Day seven continued: Our last day in Oregon

And now...the long un-awaited conclusion to the tales of my vacation adventure!

After our film museum fun, we hit the road for Portland. The road to get back over to I-5 (no scenic route for the ride home) took us through the corner of Washington, so that was about as far into Washington as we got. We didn't spend much time in Portland, either. We did stop to eat at a Jersey Mikes, but the tent cities and homeless zombies wandering everywhere in Portland led us to change our plans of exploring Portland. We quickly jumped back on the road and drove south toward our last reservation in the thriving metropolis of Yreka, California (which, according to Google Maps, was a good five or six hour drive from Astoria).

As we drove, we realized that we were going to arrive in Yreka much earlier than we had planned and we didn't expect to find a single thing to do in Yreka, so we used the Internet to find anything to see on the way home. The wife found....a mall. Shocking.

We stopped at the Rogue Valley Mall in Medford, Oregon. It was, for the most part, as unexceptional a mall as you could imagine. But there's a reason I'm mentioning this mall - I acquired a memorable item here: a 45 record (single) from The Police with Wrapped Around Your Finger and a live version of Tea in the Sahara (both of which I already have on multiple CDs and even still have on cassette somewhere). What's funny is that I haven't had a record player in 30 years. It's going to go in a frame and hang on a wall...if I can find a wall to put it on. Realistically, it will probably go in a box in the garage with my framed Ghost in the Machine album.

We also had some Fro-Yo in the mall and the little woman bought some stuff at a department store. You know - all those things you can't do at home. We did manage to kill a couple of hours in the mall. Another nice plus to buying stuff in Oregon - there's no sales tax!

We arrived in Yreka as it was getting dark, which was what we'd planned. The town turned out to look a little more interesting as we made out way to the motel than we'd expected, so it might have actually been worth at least a little exploring, but we arrived too late and had a long drive the next day - so Yreka was nothing more than a sleep-over stop.

Our last day turned out to be a marathon drive from Yreka all the way home (initially, I'd planned to stop one more time and break the drive up into two five or six hour drives). We saw a few things that we would have definitely stopped for on the first leg of the trip, but didn't stop for any of them on the way home. The Mount Shasta area (mountain and town) and Lake Siskiyou were very scenic and well worth a stop...but we didn't.

The LA traffic was much less bad than we expected, so around 9 hours after we left, we arrived back home - ready to sleep in our own beds.

It feels like I left out about half of what I'd rambled on about the first time I wrote about the trips (before losing it due to not realizing TEXT data types in MySQL had surprising limited capacity). Maybe it will come to my damaged brain later...but probably not. I was going to share a whole bunch of bridge photos the wife took from within the car. Maybe I'll still do that one of these days. We'll see...


Speaking of record players

With my shiny new (very old, actually) record in hand, I was stoked when I saw a cool record player in an email from Costco. I did my due diligence and made sure it was really a good price (it was at least $50 cheaper than the next lowest price I could find anywhere online), checked reviews to make sure it was a decent-quality electronic device, and then ordered it.

It arrived last week and I quickly popped my new record on it. It included an adapter for 45 records, so that worked out. And I also re-discovered something I'd forgotten about records: there a WHOLE LOTTA noise when you play them. Hissing, popping...all kinds of wonderful distractions from the music. Some of that could be due to this record being over 20 years old. I'm planning to pick up a new record soon to see if that makes a difference.

In the meantime, the record player (also includes an AM/FM radio and USB port for USB input) is a lovely decoration in the living room. One drawback I've noticed - if you leave it plugged in, but essentially turned off, there's a constant hum/buzzing. I haven't done much troubleshooting to figure it out yet, so it might be an easy thing to fix. Who knows?


And now for something unrelated to the Vacation adventure...Emeli's new site!

I mentioned a few posts back that I was working on a web site to showcase my amazingly talented daughter's artistic abilities. The site is live, though still a little bit of a work-in-progress: EmmaMaridith.com.

And speaking of Emeli's creativity, here's the card Emeli made me for Father's Day. Emeli is so amazingly creative, thoughtful, and sweet. And best of all, she's a fan of Pirates (not just the movies, but in general).

Emeli's creativity blows my mind.

I've read a bunch of books I want to talk about and have some other non-book rants chambered and ready to go, but I think this is probably enough for today. Maybe I'll share the rest in a couple of days...



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