lauralh: (Default)
The pictures.

When we got up it was still really cold and gross - it actually had rained last night. Reg's back hurt, and we weren't terribly hungry, so we just packed up, had shitty motel coffee and honey bun, and left. (As an aside, I don't get how motel coffee is so awful. Usually it's like motor oil and you have to add like six little things of creamer to get it to a drinkable consistency, but this time they actually added water, so it was more like... tea.)

But seriously the coffee was doing nothing for me, so when we got to Port Orford, we stopped at a diner - it was called Paradise Cafe, but it was a diner, trust me. We were the only people at 1pm (it closed at 2pm) that weren't high school students, ok. That is the mark of a good place. I absolutely try not to stop at tourist places if I can avoid it, just like I enjoy being the only white person in Asian or Mexican places. Anthony Bourdain, I salute you again. But yeah, this food took 20 minutes and was the most delicious diner food I've tasted outside of the South. Seriously, the Pancake Corral is pretty good, but Paradise Cafe lived up to it's name, let me tell you. (It was also across from a Mormon church, oddly enough). If you're ever down the 101 that way, check it out.

Reg took over then, but he was not driving very well, so I asked if he was ok, and no, he wasn't, and then he fell asleep. So I took over, again, and god it was gorgeous, I swear as soon as we crossed the state line the clouds and fogs and mist were gone. I found this amusing, as it's the opposite on I-5. But yeah, I put on Pure Phase and Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space and drove along the Oregon coastline on US-101 and it was brilliant, I swear on J. Spaceman and Terrence McKenna, totally brilliant.

The only problem - once again - the speed limit was 55. People were generally going 60-65 unless the road was curvy at least. But, well, the road is always curvy. Spaceman kept me sane till the albums ended, at which point it was 6pm and I was going to AK every tourist I saw. Stopped at one of the last public beaches before the road to Portland. It was a lovely balmy 65F nearly all day, the wind kept it from being truly pleasant, but really, I couldn't have asked for much more out of that day, aside from no idiots on the road. Unfortunately we started hitting more populous areas at 5pm - rush hour. I was really getting pissed off by the time we took 18 to Portland. It seemed like people were driving even slower than they had on 101.

Reg woke up a bit, but not enough to drive. He put on some hip-hop, and that got us almost to I-5. I bought some cloves just before the exit, for $5.35. I was very excited. Of course Reg's normal Camels were $4.30. Boy, it's a good thing we don't live in Oregon. I guess the income tax would kill us. (OR has no sales tax, but does have income tax, and the reverse is true of WA.) I played my favorite remix of "Somebody That I Used To Know" and some other mixes to get us out of Portland and into oh wonderful 70mph WASHINGTON. I stopped to pee in Woodland, and decided it was time for Butt Rock.

(If you haven't seen Hesher or are wondering what Butt Rock is, think Skid Row and Guns'n'Roses.)

The playlist began with "Don't Fear the Reaper." Then Styx - Come Sail Away, which Reg and I actually sang along rather beautifully to. Then "I Remember You", "Rag Doll", "Once Bitten Twice Shy", "Here I Go Again", "Mr. Brownstone", "Hot Girls In Love", "Good Times Bad Times", "Mother", Vanilla Fudge's "You Keep Me Hangin' On", "Paradise City", "Freebird", and "The Seeker."

And then we stopped at a rest stop after Tacoma and I told Reg that I drove over 550 miles and smoked 3 cloves and HE WAS DRIVING HOME.

He played some Eminem+late 90s crossover stuff, like, Linkin Park with Eminem, or Marilyn Manson with Eminem. Really weird, but pretty energizing.

So that was that!

And I still haven't seen Cannon Beach.
lauralh: (cynical or sarcastic)

All pictures here. Some in the entry.

Driving to San Francisco is cheaper than flying, certainly, for more than one person. Even this weekend I spend under $300 on gas. Even solo I think I might have spent more than that on a Virgin ticket.

Wall anyhoo. Reg started the driving just after 10am, and as usual the traffic on I-5 south was ridiculous till you got to Olympia. This is about 65 miles from Seattle, and the capitol of Washington, so I can only assume that there are weirdos who live in Seattle and commute to their government jobs in Olympia. I cannot conceive of this, as I have just moved to Bellevue to be closer to my job. I also don't care much about politics, since nothing I care about is being addressed.

Such as the extremely low speed limits in Oregon. I don't get this. In WA and CA, on a nice stretch of interstate, the speed limit is 70. Which is great, I love cruising at 77mph. It's a good speed, doesn't burn too much gas (we averaged around 400mpt), and when the speed limit is 70, you still get people passing you. So that's great. Whereas in Oregon, the fastest you can legally go ANYWHERE is 65mph. Now, people are still going 75mph, but not as many. A ticket for 5 over is not the same as a ticket for 15 over, right? That's fairly standard, right? So there are a significant number of people who don't go over the speed limit at all. This wasn't as widespread on I-5, fortunately. It was fairly easy to go 70mph on the long stretches, even when it was only 2 lanes. And of course you can always burn some gas on the uphill truck lanes to pass old farts.

Reg fell asleep when I put on Girl Talk's All Day, which I had stuck in my head thanks to [livejournal.com profile] perich. That got me through the worst of Oregon, all the way to Grant's Pass. We didn't switch again till the first rest stop in California, mainly because of an accident. Also, construction. MOTHER FUCKING INTERSTATE FIVE DOWN TO ONE LANE EACH WAY. During a summer Friday. You can't do this shit at night, assholes?

Oh yeah, driving on I-5 in August - I'd never done this before, and for the first time I hit the highest point on I-5 (Siskiyou Summit, 4310ft) and could see things. Including a big ol' thunderhead and Mount Shasta! (Reg had switched back in CA.) And it was hot, so hot, and we don't have a working air conditioner in our car right now. 105F baybe. It was only 90F in the car probably, but still. We were feeling rather crazed, Reg was hitting 100mph while we blasted New Order - as long as we weren't hitting the stupid fucking one lane restrictions. But going around tight mountain curves and weaving in and out of traffic with 3ft between you and big ass semis is something that typically makes me nervous. By the time we stopped for gas in Red Bluff, I thought I was going to have a heart attack. Instead I had a cigarette and took lots of pictures of the sunset.

Boy, if I thought Reg was going fast BEFORE sunset... (see the blur?)

But of course that last stretch, when you get onto the highway bypassing Sacramento and going by Vacaville,  is insanely long and boring. I mean, oh my God, long long long. We blasted "Blinded by the Light" and "Nobody 'Cept You", then "The '59 Sound" since we hadn't cried enough. (I am not ashamed that these songs make me tear up. Reg mentioned our friend Jeremy and I just lost it.) We kept thinking the city lights we were seeing were SF, but no. I got super excited when I saw a carpool lane, though. "STUFF WHITE PEOPLE LIKE!" I announced to Reg.

The toll on the bridge was $6, and it was so horribly inefficient. For those of you who don't live around here, there are two bridges to Seattle, I-90 and SR-520. They turned the latter into a toll road, but it took an extra year to get a "fast track" system for ALL cars. That is to say, if you don't have the pass (here it's called Good To Go!), they just send you a bill after a few trips. There's little cameras, you see, that take a picture of the front of your car if you don't have the special pass. Either way, there's no stopping, no booths, no difference between the old bridge and the new bridge, except you can see a sort of purple light as you approach the eastside/leave Evergreen Point.

Whereas in SF - and probably every other expensive toll bridge where you can't just throw change into a basket - you have to stop and wait for the guy to walk across to another booth to GET CHANGE. Because obviously at 9pm on a FRIDAY NIGHT no one will be going into SF without exact change! For fuck's sake, California. Stay classy.

Blargh. Finally off 80 and onto US 101, which you almost immediately get off to turn onto Valencia. Friday night traffic was abysmal, of course. Took us forever to get off 101. I was texting Steve like mad, all excited to see him. He warned us that his street specifically might be a hassle, since Mr. Woody Allen is filming a couple of scenes there for his new movie. Not the whole film, mind, just a few scenes. Parking was nonexistant, so after we blocked a driveway unloading our crap, I paid a nice foreign gentleman to park the car for the night. He charged us more than he charged Ry, but what can you do? It's a vacation, and we had free rooms.

Steve's new townhouse (thanks to the largess of his mother) is amazing. Legitimately a hundred years old, three stories - they rent the second one to pay for most of the mortgage. When we got there, just before 11pm, the kids were asleep so we just put our stuff on the couch, put on warmer clothes (it was forty degrees cooler, no shit) and went out for a couple drinks and food. We stopped at the Phoenix - great burgers, but super crowded, unsurprisingly. We then stopped at the Hideout, which sort of reminded me of the Hideout in Seattle, but without art. (I almost never leave the Mission when I'm with Steve.)

By then it was almost 1am, and we were all exhausted. Thus ended day one.

Profile

lauralh: (Default)
Laural Hill

July 2017

S M T W T F S
      1
23456 78
91011121314 15
1617 1819202122
23242526272829
3031     

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jun. 13th, 2025 11:16 am
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios