowledge of the earth by a few hundred feet.

There was a sign. Bicyclists were resting under it. We pulled over for a picture. Across the road there was a house whose fence line was the border. A man was out working in the yard. He had chickens. He was on the Oregon side. My back fence was the La Canada School District border, was that the same?

The Oregon atlas was retired to the bottom of the box and Northern California, which had seemed extraneous nearly from the beginning, came out.

1642 Crescent City Beach 2648.5 65F

The guy sitting on the driftwood noticed my T-Shirt

The next stop of interest was Crescent City. This is where on Good Friday of 1964, a major earthquake in Anchorage, Alaska had spawned a tsunami. Several had been killed and much of the town had been flattened. To look at the map this was a curious result. Alaska was northwest of here by thousands of miles and the town was shielded to the northwest by Point St. George. There must have been some geographically amplified vacuum effect in the sea here, or maybe something special about the ocean floor in the bay. There had been tsunamis up and down the coast (we had been driving in and out of tsunami zones and seeing tsunami evacuation route signs for days) but none as destructive as here.

The wave had happened in the middle of the night, hours after the earthquake. Witnesses on the island with the lighthouse had seen the ocean bottom in the moonlight before the wave struck but could not be more descriptive.

Any museums or exhibits here were closed for the day now but we drove around town, up northwest of the bay, and found a place to park on a residential street and go down winding stairs to the rocky, overgrown beach.

Here there was a major layer of driftwood against the small cliff, thirty or forty yards wide and ten or fifteen feet deep. We went out to the water first, climbed around on the rocks in the tide and skipped some stones. Another family was there. The father asked me what (kind of rocks) we were looking for. I just said, “skippers.” They were looking for choice minerals in the piles here, one of the kids had found something special. Apparently this was a place known for such things.

The sun was not low but was headed that way. A new looking resort nearby didn’t look very busy. An old man sitting on driftwood gave me kudos for my “blood donor” T-Shirt. This might have been the one I got in 2001 when all the kids first took their ham license exams for Father’s Day. Or, it might have been another. I was up around eight gallons or so now.

I studied the layout of the bay; it was relatively flat for this part of the country. Maybe the ocean floor sloped up gently like it does in other places in the world where monster waves, hundred foot breakers, can occur under the right sea conditions. Couldn’t really tell.

We needed to spend at least a week here and see everything to really figure it all out….

1719 go on

Viannah’s high school friend Chris Stones was known to be at Humboldt State, somewhere in the Eureka area. We were going to stop there tonight and try to find him. We had e-mailed Viannah (at college in Pennsylvania) a few times trying to get her help finding him. No luck. I told John to call her on his new phone.

She was there, doing homework. She e-mailed Chris, read his address to John over the phone and e-mailed it to me so we could pick it up at the hotel. Viannah was just finishing summer school but would not be coming home between terms, before school started for the fall. We had no idea what Chris was doing, if he was even in town.

cbs8@humboldt.edu

The University was actually in Arcata. We drove around. They had some hills and grades here that put Los Angeles to shame.

1912 2723.8 Comfort Inn Arcata 62 – No Vacancy

A mile back north had been a tourist exit with several hotels. We tried the Comfort Inn only to be told that it, and probably all the others here, were full.

Motel 8 and Howard Johnson had full up signs

Two others had “no vacancy” signs taped to the doors. Comfort Inn had not. Maybe they were waiting for people with reservations. No, there would still be “no vacancy.”

North Coast Inn had one room, smoking of course, and a Lions Convention coming in tomorrow.

The last motel back towards the freeway was an independent. They had one room left, smoking of course. The guy said they always filled up last because they weren’t a chain.

This was for just one night. A Lions Club convention was coming in tomorrow but tonight was fine. This would be an opportunity to talk to John about service clubs.

We got only two packets in today including none from the campground after the change back to original configuration. The Yaesu internal speaker quit working. Unrelated but I found soda water crud on the radio. Ugh. Will clean and shut down.

This was the largest note I’d made in the log yet, a danger sign.

We were in the room and unloaded, I had checked the internet for our APRS reported progress during the day. There had been only two packets! Something about my sense of security or completeness needed this to be working. I’d brought along equipment and tools to debug just such problems for just this reason.

Of course, it was in reality unimportant whether this worked or not, it was, after all, only a hobby and nobody’s life depended on it, probably.

So I went out and discovered something else. Something had leaked into the radio; the speaker didn’t work. John and I discussed this. You can’t just leave empty soda cans anywhere. They always have a little left in them and they never stay upright in a moving car. The only right place for them is in a non-leaking trash or recycle sack, such as “this one here” (the one behind John’s seat).

I poked at it with a plug and a disassembled pen and got it working again. It was just insulating sugar on the contacts. Cleaned the Dr. Pepper off the outside using a wet rag. That was all fine, but still didn’t explain why it wasn’t working. Broke out the handheld radio and listened. The transmissions sounded fine, and were occurring every two minutes as programmed. There was no way to tell the power level of the output but I verified the hookup again and inspected the antenna, cables and connections. There was nothing obviously wrong.

Well, we weren’t getting packets in, so I turned it off and went back in.

Some online research about the local infrastructure for APRS revealed not many nearby relay nodes. There were some of those weather stations in the mountains to the east but those probably weren’t radios, just reports on the internet. One guy down in Eureka had gotten a packet in via his own relay thirty miles north, the same relay that had gotten my two packets in, from Crescent City.

Well, if you were doing this here, how would you do it? I looked at the map: mountains to the east, ocean to the west. The best approach would be a relay out on buoy twenty or thirty miles out. That would cover the coast highway very nicely. There were some positions reported from out there, boats no doubt, but no infrastructure.

I sent off a panicked e-mail to Ralph about this then intentionally gave up so as to quit wasting time. There probably wasn’t anything I could do with my setup that would fix this, if that assessment were correct. Only driving on down the road to a better supported area would verify this either way. It really didn’t matter today then, yeah.

732D St. Turtle.

Hidden Creek Road

Pass Lighthouse Church

Like Chevy Chase

707 822 7754 Chris Stones

A little after ten we were watching Band of Brothers on cable, realistic historical fiction about World War II when my phone rang. It was a local number; it was Chris!

He had just gotten in and seen all of our messages. Yes, he was in town and he wasn’t going home between terms either. He gave directions to his apartment; it could be distinguished by the turtle out on the front step. We made a date for lunch tomorrow; getting up by noon was a compromise.

Ray’s, ice, pasteries, $8.06

After this we walked across the street looking for a place to eat, but everything was already closed. We went to the grocery in the shopping area instead, “Ray’s”. There was nearly no one in there when we arrived but as soon as we came up to the checkout with our pastries that we’d laboriously selected, the second checker had gone on break and there were a dozen people in line. The first in line had a big order; her week’s shopping. The second one had trouble making payment. All of the people back in line with us looked like crazy men who had come down out of the hills to commit late night mass murder in the line at the grocery store.

We finally got out of there, with freezing ice also, and carried everything the block back to the van for the Igloo.

Balance $340.56 $366.70 John, $26.14 different

I was trying to teach John to keep books on this trip. He was supposed to write down everything I spent, cash or card, and routinely calculate how much money we had left.

So, after Ray’s, I asked him total up while I counted the money in my pocket to see how well we were doing. He figured (in his head as always) for a while and when I came out of the bathroom and asked how it was going, he said, “You don’t have any money left.”

“Oh, how do you know that.”

“It went below zero.”

“Then what did you do?”

“Stopped.”

…

“OK, well, I got money out of the machine at Newport and in SeaTac and wondered when you’d notice.

John’s figures showed that I should have about twenty-six dollars more than I did. This was more than we could figure out. Something had been forgotten somewhere.

(The ledger shows that neither of us wrote down the cost at Denny’s at SeaTac, nor did I seem to have a receipt. It would be about that much, but I doubted that was the exact problem.)

2006 August 12

One approach would have been to check out of the hotel, go see Chris at noon, then when the visit was finished go on from there, similar to what we had done at Corvallis. We didn’t want to do that again today so I went down to the front desk to see if we could stay another day. I already knew that a Lion’s Club convention was already firing up this morning and would have the place full tonight, but you can always ask.

Went down and asked about staying another night. He thought there was a 60% chance, was a housekeeping issue. Check out and come back this afternoon. “Can I make a reservation?” He got on the computer and just fixed it.

The guy at the desk was expecting me to check out. They did in fact have empty rooms tonight, but not ours and, in his mind it was all about how far the housekeeping crew got with the turnarounds and the stay-ins and all during the day. They had a full staff today so there was a 60% chance we could stay again tonight but we’d have to check out now and come back, maybe around 2:00 p.m.

I was not interested in doing either of these things. If I checked out now we’d go someplace else further south tonight, even if it was only Eureka.

After listening to this for a while I had an idea, “Can I make a reservation?” I asked.

He replied only, “Oh,” did something at the computer for about a minute and a half and said, “It’s all OK now, you can stay in your room again tonight, do you have your keys?

Well that was more like it. You either have empty rooms or you don’t. If you do, I’d never heard of housekeeping issues as being the roadblock to renting one before. At least that was never the reason given.

Modern hotel keys have to be programmed and, when the itinerary changes, reprogrammed. He reprogrammed mine and gave me another so now we had three. Sure enough, tonight the two new ones worked but the old not-redone one did not.

Called about movies, we had a choice of Pirates of the Caribean II, World Trade Center, or Inconvenient Truth, at various times throughout the day.

Back at the room I used the community material and phone book to find the local theaters and checked them for showtimes today. There were three choices. John had already seen the new Pirates of the Caribbean but wouldn’t mind going again. World Trade Center had just opened this week and we had talked throughout the trip about going, but it was likely to be heavy. And, at what amounted to the alternative theater, they had Al Gore’s global warming show. I was thinking more of buying that when it became available on DVD rather than seeing it in a theater. I didn’t necessarily disagree with anything Gore was going to present, but probably would dispute his emphases or presentation some. Anyway, I’d heard that it could be irritating for a non-Gore fan to watch and, if I were going to see it in the theater would rather do it more broadly as a Family Night so it was a distant third for me.

There was other stuff showing, possibly worse than cable TV. Those were out of the question.

Used the phone book to locate a bowling alley, E&O Bowl, called for directions.

We’d been talking about bowling throughout the trip too and one reason why we were staying two nights here was that it was occurring to me that it would be easier to bowl in a smaller town, large enough to have an alley, but not so large that it would be hard to find in a city.

I knew, however, that the odds of just driving around and finding a bowling alley were pretty slim. We had passed a bowling alley on the way out of Seattle and one other somewhere else, so it was rare enough.

I looked up a local bowling alley and called for directions. It was relatively nearby but was on Highway 299 on the way out of town to the east, definitely not someplace we would have just randomly driven by on this trip.

Last night “Band of Brothers”

This morning “Ants” ugh

Band of Brothers had been a pretty good show. It looked to me to be a fairly accurate portrayal of life in the service in the European theater of World War II. Sudden death and destruction, people going crazy, politics at all levels from the grunts in the (real) trenches up to the brass. I didn’t know about the 40s firsthand, but the costumes and weather were right.

For once I had been disappointed to be interrupted by a phone call. Anyone who knew my cell number was more important than TV, however, no matter how good the show.

By contrast, the show we were watching right now, some flick on the border between Sci-Fi and horror, was a total waste. Acted and scripted more poorly than Charlie’s Angels, it was about giant ants, each about a meter in length that had somehow been mutated through some sort of radiation accident (Plutonium probably, arghhh!). We hadn’t seen the beginning to know exactly, an accidental mercy. In order to make this useless plot work, the ants had been mutated not only to gigantic size but to be more aggressive and dangerous than normal ants. More like fire ants.

So some slick hero was going to fumigate a building to get rid of this infestation and didn’t seem to care that people were still inside (living and dead).

Gag.

But we watched to the end and then hit the road.

1201 2733.8 090495 63F drive

1211 2737.1 65F Chris’ place

lunch, equations pix, Chris blog, campus tour, GPS, swimming hole, stadium, elevators, mostly closed

Chris’s directions were good. There was a fourplex and one of the doors did indeed have a plaster turtle on the stoop. Reminded me of “Tex” our concrete armadillo at home.

So Chris was working on a math problem in order to sharpen his skills, something about deriving the diameter of a circle from the circumference. This was equivalent to calculating the constant Pi, of course. He had just taped all of his work, dead ends included, on his wall, maybe fifteen pages. Good methodology, I thought. I’ll have to try something like that.

Chris lived downstairs, his roommate upstairs. They shared the kitchen upstairs and the garage downstairs. Neither had a car, the garage seemed only to be a repository for bikes, theirs and others.

Rather than drive to lunch, we set out walking, at first retracing the route we had just driven up back towards campus. The street was under construction which had Chris’s ideal world messed up. He was about fifteen minutes from campus by foot, ten by bike.

We went through the lower end and over and under the freeway and other roads on the pedestrian walkway.

Heck, I should have brought the camera for all this. Yeah, I would look like a ridiculous tourist, but Viann would want to see some of this.

Passing homeless people in the walkways and on the streets, we also passed a few eating places as we got out to one of the main drags. Mexican? Yeah, that was OK with us. We moved on, finally ending up at a campus-hangout type burger place. Not too busy today because school was out.

We all ordered; I paid. I told John that the oldest person was supposed to pay, like Bob Larkin had earlier this week. “Yeah, like Bob Corvallis,” he replied, smiling that little Wilda, “you idiot” look. This was a reference to “Billy Covina,” Katy’s friend Billy whose last name we didn’t know. At a party in at Billy’s place in Covina, she had called from his phone one night at one in the morning. Because of this I now had his number and had saved it with the name “Billy Covina” in the phone. We all knew who it was. … Now there was Bob Corvallis. Hmmm.

No one wrote down what I paid. Our bookkeeping was falling apart.

After lunch we walked back over to the campus and took a walking tour. Few of the buildings were open, it being an inter-session Saturday, but there were many sites important to Chris to see outside anyway. He had just taken a biology class this summer. For lack of seats he had ended up standing through the whole session. We looked in the window where this had occurred. One thing he wanted to make sure I saw turned out to be the football field. When it wasn’t in use for other things (like when the lights were on) it was a great place to come, lay out in the open and look at stars.

Right at the entrance was a GPS monument, similar to the one near our house on Highway 2. Chris asked what it was. John knew; it was one of Lucy Jones’ earthquake things. I knew too, it was part of the tectonics monitoring network, it might even have a Rogue (GPS) receiver of some sort in it. Both were true. “Who is Lucy Jones?” Chris wondered. We talked about Niels’ mother. Back at the hotel I just googled her and sent him the first couple of links. World famous earthquake scientist. Well, at least nationally or regionally famous. “No, world famous,” John corrected.

Behind the football field was a trail up into the forest. I asked how people could find their way around on these trails; all you could see in all directions were hundred foot tall trees. Chris didn’t think this was usually a problem. There was a creek that had been dammed off decades ago to make into a swimming hole for the students. The swimming hole was full of brown water today. It didn’t look like it was used for swimming much nowadays.

On the way down we used an outdoor elevator that had only two stops, top (2) and bottom (1), but it was five or six floors worth high. The hill was so steep here that this elevator was a major thoroughfare between parking lots, residence halls, and classroom buildings. Further, you came in one side at the top and out the other at the bottom. During the off-season, when it wasn’t busy, Chris would just walk his bike straight through. It had a Star Trek turbolift feel.

Wish I’d brought the camera along on all this. Back at the apartment I got it out for a few just before leaving. Got a picture of the equations on the wall, Chris at his workstation, in front of his apartment, making a blog movie of us.

1502 drive

As at Corvallis, we left as suddenly as we had come and drove back to the hotel.

1508 2739.8 hotel, nap

I reviewed my movie information and we both took a nap. Priorities were:

1. Bowling,

2. Movie,

3. Laundry.

We’d do whatever worked out next.

1616 drive

1626 EO Lanes 2745.5 67F

$3.00 shoes plus $18.00 games

I woke up and got John up. Showings of movies were starting right now. We’d try bowling and see where that left us.

Following the directions from last night, we went out to EO Lanes. At that moment, no one else was in the bowling alley. The attendant rented us shoes and turned on lane 5. In another part of the building, people were getting ready for a pizza birthday party.

We both scratched our first throw, then I started hitting a few and in frames three and four of the first game got strikes. John had three points in the first four frames. Just warming up.

John the Master Bowler

We ended up playing three games, six person-games total. Our scores were John: 38, 55, 49, and Courtney 86, 77, 73. I was getting tired and sore and couldn’t go on to another game. An old timer watching coached John a bit. This helped but still no one broke 100. I told him the old deal about making 100, “Always knock some down and get some spares.” The real version rule was from my Hubbard High School physics teacher Charles McClain on how to get 200, “Spare them all and get some strikes.” This was way out for today.

Later we watched some bowling on TV. Those pros weren’t doing so great either, mid 200s typically. They were throwing harder than I could, at least than I could two or three score times in a row. My right forearm would be sore for a week, until after we got home.

Bowling: “I don’t understand the physics of this.”

“The cellphone wouldn’t let you have that.”

While we were playing, John complained that he didn’t really understand how this worked. We had thought about inviting Chris along on this. He would have worked hard figuring all the angles. On one good throw of mine, an eight or so, John exclaimed, “The cellphone wouldn’t let you have that.” We were expert electronic bowlers on our cellphones (under “Games”). I think my best score there had been a little over a hundred.

Real bowling was more fun. Bigger display.

1743 drive

1800 The movies 2760.5 “WTC” $17.00

We had decided on World Trade Center for the movie. There was a showing in fifteen minutes. Unfortunately it was in Eureka, where I had never been, and most of the time would be spent getting over there on the freeway. Further, there was a 50 mile per hour limit on the freeway.

Luckily, the theater was right on the highway and we didn’t take any premature wrong turns looking for it. We pulled up right as the showing was supposed to start. “Previews,” I said. We paid and went in. I was thinking of popcorn but John didn’t want any. We skipped the concession altogether.

It was not what I had expected. Perhaps I was confusing this Oliver Stone movie with a documentary that we had seen advertised on cable. It had to do with conspiracy and tragedy. World Trade Center was only the story of a a few Port Authority cops and their families. They went to work that day, went out on an unprecedented disaster call, saw things that had never been seen before, worked carefully to try to go in and help evacuate the buildings, and ended up trapped in a destroyed elevator shaft. They were numbers 19 and 20 of the 21 people rescued alive and, even so, spent months, sometimes years, in recovery.

That was all it was. No Muslim extremists, no panicked people in offices, just two cops trying to do their job, and barely living to tell about it, and what happened in their homes during the crises. This was actually better than I was expecting.

2024

2026 Wendys 2760.9 $14.78

Not an achiever – Am I a failure?

Talked some about WTC

Stock broker seen running out of building

The possible Caltech student

There was a Wendy’s right down the street. We were really looking for a Denny’s, and would have found one if we’d turned with the highway and gone three more blocks, but we stopped and ate in the Wendy’s. I told John that there had been no orphans, that is, no one who had been left without a place to go. Some had lost a lot of family. There was a story from the Caltech financial aid office that always made my cry to remember. One student, a senior in high school, had lost both parents and was living with his teacher. He wanted to go to Caltech and had the grades but didn’t know how he was going to pay for it. The financial aid officer, on hearing this incredible story, told him that if he could get in, he wouldn’t have to worry about the costs, it would be taken care of.

John knew someone who saw his stock broker running out of one of the buildings on TV.

We both knew Jeff Maljian, then the youth pastor at work, who had been a classmate of Todd Beamer, one of the heroes of Flight 93, which had been forced to crash in a field in Pennsylvania by passengers fighting back rather than some building of national importance in Washington, DC. I had not seen that movie.

On a different subject, I was wandering if I was a failure because John was not turning out to be an overachiever. He was brilliant, his ideas on what to do and how things worked were often amazingly good for a high school underclassman, but I had done nothing to push him into achieving places. Like his friend Krishanu, a math whiz who was learning calculus while they were all in grade school, whose family had moved to New York so he could pursue this in better schools. Or Neils, or Chris Chafin, another ham who had picked up on technical gizmology more than John had. John was just happy to be around the gizmologists, but had no aspiration to become one.

Was this my failing or was John just not the person to pursue things in this way. Had I missed something? We had already established that I was not a coach and was not going to become one and that this was fine. I had to be myself as best as I could. I should not be someone else poorly. Still, maybe we should have done more scouting or something.

Well, here we were; this wasn’t nothing.

We ate in peace for a while.

John ordered and completely ate a “triple.” Back when Wendy’s was new we had called these the “cube of meat.”

2103 drive

2123 2772.4 hotel 58F

Settlers of Cattan: John played Blue and White. I played Red and Yellow

Order was Red, White, Yellow, Blue. We think we messed this up a few times. John said three at least, won, joint forces – 20 instead of 10 points.

It wasn’t too hard to turn the TV off and play the game. We thought it would be more interesting with all four sets of pieces so we each played two. It quickly became clear that there were two major problems with this. It was more difficult than expected to remember which color’s turn it was. It was also clear that the two sets being played by one person were not enemies. They could trade anything and would cooperate. This understood, the winning score was twenty, not ten. I didn’t think that the setup of the game would make a double score reasonably achievable, but John achieved it anyway, so there was a winner.

2006 August 13 Sunday

No dread waking up this morning. Now some but might just be hunger.

So I guess I’m off of the coffee addiction now.

0918 2772.4 = 90533 59F check out $209.00

While I was checking out a lady ran into the lobby and announced that a big milk truck had turned over in the traffic circle over by the 101. Every time we went through this circle we commented on how nonsensical it was, and I thought of the much larger one near the airport in Borger, Texas. One problem with them was simply that no one understood how to drive and yield in them. In this case, the problem was the small turning radius. A big truck driver hadn’t known how to drive in it in this case.

All of us in the lobby discussed and agreed on directions to get out of here going south. … go out towards the bowling alley…

0926 2772.6 = 90533 Chevron

Turned over milk truck

$3.399 X 19.931 = $67.75. A record?

Oil 2/3 down – darker

But first we needed to fill up. We were still on Oregon gas. I thought this might have been a record fill up. How long had it been since I got the camera out to take a picture of the pump on my then-record fill up of $30.00. Was that 2001?

The oil was still dropping. This was normal this long after a change.

Today:

Acts 27-28:10

e-mail

cash accounting

These were the topics for today as we got started on our drive. We would either camp along the coast some place or press on into San Francisco, depending on what we decided … after four.

For today’s church lesson, I had John read the story of Paul’s shipwreck off Malta. As I had remarked in my commentary on the Bible when in Acts, I thought that this would make a great movie. Paul, under false accusation from the Jewish establishment, the people to whom he was a threat, had appealed to Caesar. He was now under guard of a centurion whose job it was to bring him to Rome. They took various ships around the coast and ended up on a shipping vessel headed into Greece around Cyprus. There were over two hundred on board including Paul, his guard and some other prisoners. It was late in the sailing season and Paul, having heard from God on the matter, had warned against undertaking the last leg of the trip, but the weather was nice and the crew wanted to get their cargo delivered this year if possible.

No sooner had they set out than a northeaster blew in. They lost control of navigation and sailed in desperation down wind for fourteen days. As all hope was lost, an angel appeared to Paul in a vision telling him that the ship would be lost but none of the people. Paul, the prisoner, essentially took command and directed the whole abandon ship activity. It was a hair raising scene right up to the end as people were swimming through the surf and washing up on debris.

This action story rivaled the Exodus for suspense, I thought.

We discussed our cash accounting problems. John still had his notebook – ledger, but I wasn’t asking him to try to use it anymore. This had been one of the downfalls of Texas Ranch House, a Public Broadcasting System series that we had watched earlier in the year: the proper accounting of funds. My own finances were rather loose in this respect. I didn’t really know where I stood either.

And then I brought up the topic of e-mail. John would hardly use it. I was enslaved to it.

I started with the story of what life was like during the thousands of years of civilization before e-mail. When it was arriving fifteen or twenty years ago, it seemed a great tool to get around certain problems. For example, in the late 80’s a worldwide group of thirty or forty volunteers had built four satellites. Much of the work was done via e-mail, with some significant exceptions, but the normal routine of having to have a thousand people in one place for several years to build a satellite was way out of date by this working model.

So, there were those of us, hams by nature anyway, who had embraced this tool. It allowed time shifting of conversations. You could have a pretty useful technical interchange with someone in, for instance Italy, with one complete turnaround per day. And it overcame geographic barriers in important ways.

There was abuse also. It was possible for people to get entrapped by the tool, as I had. I was so wrapped up in it that I had moved my “to do” list to e-mail. While this had been effective and leveraged my compulsion, it meant more time on e-mail.

Then there were the illnesses. Spam and people sitting around forwarding all sorts of political or religious diatribe, etc. all the time. This was wasteful. I wouldn’t do those things, but I would write long diatribes of my own and sent them to twenty people. This was why it would sometimes take me until lunch time to get my e-mail done at work some days.

I decided right there to not do anything personal at work anymore.

John, on the other hand, the generation who was recipient of this great savior, had an account that we had provided as part of our internet set up at home. I had expected him to just grasp and use, if more reasonably than I did, but he wouldn’t use it at all.

After discussion, we decided that we could both improve. I would use e-mail as a slave, not a master. John would use it at all in order to be responsive to the truly important stuff and just trash the rest.

OK.

1005 Big 5 Not the right Coleman Part 2789.6

1015

Somewhere along the road, I don’t even know where, there was a Big 5 sporting goods store right by the freeway. We got off and went in.

Like most stores it was mostly clothing, sports clothing of course, but there was a section of Coleman and similar camping gear including a display of replacement parts. I studied it carefully but there wasn’t anything like what I needed for the lantern here. There were replacement fuel caps, but no Shrader valve wick assemblies. I’d have to order something like that online probably. Something else to do when we were back at home.

We left without buying anything.

1148 Highway 1 2878.5 82F

After a long while, we came to the split of Highway 1 from Highway 101. We still hadn’t seen those places where the car commercials were shot, I didn’t think, at least not the California ones. Maybe this stretch would lead to such places.

1151 2879.3 Drive Through Tree $5.00

Right here was where the world famous California drive-through tree was, right down that side road a quarter of a mile. This being the sort of thing that we were here for, we took this road. Shortly it came to a booth where a kindly retired man took the five dollar admission fee.

1201 2879.6 stop

There was a line of about three cars waiting to go through the tree. While we waited our turn I took down the big antenna and we turned in the outside rearview mirrors. The man at the tollbooth told us that Ford Explorers had gone through here. Maybe we would fit.

It was tight. When our turn came I eased it in, keeping the sides just even enough with a couple of inches to spare. Then there was the scraping sound. I’d forgotten the mag-mount two-meter antenna on the roof. It was knocked over and dragging. Distressing but no permanent damage.

As soon as we were far enough through to get a door open, John hopped out and took pictures.

We pulled over to the side for a minute and looked at some felled logs large enough to climb into, but did not visit the store or the food shop.

This was one of those things you’d seen on Huell Howser or somewhere but never know where it was.

1206 go

I-Pod with surround sound

Now John had figure out how to use the external computer speakers we somehow had along with his Ipod. There it was plugged into its adapter in the accessory outlet with the computer speakers plugged into it. An Ipod can hold around five hours of music. We would listen to it all day. John would hit the skip button every time something came on that he didn’t want to hear. It seemed like this was four out of every five, and the ones that he did want to hear were not the ones that I wanted to hear.

“We’ll count this as his turn,” I thought.

1211 80.4 Highway 1 55F and fog on the coast

Got a call from home, network problems, dropped.

Highway 1 was quickly treacherous, not as bad as the Mt. Wilson spur, but worse than Highway 2 that it came off of. We needed to take it easy and watch for the turns. “Winding Road Next 22 Miles,” was the advertisement.

The phone rang. It was home. They were having network problems. I swore. You just couldn’t get away from that s**t! They wouldn’t be calling me if they weren’t desperate, if they hadn’t tried everything they knew and it hadn’t been down for a while. Since Friday, it turned out. This meant that the first several queries were answered with, “We’ve already tried that.”

Problem was, people didn’t really understood how it worked. (The fact that they weren’t supposed to need to understand how it works was beside the point by now.) So they would try things and mark them off their mental list, but having tried them in the wrong order, it didn’t necessarily mean anything. I swore to myself again that I’d write up a set of instructions for this.

Right when we were starting to get into things that hadn’t already been tried, the call dropped. Nobody had any bars on their phone. Should I stop at a turnout and try back? Should I go back? While I thought, we kept going. Soon it made most sense to keep on keeping on going.

This reminded me of Cloudcroft, I told John. Just as we were sitting down to dinner the phone rang. It was Joyce who was house sitting for us. Exact same problem. Internet not working and she had tried everything and needed help. It took about twenty minutes and a reboot to get going.

When I came back, Doug said, “It seems like at least on vacation you wouldn’t get phone calls during dinner!” Everybody (else) laughed.

This road did indeed wind on for twenty-two miles. As we got down close to the coastline, we got into light fog. That was how we could tell, in the trees, that we were getting close. Then we’d see water through a break in the trees, then more trees.

Eventually we were down on the beach again. This was not the most remote beach on the west coast, but was quite undeveloped. There were parks and state beaches. People were out playing near (mostly not in) the water on their Sunday afternoon.

John checked; he had bars! We called home. They had worked it out on their own. Viann was swearing by now. This was much more uncommon than me swearing. But, it was working and Katy had printed out mailing labels for things that Viannah had sold online and all was well again.

1335 Denny’s Ft. Bragg 2923.7 60F $22.49 + $3.50

1434

There was a Denny’s in the middle of Ft. Bragg. We stopped for lunch.

Most of the tables seemed to contain tourists, but the one behind us seated what seemed to be locals. It was a couple a little older than me, I judged. They didn’t look like they’d been together for decades, maybe a few years or months. The more snippets I overheard and actions I couldn’t miss (they were behind John), the more it seemed like they were old hippies living now on superstition, or family crises, or something.

1650 Ft. Ross 3010.0 $6.00

Thought it was closed, but paid and went in anyway and it wasn’t.

I had insisted that John at least flip through one of the tour books for today’s drive. He had a favorite. It went from south to north so we were proceeding earlier and earlier in the book.

He wanted to go to Ft. Ross. I started watching. Ultimately we got there.

The park kiosk was unattended. It had instructions about how much to pay for entry, day use, or camping. It said the fort itself and the gift shop closed at 4:30, twenty minutes ago. I decided to just make a donation and paid the six dollars for a self-serve permit.

Neither the store nor the fort were yet closed for the day. The people tending them seemed to be preoccupied with research, however. This was not a problem.

Ft. Ross was from the same era as the Alamo and was of similar construction. It was an interesting story. Sometime in the early 19^th century, the Russians had just come and built this fort here although the land was formally under Spain (or was it Mexico). The fort was too impressive and impregnable for the local natives or others who claimed the territory to do anything about it, but they did establish trade relations with those who passed by. For a while there had been a conveyer down to the beach to facilitate loading and unloading ships. John wanted to ride on it, but it was long gone.

Two opposite corners were defended with blockhouses. John wondered why the chapel had been put in a third corner most prone to attack. “Maybe they let God have the hard corner,” I speculated. We could see the Orthodox cemetery about a mile away inland, the first reasonable use we’d made of the binoculars.

The old barracks, mess, armory, and commander’s house were stocked with exhibits of period tools, weapons, and goods. What a life it must have been, here where the only contact with the outside world was the occasional ship that would pass. Except for the coast road it was hardly less remote today.

We checked out the water well right in the middle of the compound. Threw in a few rocks. It looked about thirty feet deep. I told John about Wonder Cave in Texas. It had been discovered when, while drilling a shaft for a bridge support on what would become I-35, they hit a void and lost their drill bit into water. Later, Wonder Cave had been opened to the public and part of the tour was to visit the shaft and look down into water of unknown depth. People would throw coins in there and after a while, diver’s had been sent to find the limits of he underwater cave but had found none, so they put a floor in the shaft to catch the money and emptied it every year. The $200 collected in this way provided for an employee Christmas party.

We could see a dollar down this well….

There had been a windmill here once too, ala Don Quixote. It was advertised as the first windmill in California and had been used for grinding wheat.

We looked around in the store. As always there was enough material sitting here for one to study for a week, or a lifetime.

1752 60F as always

After an hour we moved on. Still windy and chilly right by the water, even in August.

1842 Portuguese Beach after Duncan’s Landing

Sandals – Wade 3029.3 59F “Most deadly” “sneaker waves”

1910

We came to a place called Duncan’s Point, by Duncan’s landing. It was a protected wildlife area. No beach access. Lot’s of Duncans had been out here at some point, apparently. There were no stories about this in my family that I had ever heard.

But, right after the cove was Portuguese Beach, and it did have access to the water.

Access, that is, after walking by a large sign with diagrams about how the water was dangerous here. There were “sneaker waves” (surf version, I imagined, of rogue waves, waves larger than the current average size). These could wash you away, then there were depressions in the surf where you could be rolled and drowned. And there were rip tides. In all, this was one of the most dangerous beaches on the coast, people were supposed to stay above the berm.

Well, we had not come here to stay behind the berm. I rolled up my pants and we waded in, near a rock, until they were nearly getting wet with waves. We stood on a rock in the edge of the surf for a time. John wanted to be there when a wave totally surrounded it. Eventually, this happened. It was frightening, of course. A wave big enough to wash all around the rock went partially over it too. And there was spray.

But, we walked away without injury. Here as at other beaches, there were people camping, in various stages of various activities, but none seemed as interested in the water as we were.

Abortion? “We talked about that – Casitas”

… encyclopedic memory

Silence now – some sleep.

On down the road, attempting to strike up a conversation, I brought up the subject of abortion. John said, “We already talked about that.”

“Oh, when?”

“On the Casitas trip a few weeks ago.”

“Oh….” This boy had an encyclopedic memory. Then he slept for a while. The coastline wandered back and forth in front of us, rolling by.

Piano is not “all” for me.

Wm. Kapell

Half Moon Bay

Once he was awake again, I gave my standard “music major lecture.” The problem with making a living in music was that there wasn’t much demand. Electronic media had made this worse, pooling wealth in a few superstars while impoverishing all of the regular musicians. But even before that music was a luxury, not consistently supported, not usually lucrative, except when a bidding war broke out between kings for a superstar like Hayden.

Anyway, the bottom line for this today was that, in my view, to make it in music school and beyond, you really had to have no other interests in life. And, even then, you needed to be really good, which wasn’t guaranteed.

Piano was not the only thing for me. When I did nothing else, as I had done in college for a while, I had burned out and missed other things. Now I had better balance, but a career in performing was out of the question. I didn’t want it that much.

There was this pianist in the 40s and 50s, William Kapell, the first great American born and trained pianist. His parents owned a book store in New York and he had started lessons when he was seven. That hadn’t worked out, but when he re-started when he was ten, it was nothing but piano from then on. He had been a sensation. He had nearly single-handedly made the Khachaturian piano concerto famous and popular. It was a movement of this that I had played with the symphony at Baylor.

One reason I was bringing this up now was that Kapell had been killed in a plane crash on return from a tour in Australia. The crash had happened somewhere near Half Moon Bay on the other side of San Francisco. When we got down there we were going to look around at the area.

We were going on into San Francisco today. John wanted to stay at the same hotel where he had stayed on choir trip. From there he knew his way around there were places he wanted to go and things he wanted to see.

We weren’t in Seattle anymore, however, and when we drove away from Portuguese Beach just after 7 p.m., it wasn’t dark, but it was going to be soon. We’d only been up north of San Francisco here once before, when we were on Viannah’s fourth grade mission project trip. We’d gone all the way to Santa Rosa.

It would violate our “no driving after dark” directive to go on into San Francisco tonight, but John wanted to go for it and get on down there and do those things.

The road turned inland, passing through rolling farmland and small communities. There were some tricky forks in the road. All roads seemed to want to go to Petaluma but we wanted to go on down the coast.

When Highway 1 rejoined the waterfront, it was along the San Andreas Rift Zone. A hilly peninsula was across the body of water, maybe a mile or two away. This wasn’t unlike our own piece of the San Andreas Rift, except this rift zone was full of seawater.

The road was nearly in the seawater in many places. The only things on the right side were on pilings or spits.

“So what would happen if there were a big earthquake in here?” John wondered.

“Well it could cause the valley to slosh. That happened in Alaska sometimes, medium earthquakes in medium coves. In one documented case the shaking had made a resonance in the bay and sloshed the water at least 1400 feet up the mountainside.” They knew this because trees were sheared off that high above sea level.

We looked around. Such a thing had not happened here since at least the 60s. There were some ranch houses and other structures that looked pretty old, sitting right near the water some of them. This was another way to go straight to heaven, no doubt.

The water was comparatively calm today. Not quite up to the level of a little chop.

Continuing straight down the rift zone, its floor came up out of the water and we were in the Point Reyes National Seashore. And now the road was a mountain road again. And now it was getting truly dark.

This went on for a while. We passed various campgrounds and seashore attractions as it got darker and darker. Then the rift dove under the water again and the coast rejoined the road. But now it was mountainous and we were climbing cliffs to stay out of the water.

And the road got worse then there was construction and gravel again. And it was black night. We could see San Francisco across the water, but it was not bright enough to photograph. We continued to climb into mountains but with sheer drops never far away on the right. I stopped to let thirteen or fourteen cars go by. This would be required in Washington. This place would certainly be scenic in the daylight.

After some more difficult driving, the road turned inland and got severely more mountainous. There were several 15 mile per hour turns, some of them more than a full U. Drivers who knew what they doing were going faster. I was going slower. It looked like we had about ten miles left, but at the speeds we were going, it looked like it might be more than half an hour yet. When it was five miles left, the road was narrower and curvier and it still looked like it would still be more than half an hour left. It was getting close to 9 p.m.

Then we started seeing development, houses built in near the narrow road because they had no choice. This was more like some of the roads we knew of in the Linda Vista area of Pasadena. And finally, after what seemed like yet another half an hour, Highway 1 rejoined the 101 Freeway.