There are few things more pleasant than getting home after a long trip. One of them is ending a 3-and-a-half week road trip on Greyhound busses with a week and a half with one of my best friends, Lee.
I met Lee two years ago, more precisely a cyber-Lee who I thought was a guy at first. In two years of back-and-forth emailing I’ve learned that besides being female Lee is a great tour guide and a passionate Californian. I thought it was about time that I found out for real.
One last Greyhound trip from Las Vegas, through Los Angeles, San Francisco, to Santa Rosa. Understand that I haven’t seen more than pictures of Lee (always smiling, usually with her 11-13 year-old son in the frame), so it was a pleasant surprise when reality added a warm Californian accent and subtracted a few inches from my mental image. I also had to add the full splendour of her Mini Cooper, a sweet supercharged character with Union Flags all over the place – ‘Lucky’. Lucky was one of the unexpected bonuses of the trip, Lee could drive him round bends like a rollercoaster.
Lee put myself and Barry up in a camper van parked in the garden of her house, her son and boyfriend lived in the house with her. We arrived in the late-afternoon and went out for dinner and I sampled some ale and a burger and crashed pretty quickly that evening. After a trek of some 4500 miles at a guess, it was nice to be somewhere that resembled home.
The discussion after our arrival had included the best time for going to Yosemite. Since we missed Yellowstone, I was more than enthusiastic to get going, and was over the moon when the next morning it was planned that we’d drive down and stay the night. The drive down was five or six hours, and traffic had us come in at close to midnight... we bedded down at Yosemite Bug, a remarkably cheap and supremely comfortable cluster of cabins secreted inside the park.
I woke in the morning very well rested. We ate a filling breakfast and started the drive up the periphery of the park, to the tourist section.
The road we took along the outskirts of the park was in a long gulley, a river on the left and a shear rise of the right, dotted with trees and sunlight. After getting through the ticket barriers, and parking, we indulged in a honey sandwich and started wandering. The Yosemite Valley is a beautiful chasm with wide and flat portions enclosed by cliffs littered with waterfalls and greenery. Above it all, out of the stellar scenery, rises the half dome, a demihemispherical pinion atop the tallest cliff, visible from a large portion of the floor of the valley. It would be my dream to climb had I the skills.
The free buses inside the park ferried us round as far as they go, towards the Vernal Falls. The climb started with a couple of kilometres’ walk; we played ‘Spot the Biggest Rock’ until we reached the final accent. Crossing a stone bridge over the river, we had the start of a sightline to the water crashing down on the landscape. Well laid slabs and tarmac turned to uneven rocks, dry and then damp and then dripping with spray. The last climb was a steep staircase of rough granite stones, sheltered from the rainbow-casting water by thickening trees. Once atop the drop, the view was fantastic. The rainbow from the top was mild, and the sound was dull compared with Niagara falls; what excited was the view over the valley, and the snake that river made once it’d finally decided to stop living the high life and settle down.
A walk back and shuttle to the car park, and a quick pack-up closed the day at Yosemite and foreshadowed the lengthy drive back. Lee’s son and Barry slept for most of the trip, I think I dozed somewhat. When we arrived back under cover of darkness, my bed grabbed me before too long, and the next day began.
Sunday: “San Francisco” Forever will those words be voiced in my mind by George Taki, Sulu, piloting the Bounty towards Golden Gate Park. It took about an hour and a half to get there by car in the morning (*cough* late morning *cough* - we enjoyed a good breakfast), and the weather was bright and clear as it was for the whole time we were there. Barry, Lee and I got out of the car near the Golden Gate Bridge, wandered round the gift shop (where you can buy genuine pieces of bridge cable), and then took the pedestrian path along the east side of the bridge.
The view of the bay, the city, the water dotted with yachts and boats and even a couple of kayaks, was magnificent. The only thing to top it that afternoon was the view later, once we’d driven up to the northern hills. San Francisco hugs the hills like the architect had a fight with the landscape artist and lost. We returned to San Francisco on the Wednesday and rode the cable car up the hills; the operators had to ride the brakes on the way down just to keep it from going into free-fall.
After walking back from the bridge and driving back across (oooh, the Golden Gate Bridge is a fish-eye lens’ dream), the road around the hills on the Pacific side had a few view-points, flooded with cars. We had to find a spot a fair way out, but it was worth it. The one-way system meant that after stopping off at a beach... we had to go around again because we took a wrong turn; we were forced to look more at a crystal blue Pacific and green hills of California. We headed home for ribs.
The follow-up the next day was a trip to the Redwoods at Mendocino – I have to hand it to Lee, she can put together a smashing itinerary. It was empty, the park had a car park and a path, and the only sign of life we encountered was a couple, with their photographer, doing a wedding shoot. The sharpest memory of the time we spent in Mendocino was of Barry sitting astride an off-shoot of a trunk – an off-shoot of a red-wood being like the trunk of a regular tree – proclaiming it his manhood, putting Lee in stitches.
The next day was spent kayaking and wine tasting: heading out in the morning, the drive to Sonoma lake gave a view of this artificial reservoir, of hills dipping straight into the water and trees submerged and peeking above the surface.
Once on the water in our fluorescent kayaks we set out on the wind-whipped water around the bends of the reservoir. Before too long, the serenity of our paddling turned to jousting: doing our best to resemble knights on chargers in medieval times, myself and Barry had to settle for frantic paddling followed by a splashing, clashing collision of paddles and hulls... I fell in. I got back in. We paddled back to the shore.
Drying out was quick enough. That afternoon we set off to the wine district, not Napa itself, but there were more than enough wineries in Sonoma County. Visiting 5 or 6 wineries, tasting 5 or 6 in each, it was a wonderfully adsorbing afternoon: Californian wines don’t have the sweetness or the lightness of Virginian wines, a heavy body’s a good thing but it plays all kinds of fictitious, painful afterlife locales on my stomach.
By the time the last winery came around, I was easily convinced to buy some chocolate truffle sauce infused with Pinot Noir.
I’d planned on meeting up with a friend from uni who was over in the states, working in Foster City. The only way that was going to happen was if we went back into San Francisco... rather than drive all the way up, Lee had the wonderful idea of taking the ferry across San Francisco Bay. It took about half an hour to cross over, and we got a spectacular view of the Golden Gate Bridge, shrouded in morning fog, and Alcatraz.
We pulled into the harbour, and walked out straight onto the Embarcadero. After taking the cable car across town and, visiting the harbour, we stopped at Lou’s Blues Cafe. Being treated to my first clam chowder is one thing, having a 32 ounce cocktail with it was a nice bonus, but seeing San Francisco’s own Bush Man was prime entertainment: the Bush Man is a homeless guy. He has a box. He has a ‘bush’, a clump of branches he hold out in front while he sits up against a bin across from Lou’s Blues. He has a unique appeal.
The Bush Man sits on his box until someone, usually women, walks by that he can scare. Shaking the bush and shouting, he got screams out about thirty people in the time we were eating across the road. A couple of times the scared would take pictures: “Hey, you gotta pay ta take a picture a ma bush! How’d you like it if a took a picture a your bush?!”
There was a street troupe doing an acrobatics demonstration, from the UK! After watching that we headed back to the bus stop, but I deviated when I saw a gallery. Exhibiting the finest works of the world premiere landscape photographer, it was a beautiful collection of the typical mixture of mountains and plains and snow-speckled plateaus, but what caught me was a equipment.... every shot in the gallery was taken on a photographic plate, using a picture box about two feet deep. I was so tempted to run off with it; the plates were about a foot square.
We took the bus back and hopped on the ferry back.
I am a huge fan of cheesecake. Say the word and you have my attention, and you’ll have it until I actually see the cheesecake... then you have you wait until I’m finished. Reputed to be great cheesecake makers, there was a shop that Lee took us to the next day. It was closed, but a sign at the front told of another shop nearby selling the same cheesecakes! We went in and grabbed one each (they were mini-cheesecakes) and headed off to Lee’s company meeting.
Lee coordinates about 50 special needs attendants that work one-to-one. At the meeting were mostly the attendees of the programme, discussing this and that about all the community work that had happened in the last week. There was a wide mixture of disability displayed by the group, but they were happy and positive, and collaborative. I doubt that anything as productive and inclusive would occur in the UK... a shame that California is bankrupt and funding is rapidly tightening.
After the meeting (and eating my raspberry and white chocolate cheesecake) we drove off to a thin stretch of beach. The sand nestled between shallow cliffs, and the gentle slope of the sand left 30 feet of wet shore to play with the Frisbee while being splashed by the freezing Pacific. A few sandwiches, some Pringles and some cider sufficed for lunch. After the beach, there were the rock pools: after a short drive and a walk through some trees there was a wooden walkway that sidled through tall yellow grasses, Lee thought it would be a great place for a wedding photoshoot.
At the pools were a few viewing platforms with information about the local flora and fauna... but when we got down to the pools not a single starfish was to be seen. Seaweed and bland molluscs, the occasional seagull, and lots of jumping between rocks and dodging spray.
The next day was Barry’s last. He was bound for Philadelphia via Sacramento Airport. The drive to Sacramento was a few hours and traffic wasn’t bad.
Over the weekend me and Lee visited the Noyo and Lee’s boss and her 5th-wheeler. Still in love with the Mini, the drive over was relaxing. Once we arrived we stole Linda’s kayaks and set off up the Noyo. A river that is sourced from the Mendocino Mountain Range and drains in the Pacific, the Noyo is surprisingly peaceful, and after a mile or two upstream, so shallow that we had to turn back for fear of running aground. We paddled on that narrow stream, banked on either side with dark earth riddled with dense foliage. Crystal clear water shook with our wake, disrupting the near-perfect image of rounded pebbles and stoned bedding the river, almost completely level bank-to-bank.
Herons darted away from the boats when we drew close enough, Lee was enjoying the calm to use her camera. Once we turned around and reached the landing beneath Linda’s 5th-wheeler Lee bumped into an old friend teaching a group to use their kayaks, and then we met Linda and her husband. After a great fajita dinner and beer-infused conversation, Lee took me to see one of the features of California that I had been longing to see since Lee had first described it. The bioluminescence in Tomales Bay is supposed to be spectacular, a paint stroke of green-blue light tickled by waves, extending for miles. Sadly, Tomales Bay was an hour and a half away... to make up for it, Lee found a cove where the microorganisms responsible for the bioluminescence could be found. Dark and lifeless, the still water in the bay could be stirred into a brief spackle by the brush of a hand. Fragments of light, like a meteor shower, split from the splashes, and fizzled out like fireflies.
My flight to Charlotte was to be on Monday, I spent Sunday doing next to nothing. After a nice lie-in I watched TV and cooked and talked and lounged.... a proper holiday day. On Monday we left early, trying to avoid traffic by leaving at 5 AM (my flight was at 10). We made good time and arrived with a couple of hours to spare. At the time I was working my way through Frank Herbert’s ‘Dune’ (an awesome book, the sequel’s begging for my attention) so it didn’t feel like too long before I was boarding. The flight wasn’t direct, there was a stopover in Houston, TX, and the next plane was much smaller. I soon got talking with my neighbours, comparing ticket prices, holidaying adventures etc... my immediate neighbour turned out to be a senior executive at Amway.
At Charlotte was the one person in the world that I’d wanted to see... I disembarked, made my way to the luggage collection point (navigating the signs posted around the construction going on) and there she was. Petunia, my Petunia. After weeks of calling into the wee hours, I was finally able to give a lingering, travel-tired hug. To quell the elation of arrival, my backpack decided to give me a heart attack by skipping the conveyor. It turns out that it had arrived ahead of me and slinked off to a corner of the collection bay.
Ah, 3 weeks of Petunia, Virginia, Richmond, wine, food and lie-ins...
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