Back to Portland

(As soon as we got to Portland we had to go to Canada and back to renew my visa. What a complete pain in the arse. Stupid bloody bureaucratic immigration service. Stupid rude suspicious border control guy! So that was a long and expensive train journey for a bit of paper that cost me ten minutes and $6 to get. It was good to visit Hannah in Vancouver though.)

So after 9 states and something like 3000 miles, we finally got back to Portland. The most fantastic road trip ever! Pretty much the best end to the best year. After that we felt like spending a bit of time in Portland. The Hoyers were kind enough to offer their hospitality again (I stayed with the Hoyers over Christmas, they have a big house up in the hills), and we had the same attic room with the clear view of Mount Hood.




Plenty of Portland landmarks to catch up on: Powell's, The Pub at the End of the Universe, Hawthorne, Dots, the Horse Brass 'English pub', Papa Haydn's, Burgerville, Laurelhurst Park, the Bubble Bubble cafe. (The Dollar Scholar on Hawthorne: "Where you LEARN To Save".) We saw Emily, and Vas, and Sarah, and Joe, and my host family, but really not half as many people as we would have liked to see. We just ran out of time really. It was good getting back to beloved and familiar Portland after a month on the road, but sad knowing it was all ending for me soon, even though I was looking forward to getting back to England after an entire year. We spent a week doing exactly what we felt like doing and seeing our favourite bits of Portland.

And then I took a flight home, and getting on that plane was so awful I don't even want to talk about it.

Eugene

Between Ashland and Portland, we stopped off in Eugene, Oregon; which come to think of it was one of the towns I could have ended up at this year. It was on my list!

We stayed with Kaia's birth-mom Diane, Diane's partner Helen, and their two-year-old son, Jonah. All three were very lovely people to stay with. We took Jonah to the park a couple of times, and he showed us his dumptruck collection, and Kaia pushed him manically around on his little trike. Jonah is so cute! Blonde and charming, and apparently looks a lot like Kaia did when she was his age.

Eugene seemed like a really friendly place, maybe a bit like Ashland without the tourists. It might be nice to look around a bit more some day. I also got the impression that Eugene is fairly lesbian-tastic. The Hebden Bridge of Oregon! Diane and Helen's neighbours on both sides were lesbian couple with kids, I have a feeling they have a nice little community going.

Ashland

Ok, so my first draft about Ashland reads: "It's full of pleasant hippies and everyone keeps their doors unlocked". Ahem. Well that is basically true, but mostly everyone is just really really nice! And far too proactive to be hippies.

I feel like I have to be careful when writing about Ashland, because it is after all Kaia's home town. I should be safe though, because I did really like the place. It was also wonderful seeing Kaia's friends and family, and the town she grew up in. I think Kaia made a little bit more sense afterwards (not that she was nonsensical before)! Ashland is lovely, liberal, has a cosy community feeling, a lot going on, nice buildings, a big green park. They get a lot of tourists because of the Shakespeare festival: possible slight tourist/townie tension. I enjoyed spending time with Kaia's friends, after the initial inevitable nervousness. I think she has a good strong home town support network, which is what every girl needs.

Redwoods

A couple of days in the Redwoods on the way north out of California and into Oregon. We took more of the coast road, following the 101 pretty much all the way. This was nice for my limited navigation skills. (Can I just say what a miracle it was that I managed to navigate us through 9 states without us getting hopelessly lost and ending up in Maine?)

We chose Jedediah Smith State Park (I always think if your surname is Smith you need a top-heavy first name) out of the dozens of Redwoods parks in the area. Kaia knows her way around the redwoods. We camped for a couple of days amidst the trees and by the river. Kaia is very skilled at campfires (she's a firestarter, a twisted firestarter), and we had pasta and jasmine tea over the fire, and red wine and fancy biscuits too.

The redwood trees were just amazing. It's hard to comprehend the size of them- hard to imagine without seeing one, hard to fathom whilst actually standing at the foot of one. It's like seeing hundreds of other trees in your lifetime hasn't prepared you for the gigantic exception to the pattern that is a giant redwood. They do encourage people to wax rhapsodic. The forests are very calming too, quiet and cool and peaceful. I didn't really take any good pictures.


On the way north from the Redwoods towards Ashland we stopped off at some fantastic place with square-sliced pizza (where was that?), and also at this completely mental store/gallery/treehouse emporium called 'Burl-esque'. They make carvings out of burls, those lumpy bits on trees, hence the name. Couldn't afford any of the stuff on sale, but we had a chat to the nutty owner (who advised me to marry some rich American guy so I could stay in the country) and played in the several treehouses they randomly had on site, apparently just so people could stop by and play in them. Below, see a three-tiered treehouse, and a wooden spiral staircase (and my powder-blue toenails). Eep, spiral staircase. Awesome.



Gosh I love treehouses. I think when I was a kid I believed my life would be complete and sublime if I had a treehouse. (And possibly some kind of super power.)

San Francisco

We stayed in San Francisco for six days, which is an age compared to the breakneck pace of the rest of our roadtrip. I think we felt it was time to settle down. We stayed for the first couple of nights in the Green Tortoise hostel downtown. I usually really like Green Tortoise hostels, but this one was just a bit too big and impersonal, and in a rather dodgy area. Actually it was in an area near Little Italy and the City Lights bookstore, which was cool, you just had to pass a lot of gentleman's clubs and sex shops to get to them. So after a couple of days we switched to a hostel-run hotel (hostel rates!) near Union Square, and we got our own room, big windows out onto the street, fire escape to sit out on. Very nice.


I'd never been to San Francisco with a car before, and I have to tell you that parking is a complete bitch. We spent hours trying to look for a parking spot, driving up and down hills so frighteningly steep that I was convinced gravity was going to stop being on our side at any minute, and that we were just going to fall right off the road. Eventually we found a spot about 20 minutes walk from where we were staying and just left the car there for 6 days.

Our time in San Francisco (are you supposed to call it 'The City'? Not quite sure I trust Armistead Maupin on that) was spent doing a lot of wandering about, really. it was great. We went to SFMOMA, which has this sculpture on top of it:


We saw Golden Gate park, Chinatown, met up with Asha and wandered Berkely, went up to Twin Peaks to see the city below, went to the Castro district, stopped by Haight-Ashbury in time for their annual street fair. I got obsessed with the gorgeous colourful Victorian houses; we both got obsessed with all the fantastic rainbow flags everywhere! There were dozens in the Castro, of course, but they were also lining Market Street (that's the main street which bisects the city in the picture above).


Yay rainbows! San Fran was just a lot of fun (I'm pretty sure you're not supposed to call it 'San Fran'). It seems like it'd be quite liveable, despite the tourists. I do not mind the cold summers either. It's not like I don't have the experience for it.

Monterey

Where was this? New Mexico maybe?:

Kaia: "Aww, we missed the Continental Divide!"
Me: "We could get a continental breakfast."
Kaia: "True!"
Me: "We could divide it!!"
Kaia: "..."

I finally read Cannery Row by John Steinbeck a week or two after stopping in Monterey (thanks for the copy, Asha). It was really about time. I realised I'd been to Monterey four times so far - which is plenty for someone from Huddersfield - and wandered down Monterey's famous Cannery Row four times too. I found the Cannery Row of Steinbeck's books to be vibrant and engrossing, and the Cannery Row of real life to be quite nice and have a really great sock shop. Strange that I like them both but they have nothing to do with each other whatsoever. (Seriously, that could be the nicest sock shop I have ever been in. I got several pairs of just lovely socks). I wonder if Cannery Row would have stayed the same, would have stayed 'authentic', if Steinbeck had never written about it. It wouldn't have become famous and got so much tourist attention, and it wouldn't have banners up every ten feet with quotes from the novel written on them. Call that the literary observer effect. As long as it brings me socks...


We just stayed in Monterey a couple of days, really because it was on the coast on our route between San Luis Opispo and San Francisco. We didn't go the the Monterey Bay Aquarium this time (I love the aquarium. Oh the cute sea otters! Oh the freaky jellyfish!) but we wandered around and ate fish and chips, and found a beach to sit on just as the sun was setting.

San Luis Obispo

Hmm, so my first draft of this post reads only : "I love this place and I want to live here."

No kidding. San Luis Obispo is just lovely. It's heaven. It is the ideal town. It is the reason why everyone wants to live in California. The town is clean and aesthetically pleasing and full of cute little stores and all the street signs have the same pleasant olde worlde font. I mean, I'm pretty sure you have to be absolutely loaded to live here, and I think that's why it's so nice: rich people get to live in the nice places. But never mind, we were just staying in a hostel for a few days, so we could afford to spend time here. Other than that, it's a handy aspirational target.

I came through San Luis Obispo on our spring break Californian road trip with Charlotte and Asha and Hannah. We only drove through town and stopped for gas - and had a surprisingly good time at the gas station, and bonded with a gas station employee named Dino - but it was long enough to make a plan that we would all live there some day, and have really pretty houses, and Charlotte would marry Dino etc. This was enough grounds for me to persuade Kaia that we had to visit on this trip, although she didn't quite realise this favourable impression was based on one brief stop, and when we arrived there she expected me to actually know my way around (an assumption even more false than usual, which is saying something).

I'm pretty pissed we didn't bump into Dino actually, but never mind, it was fun anyway. We stayed in a really cosy hostel stocked with interesting people to talked to, and generally just hung out, relaxed and wandered around. A farmer's market; an indie movie theater (saw Waitress, v.cute); an 'English' pub, The Frog and Peach; extremely organic cafes; shops too designer to set foot in; herons on the beach; pancakes in the hostel. We went along the coast to Morro Bay a couple of times because it was just the most perfect, and generally deserted beach we could find. Gorgeous. Check out Morro rock, too, that was a cool-looking piece of geology:


We went to this coffee shop called Linnaea's a few times, in fact it became a breakfast ritual, and it was just the best coffee shop I had ever been to. It is my new Platonic ideal of coffee shop. Great tea, simple and delicious food, absolutely fantastic prints on the walls, decor like the parlour of the eccentric yet stylish great-aunt you never had. Sitting with Kaia out on the back patio of Linnaea's, drinking tea, reading Zola and having nowhere else to be, was perfect contentment. I miss that place very much.

Generally San Luis Obispo was a nice rest, given the pace that we'd been going, and the miles covered, all the way from Portland to California via New Mexico. I was knackered, and I wasn't even driving.

Aha! Also near San Luis Obispo: The Madonna Inn. No connection to the pop star, apart from an occasional total taste vacancy. The design scheme is a mixture of rococo, big lumps of rock, and pink. Apparently Umberto Eco described it thus: "the poor words with which natural human speech is provided, cannot suffice to describe the Madonna Inn...Let's say that Albert Speer, while leafing through a book on Gaudi, swallowed an overgenerous dose of LSD and began to build a nuptial catacomb for Liza Minnelli." (I don't know who Albert Speer is, but you get the picture. Oh, apparently he was a Nazi architect. Thanks again, Wikipedia.) It has themed rooms and is so ridiculously over-the-top you can't believe it. We couldn't afford to stay, but stopped for tea in the cafe - pink sugar provided. Here is the entranceway, the main restaurant, and one of the ladies' bathrooms. Pink!!