Dreams, Moments, Travels
It’s Saturday night in Phoenix, Arizona; what you gonna do? How about coloring our hair and putting on some dark lipstick and eyeliner for a night of Goth Bowling? That sounds like a great idea; get out your blackest clothes, and let’s go freak out the locals on a summer night.
Okay, did anyone give Rinku any lessons on how to throw the ball down the lane?
The sad looks reflect their sad scores, but don’t let the tears fool you; we all had great fun.
A plot to take Jay to Las Vegas without his prior knowledge was hatched just days before. Anju helped us out by filling in at the store while Jay joined me to pick up some packages delivered by UPS. On the way, we see three women hitchhiking. I stopped to pick them up; they identified themselves as Sandy, Mandy, and Candy, and so began our foolery to bring Jay on a surprise visit to Vegas.
We left Phoenix at 3:15 and arrived in Vegas at 7:45.
Jay hadn’t been to Vegas before, and as he was leaving America in a few weeks, he just had to go.
We went up the Stratosphere to ride the Bigshot and X-Scream at midnight,
Walked all over the place, goofing off until 4:30 a.m.
Goofing off until Jay passed out. Just kidding, we headed to our hotel to get all of 3 hours of sleep, figuring it was better than nothing.
We awake early and are back on the road at 7:45 a.m. to Phoenix so Jay can get to work by noon. Here we are at Hoover Dam on the Arizona side. That’s Caroline Wise, Jay Patel, Rinku Shah, and Raenu.
Today was Jay Patel’s birthday, and a couple of dozen of us got together with him at Maharaja Palace on Bell Road for dinner, cake, and celebration.
We got into Lee Vining, California, last night after midnight, which put us in the perfect spot to head up the mountain to Yosemite National Park or across the road to Mono Lake. We obviously chose the lake.
We are out on the South Tufa Trail, but with over 650 miles to drive today and the need to be back in Phoenix, Arizona, tonight, we can’t fool around, and we’re soon driving away from Mono Lake.
Okay, so maybe we have time for one detour. On a side road that is only a tiny bit out of the way, we pass Silver Lake and are happy we did, as this side of the highway is totally different than the other side.
Oh, we are so close to Mammoth, we should go up and visit the Devils Postpile National Monument! Until we get up the mountain and find out we have to wait for a shuttle to take us to the monument; little had we anticipated that even in summer, Mammoth is a popular destination, and what else is there to do up here when you can’t ski than drag your kids to the nearest national monument? Fully discouraged by the crowds I needed to escape this mountain asap.
Nothing like a bakery to soothe frayed nerves, except this is likely California’s second busiest bakery, the first one being the madhouse called Boudin Bakery in San Francisco, which is famous for its sourdough. Well, crowded or not, I have to get something here in Bishop, as the Erick Schat Bakkerÿ with the middle name “Schat” talks to my inner 14-year-old so like peeing in Santa Claus (Indiana) back on our year 2000 cross-country trip, I need to eat some baked schat and that’s that.
Hey, I have a great idea to delay our seriously long drive home; let’s take this back road from Big Pine, California, for 104 miles through a seldom-used and often treacherous trek through the north of Death Valley on a nice summer day in July. A local sheriff at the gas station tried to dissuade us, but we assured him we had enough water and lived in Phoenix, so we knew these temperatures and promised that if the car died, we’d stay in place until our rescue or death from exposure.
Well, it’s just beautiful out here. It’s quiet, too. The road isn’t half bad, but there is nobody else in sight. The temperature is well over 115 degrees and while confident nothing will go wrong, we choose to keep the air conditioning off to help ensure nothing overheats. We’re taking our time and enjoying the rarity of such an experience.
We feel quite alone on this lonely road. Every so often, we stop and get out of the car to look for signs of life and listen for what might be beyond our view, but everything is standing still. Passing through some parts of the road, we get a little nervous as we don’t know how the conditions of what lies ahead might change and require us to turn around in our rental sedan, but we go on, paying close attention to how many miles we are into the park.
I took a number of photos from the open car window of the crankshafts and other assorted car parts here at Crankshaft Crossing when it dawned on me that we needed a selfie to prove that it was Caroline and John Wise who stood here at this remote outpost in Death Valley back on July 6, 2004, when we were young and dumb. It took us nearly 2 hours to reach this point, which is about the halfway point to joining the main road further down the way.
Claim to fame: I posit that this is the first-ever digital selfie taken at Crankshaft Crossing. Prove me wrong.
Wouldn’t you know that the last 10 miles of the road, after hours of dealing with varying degrees of washboard roads and uncertainty, would start making us seriously nervous?
What kind of idiot thinks it’s a good idea to take a 4-hour detour on a dangerous road into Death Valley in July? Special idiots, apparently. We reached Furnace Creek, which is 190 feet below sea level, at 3:00 p.m., and it is 118 degrees in the shade.
Seeing we’re already here, we should see what else Death Valley has to offer when the park is empty. And what the hell is that 60-something-year-old guy in mini shorts doing running down the road? Are we hallucinating? Was he a mirage? Turns out he might be participating in the Badwater Ultramarathon which is 135 miles long, obviously starting at Badwater, a point 279 feet below sea level, to Whitney Portal on Mt. Whitney at an elevation of 8,360 feet. Who does that? I can tell you that those people are a lot crazier than these two people who took a nice Tuesday afternoon drive across the desert.
We didn’t do much out here at the Devils Golf Course besides letting Satan play through.
There’s also that kind of funny moment where I left Caroline out on the fairway and pointed in the general direction of where I’d pick her up over at Badwater. Crawling out of the desert on her hands and knees, I couldn’t help but laugh at how distressed she looked. Trust me, I know she was faking it, but I gave her the water anyway after such a big effort of dragging herself the 11 or so miles to the car.
Joshua Trees along the highway, while we sped by, were the last thing worth sharing as from the time we left Death Valley just before 6:00 p.m., we needed to just keep driving. Wow, somehow, we got home before midnight. That was one action-packed 4th of July celebration.
Well, here we are for a return visit to Crater Lake National Park. This good fortune of making follow-up visits seems to be a thing in our lives. There’s no exaggeration when I tell you that never in our wildest dreams did we ever believe we’d be this lucky. But here we are, two years nearly to the day after our first visit, again standing on the rim of this ancient volcano looking into the deepest blue waters either of us has ever seen.
We never expected this much snow at this time of year; this is crazy. So are the mosquitoes feasting on Caroline – so bad that we stopped at the visitors center to buy some “scented” repellent, but it seems there’s just no way of making DEET pleasant to the nose. Good thing it works, and good thing we don’t want children as this stuff is wicked evil.
I don’t know how many other times I’ve mentioned this (probably dozens), but the shirt Caroline is wearing that seems to go on all of our travels is effectively Caroline’s wedding dress. To hell with the white dress stuff; this shirt that we picked up at Eurodisney in Paris, France, on her 25th Birthday in 1992 is the one she wore a couple of years later in Las Vegas, Nevada when we were married at the Little White Chapel. Traveling with memories to make new memories that’s how we go down the road of life.
It might be slightly difficult to see in such a wide view, but there’s a small island out there on the left; it’s called the Phantom Ship and stands 170 feet above the lake surface. So consider that the tiny island is actually the height of about a 15-story building and maybe you get an idea of the scale of this ancient crater. Actually, this crater is not all that ancient, as it was created a mere 7,700 years ago.
Deep blue skies, deep blue waters, bright white snow, and cragged cliffs all blur together to create Crater Lake. There’s something otherworldly up here that makes you feel you are at heights never experienced before. The idea that we are only about 110 miles from the Pacific Ocean as the crow flies is difficult to comprehend when the universe up here is in such a contrast to the one below.
This is how you make a beautiful site even more so.
On the way out of the national park, we stopped at the Rogue River Gorge viewpoint so Caroline could add these waters to the growing list of places her feet have felt the pulse and flow of another fluid highway. Unable to score some more Tillamook ice cream this far south in Oregon, we felt like we still won as we stopped in Medford for pastries and coffee at our favorite Oregon coffee shop, Dutch Bros.
If this is Mount Shasta in California, this must mean we are traveling south and are likely headed home from yet another one of our ridiculous out-and-back marathons.
The day is too beautiful, too perfect, too inviting to just plow through the rest of it so with Lassen Volcanic National Park on the horizon we just had to pass through and hopefully find something or other we could do quickly.
Considering it’s already after 4:00 p.m. when we enter Lassen, we should admit that, in some way, we are moving at an ant’s pace, and maybe we should just embrace that we can’t be rushed.
So if we are going to take our time and accept that we are going to be late by the time we reach Lee Vining, nearly 300 miles south of here, then we’ll do something meaningful. That bit of distraction cost us a couple of hours as we climbed along Kings Creek, which does not require anyone to stand in its rushing waters that cascade down the mountain just feet away from the trail, but this is Caroline, and ice water only adds to the challenge.
Marmots are supposed to talk, or have I watched too many videos where this kind of animal screeches at people or other animals? Or maybe it should stand up and do a chubby rendition of the Hamster Dance!
Just then, Lassen Volcano erupted, killing us instantly. This was the last photo I ever took before my untimely death.
So, while there was zero exaggeration about our passing from this life, we were shortly afterward reincarnated as improved versions of ourselves over at Emerald Lake just before 7:00, a kind of miracle really.
With the recognition of how lucky the events of the day were, considering we were alive, dead, and alive again, we decided to skip over to the Nugget Casino in Carson City, Nevada, to win big. Now that we’re millionaires and not broken zombies, we’ll live better lives trying to share our good fortune.
We greet ourselves with astonishment that we are so fortunate to visit one of the most beautiful places we’ve ever been to a second time. Who gets this lucky in life? Less than two years ago, we crept down the road for our first visit to a legitimate rainforest, listening to Enya, Brian Eno, and Vangelis.
Driving in, I spot purple in the sea of green. It’s not hard to make a quick stop when you are only driving five mph. I think this is a Marsh Orchid, though, in reality, I’m not a botanist who really cares what it is beyond its striking characteristics of vibrant, colorful contrast to all that’s around it.
The visitor center wasn’t open yet when we arrived at the Hall of Mosses Trail, but that didn’t mean the trail was closed. This being summer, we were certain the throngs would be out in force, but it turns out that Hurricane Ridge is the main draw in this massive national park. When we visited this part of the park back in 2002, we left our motel before daybreak to be the first on the trail in order to best experience the quiet and solitude, but it so happened that we were never disturbed. Today is playing out much the same.
Note to selves: visit in late summer or early fall depending on when the wild berries are edible. A question to ourselves: if we really want to eat wild berries, will we be in competition with bears for one of their food sources?
I don’t know what others see in this image, but it looked awfully sensual to Caroline and me, almost naughty really.
The larger world is so easy to see, but it is what is hidden and small, out of sight, and requiring a closer look that holds an enchantment that I long to want to know, to understand, to go within.
I should exclaim at some point here an enthusiastic “Happy Independence Day!” as it is the 4th of July in America. While we’ll miss any fireworks displays later today, the spectacle we are able to indulge our senses on both here in the Hoh Rainforest and later at the ocean will make up for missing anything exploded in the night sky with a giant boom.
I probably should have chosen a lot fewer photos to accompany this blog entry, as our notes about this leg of the trip consisted of a single line entry that noted what time we arrived and left the area. So, the visual narrative will have to suffice where you can deduce that the images are a sequential story that followed our two-hour walk into the rainforest.
Hall of Mosses now makes all the more sense, though Cave of Mosses would also have worked on this part of the trail.
Land of Big Trees works occasionally, too. By the way, that tiny blue spot is Caroline, who is standing there for comparison.
Would you believe this is a giant sandworm? Maybe a wood-colored forest snake? Okay, so the truth is it’s a 2,000-foot-long tree that fell in the last ice age that is a hollowed-out portal to another dimension; maybe not, but it could be.
Limax Maximus isn’t the greatest superhero name when the two words are used together, but Limax sounds like one of the greatest superhero names to me. A spotted leopard slug, on the other hand, does not sound the least bit super or heroic. Sexy, though, comes to mind because what’s not sexy about slugs?
From spotted slugs to starfish, they could take on an air of unwholesomeness, but your mind would have to be in the gutter. Not that my mind is necessarily in the gutter (though it’s been known to flounder there from time to time), so what I was alluding to is transitioning from the slug to the chocolate starfish. I shouldn’t have gone there, but I did, so that’s that. By the way, we are at Ruby Beach out here on the Washington Coast, and it just so happens to be low tide.
Don’t worry; I know of no way to besmirch the innocent anemone by dragging it into sexual innuendo that puts my immaturity on display. Funny how we’d never ask an anemone to act its age and remain appropriate as it gets away with showing us its anus. Come on now, have you really ever thought about it that the center hole is both its mouth and its butthole? Oh, how I wish I was built the same way.
Right about now, the reader must be wishing their eyes and ears were like these crustaceans, sealed up tightly.
Who’s that knocking at my door?
Said the fair young maiden!
Well, it’s only me from over the sea,
Said Barnacle Bill, the Sailor,
I’m all lit up like a Christmas tree,
Said Barnacle Bill the Sailor.
I’ll sail the sea until I croak,
Drink my whiskey, swear, and smoke,
But I can’t swim a bloody stroke,
Said Barnacle Bill the Sailor.
Of the over 1,200 species of barnacles, it’s probably not a bad thing that when Ballochy Bill The Sailor was adapted to a cleaner version of the song known as Barnacle Bill The Sailor, the writer didn’t know about these acorn barnacles as the song would certainly not had the same cadence and flow. Click the link for the song’s history, and you can read the original lyrics of the raunchier version; seriously, you should read those lyrics.
Can you grow back like a starfish? Do you even know the reference? Try listening to this song from Antony and the Johnsons titled Cripple And The Starfish.
It’s sunny when it needs to be, while at other times, a bit of moody, overcast sky sets a tone that paints the environment with the appropriate colors to suit our senses and create just enough magic that makes it all special.
It was 2:00 p.m. as we left Aberdeen, Washington. Sadly, our notes point out that we ate at KFC in town, not that Aberdeen has a lot more to offer than that but it’s kind of embarrassing to admit we ate there. Maybe I should also come clean that we once ate at a Taco Bell leaving Death Valley, though we tossed it after a few bites, deciding to wait for something reasonable further down the road. Plus, we had to eat fried chicken in commemoration of Jim Morrison. Are you intrigued why the singer for the Doors inspired this instead of Aberdeen’s most famous resident, Kurt Cobain? Because punk rock and LSD.
This is the most unceremonious passing through Oregon EVER! We enter the state on Interstate 5, and nearly without pause, we just drive south. Reaching Roseburg, we turn left as we’re staying at the Featherbed Inn in Chemult, Oregon, but before we get there and with the few remnants of available daylight, we stop at Toketee Falls. From rainforest scenes and marine life at the edge of the sea to a walk in the forest to this waterfall, we cannot complain that this 4th of July was anything other than spectacular.