When we last heard about our daring trio, they were on their way to the mythical land of Astoria...
Day five continued, still day one in Oregon After several more hours of driving though the never-ending greenery, we finally arrived in Astoria, Oregon - our northernmost destination. We had originally planned to go as far as Vancouver, but couldn't get passports in time so we scuttled the Washington/Canada part of the adventure.
We checked into our motel, The Atomic motel, and after chit chatting with the owners for a while, we went out to a restaurant they recommended. The food was okay (the fish was tasty, but deep-friend and too greasy for my empty stomach), but the floor of the restaurant was the real attraction. The restaurant is on piles over the water and had a small glass floor section with a viewing area of the water below. And lying on some boards above the water was a couple of Sea Lions. There was also a Sea Lion under the bridge we walked across to get into the restaurant, which was pretty cool.
I think the Atomic Motel deserves a brief description before I continue. Although it wasn't really comparable to the Best Western in Garberville, it was definitely the most unique place we stayed on our adventure. The whole place, from the lobby to the rooms, was decked out in a 1950's motif. The lobby has old TV shows playing on its big definitely-not-a-50s LCD TV. There are cut-outs of Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra standing in the corner of the lobby. The furniture and colors are possibly more 60s than 50s, but definitely a page out of history. And there was a guitar on a stand in the lobby, which Emeli admired as we were checking in. The Managers/owners, Barb and Dan, encouraged Emeli to play a song when they saw her admiring it, so she spent quite a bit of time in the lobby entertaining everyone with the songs she knew by heart (or almost knew by heart - Blackbird was their favorite).
Emeli was enjoying our stay so much that when we returned to our room the first night, she asked if we could stay a second night. This is the only place we stayed for more than a single day and it's a good thing we did, because Astoria had a lot of cool stuff to explore that we would have missed if we had just been there a single day. We didn't even see it all with two days to explore. Barb gave us a map the night we arrived and highlighted (literally - she used a highlighter to note things on the map) all the most noteworthy things to see in and around town.
We didn't have time to see anything other than the Sea Lion restaurant (not its actual name) on the day we arrived in Astoria (it was later than it looks in the photos), so here are some photos of the things we saw on our drive along the Oregon coast to Astoria (and possibly a few from California - sometime it's hard to tell). We stopped and explored pretty much every beach we could find a pull-out for and also stopped several times in wooded areas just to snap pictures and marvel at nature.
I had really planned to finish blathering about our trip by now, but giving captions to all the photos, organizing the photos, remembering what we did, etc. is taking a lot of effort. I've never posted this much blather at one time other than maybe for ComicCon years ago (and that's a one or two day outing at most). So I'm going to stop with only one day chronicled. And pick up with day six later. There are a whole lotta photos of the many points of interest in and around Astoria, so that one's gonna be a bear to finish.
We (the lovely wife and the younger of the lovely daughters) took a road trip a couple of weeks ago from San Diego to Astoria, Oregon - and back, of course. I planned our route in advance to try to keep each day's drive-time relatively short so we would have plenty of time to stop and explore anything and everything that looked interesting along the way.
Day one: Pismo Beach, Ca I planned for the first stop of our adventure to be Pismo Beach because that's the location of my most memorable anniversary adventure1. We stopped a couple of times on the way there to explore unfamiliar beaches (one of which was accessible from an empty parking lot through a weird under-the-freeway tunnel). It was dark by the time we arrived in Pismo Beach, so we didn't spend much time on the beach or looking around town on day one. We basically just checked into our low-budget motel and then went out hunting for someplace to eat (Five Guys was the winner). We later sought out a Target to obtain the items the girls forgot to bring. It's hard to imagine trying to make this drive without the internet on my phone2.
Day two: Pismo Beach/Half Moon Bay, Ca The next morning before heading out, we decided to explore Pismo Beach's boardwalk, beach, etc. We wandered around, looking at the many beach-type shops you find on the strip at every beach. We ate breakfast at a delicious French-themed restaurant, the Mon Ami Creperie Cafe. The food was delicious and the ambiance was very French (from the perspective of someone who has never been to France). I recommend The Bako crepe for breakfast if you want real food. They can also make all their stuff gluten-free, which was a big selling point for Emeli. Julie had a Belgian waffle and really liked it a lot. After eating and spending a couple of hours of exploring shops and the beach, we packed up the car and headed to Half Moon Bay, CA, arriving a few hours later. Again, it was getting later in the afternoon, so we checked in to our slightly-less-awful motel and then sought out a place to eat. We found a place called Spicoli Pizza online and headed over3. The restaurant was in a cool inside-out shopping center that was pretty much closed by the time we got there. The pizza took a while to make an appearance (probably because we got a gluten-free pizza for Emeli), but we were fine waiting and watched America's Funniest Home Videos on the restaurant's TV while we waited. It was a tasty pizza (for gluten-free food), so I guess the wait was justified. Emeli said it was the best gluten-free pizza she'd ever had. I found the crust unimpressive, but the toppings were very generous and tasty, so I guess that made up for it. And that's pretty much all that happened on day two, other than seeing some really interesting trees on our drive in the middle of otherwise empty fields of grass. It was interesting to watch the landscape and vegetation shift as we drove from climate zone to climate zone.
On the way to Half Moon Bay, we also stopped to look around a lighthouse: the Pigeon Point Lighthouse in Pescadero, CA. Sadly, it's now a decrepit old thing that is barely standing. But it's still worth a quick look on your way up the PCH. Interestingly, there's also a hostel there for vagabonds who shun hotels and privacy.
Day three: San Francisco We didn't spend a second on the beach in Half Moon Bay, so I don't know if we missed an amazing beach or anything else spectacular in this town. We headed right to San Fransisco the next morning and found parking near Fisherman's Wharf. We parked in an internet-suggested parking lot that cost way more ($45) than we could have paid had we looked a little harder - so lesson learned. We drove and later walked up and down several super-steep streets, explored shops and neighborhoods in the area, marveled at the cool architecture everywhere, had some delicious desserts in the Ghirardelli Ice Cream and Chocolate Shop in Ghirardelli Square. We also drove over to Union Square so I could show the girls the sweet mall I'd discovered the month before on my OSI adventure, where we ate lunch (Emeli had a weird vegan fake-chicken thing and I got a pretty-good Philly cheese-steak - opposites!). We really didn't take the time to explore this very impressive mall at all because Emeli wasn't feeling very well (that's what she gets for eating vegan), so we headed back to the (much more affordable) Union Square parking lot and made our very circuitous way toward the Golden Gate Bridge, poorer, sunburned and ready to hit the open road.
Our next stop up the road: Garberville, Ca. We arrived at our hotel, the Best Western Plus Humboldt House Inn just as it was getting dark. This hotel was a million times better in every way than every other place we stayed on our adventure. To be fair, I was targeting more affordable accommodations.
Day four: Redwood adventure day We explored Garberville the next morning, primarily in pursuit of a pair of socks for me because I hadn't brought any that were adventure appropriate, and made some fun local discoveries. We found a used bookstore that had a lot of books for the girls to look through (I didn't find any that I found interesting that I didn't already own). Emeli found a book worth reading and spent a good part of the trip reading it. We also found another notable Garberville shop - The Stonery, a really cool gem and jewelry store. Surprisingly, I got out of there without having to buy any expensive gifts for either of the girls. Emeli was going to buy some little stone-carved animals, but the owner of the shop, who was full of information about things to see on our trip through the redwoods, gave her a couple of things free (she was planning to buy one of them, but he just gave it to her), which made her morning. With a new map from the shop owner and a whole bunch of information, we left the shop for our last stop - a sporting goods store that had the socks I needed.
We drove north from our hotel to The Avenue of Giants, stopping on the first of many a pull-outs very soon after exiting Highway 101 onto the Avenue. The lush, foliage of the trees, the ferns growing everywhere, and the gigantic trunks of the ancient trees all around us were breathtaking. It felt like a Velociraptor could come tearing out of the primordial forest and eat us up at any moment. After we parked the car, we wandered deeper into the undergrowth, awestruck by the ancient-feeling foliage. We crossed small streams atop mossy redwoods that had fallen across the gaps. Looking up and downstream, we saw many other trees had fallen the same way, which made me wonder if the logs had been dragged here and dropped intentionally to form bridges or if it really was just random chance that these trees had formed perfect bridges across the streams. There was no obvious reason anyone would take the time and effort to create bridges with these huge trees in this given area, so I'm sticking with random chance theory.
After taking a million photos and wandering in every direction as far as we dared, we made our way back to the car and drove until we spotted something else we wanted to explore. We found too many amazing things to mention them all. Among these were a giant hollowed out Redwood I could walk through upright, many Redwoods that were at least partially hollowed out and could be stood within (most showing evidence of past fire damage), lots of streams to explore, thick, green ferns everywhere...and just so much nature.
As with the failure to show just how steep the super-steep streets of San Francisco were, these photos fail to show how amazingly ginormous the redwoods are.
We also stopped at a tourist-y thing along the Avenue (there are a few of these and small towns right inside the forest) and paid to drive the car through the long-dead and barely-standing Shrine redwood (I recall driving through a larger redwood years ago, but that was probably the tree that feel over from the heavy rainfall earlier this year). There were also treehouses made from hollowed out Redwoods that were fun to check out. And there were also a couple of other things to see a little further north along the Avenue of Giants.
It took us a few hours to traverse the 30 or so miles of The Avenue of Giants, and then we continued on to our second stop of the day: Ferndale.
Ferndale is pretty much just a tiny farming community northwest of the north of The Avenue of Giants. It's not on the coast, it's not very near any redwoods, but it is picturesque. The main street is filled with a lot of Victorian-style architecture. There are even buildings off the main street that were very impressive - one of these was the Gingerbread Mansion Inn. We really wanted to stay there, but couldn't work into the drive timeline. One of the most impressive shops on Main street was actually vacant, (at least the bottom floor was - the top floor was occupied with residents). We ate lunch at The Ferndale Pie Company which wasn't one of the super-cool Victorian buildings, but was a very quaint small-town cafe that had the best chicken pot pie I've ever had. It must have risen a half-inch above the lip of the pie tin and was filled with every vegetable imaginable. They also had a large assortment of homemade pies and other desserts - we shared a gigantic brownie and cinnamon roll. This was the kind of food you seem to only find in small towns - freshly made with real ingredients and delicious. Sadly, we were so overwhelmed by the sights (that's my excuse, anyway) that didn't take a single photo of anything in Ferndale. I recommend stopping by if you drive through The Avenue of Giants. I still wish we'd been able to stay at the Gingerbread Mansion Inn. The photos online make the interior look just as cool as the exterior.
I had planned to do more exploring / take some photos of Ferndale before we left, but Emeli's sensitive stomach drove the agenda and we were soon back on the road, headed north. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it. From Ferndale, we drove straight up to Coos Bay, Oregon - arrive just as darkness was settling in.
Day five: Oregon Explorations, day 1 The motel room in Coos4 Bay was the low point of the trip (or at least of the trip's accommodations). It was smelly, dark, noisy (feet from a busy road used by huge logging trucks all day and night, apparently) and on the very cramped side. There was a waterfront museum across the street from the motel (within sight of our room - across a busy street), but the stay in this room had us so soured with Coos Bay, we opted to skip anything Coos Bay might have to offer and just get out of town as soon as we were all ready to go. But...on the way out of town, we did stop to eat in a quaint little restaurant, The Pancake Mill5 since we hadn't really had anything since the day before. I had a delicious full breakfast special with eggs, sausage, pancakes, and juice for less than I paid for the Philly cheese-steak I'd gotten in San Francisco. And the girls got delicious Belgian waffles that they really liked (Emeli's was gluten-free, but still delicious, which you'll realize is a major accomplishment if you've sampled gluten-free food).
The drive along the Oregon coast is one of the most scenic you could imaging. Tree-covered mountainsides on one side of the road and driftwood-covered beaches on the other. Streams and rivers fed cold spring water (not the toxic sludge that drains into the ocean in Southern California) to the Pacific Ocean at every beach we visited. There are small rocky islands just off the beach all over the place. And there are moss-covered trees everywhere. Everything was green and we drove over uncountable rivers, lakes, and lily pad-covered ponds. The beaches were chilly, but we stopped and explored several anyway. When I made this same drive years earlier, I remembered seeing Sea Lions sunning themselves on the remote beaches, but the only spot with Sea Lions on this drive was a tourist trap that had taken over a section of beach and charged a lot for access to the Sea Lions. And it charged a lot. So we didn't get to see the Sea Lions up close on the drive.
We did see another lighthouse on our way to Astoria: the Umpqua River Lighthouse. This one was actually a fully-functional lighthouse with a U.S. Coast Guard housing complex between the lighthouse and the lighthouse museum. We paid to take the full tour of the lighthouse. It was very cool. There was also a whale's jawbone display outside the lighthouse and some of those pay-to-view binoculars (there are apparently quite often whales off the coast here, but we didn't see any).
I had every intention of blathering on about the whole vacation at once, but after losing the second half of what I'd already written, I'm now going to just post this bad boy up in installments. (I was unaware of the size limitations of a MYSQL TEXT data field, which is 64KB for the record!)
Consider this the end of installment one - installment two coming soon...ish!6
1 I'm planning to add this to my bio page at some point, but there are a ton of gaps that need to be filled in there, so who knows when or if that will ever happen...
2 How did I survive these long drives before the Internet - or without phones with access to the Internet for that matter! It took a lot more planning and a lot more dependence on the good ol' Thomas Guide, that's fer sure.
3 See, another victory for the Internet. We not only needed food, we needed something that would cater to the gluten-sensitive.
4 What in the world is a "Coo"? Since there's no apostrophe, Coos must be the plural of Coo...but what does it all mean? Am I the only morally outraged grammarian?
5 Go Internet!
6 As if anyone has even read this far...
A book, some art, and a movie... so, pretty much the usual
I really thought I was going to start vomitting up content more frequently...and then I dropped the ball yet again. Let's just say that I'm the only person in my household who thinks the time spent coming up with this drivel is a worthwhile endeavor. So it will always be a battle to find time to do this. If I didn't feel obligated to give Dan something to read and complain about, I probably wouldn't bother butting heads with the little woman at all.
Resurrection America
I was approached by another author selling on Amazon, Jeff Gunhus, to read his book and offer up an opinion. Enter Resurrection America. I'm happy to report that unlike some of the other books I've been asked to read and review, this was a book well worth reading. It was well-edited, the characters were generally 3-dimensional and fully-developed, and the story was adequately suspenseful and not entirely predictable (for me, anyway - but that could be because I'm just a simpleton). I didn't anticipate the ending at all or the many twists and turns of the story. If you like a good dystopian story with a little bit of conspiracy theory thrown in, if you harbor just a little concern about computers working their tendrils into every facet of our lives, and if you appreciate a story with little guys standing up to bullies...have I got a story for you!
Here's the setting: In the near future, the madness and madmen in the middle east have failed to be dominated by the constant efforts of the United States and its allies. More and more soldiers have been shipped out the the Middle East and returned traumatized and with missing limbs. But don't worry, we have fully-functional prosthetics in the future that are every bit as functional as the missing parts - and even stronger - thanks to being directly wired into the recipient's brain. The story's protagonist, Rick, is one of these prosthetic recipients. Beyond the Middle East, Europe is a mess thanks to the overwhelming Middle Eastern migration, Russia has all but collapsed, and China is overwhelming all its neighbors as it steamrolls over everything with its massive military. The White house is rubble after a jihadist attack and American dominance in the world is diminishing as it falls back into a protectionist stance and locks up its borders. Interestingly, one of the complaints of the characters in the book is about the shoddy undependable American-made electronics he now has to use with the cessation of all Asian-manufactured electronic imports.
He considered the chances that Manny's radio was receiving but couldn't send. It was possible. The last few years spent using American-made electronics had proven there was no end to the ways they could malfunction. He hoped his deputy just had a flat tire or some mechanical problem and that's why he wasn't at the mine where Rick had expected to find him. But another look at the fence told him there was more than a flat tire at work. He hoped there was a simple explanation for it all. The fence. Manny's absence from the spot of his last radio transmission. But his gut told him he was hoping for too much.
I drew comparisons, as I was reading Resurrection America, to a lot of different books/movies I'm familiar with. It started out feeling similar to the fine EMP-apocalyptic books of William Forstchen (One Second After and One Year Later - which I may be mentioning here sooner or later) and the TV series Designated Survivor. It slowly evolved into something closer to Terminator, the Matrix, or 2001: A Space Odyssey. And then ultimately, it unexpectedly ends like none of them. Or kind of ends, anyway. Let's just say Book #2 can pick right up where book #1 ended.
The title of the book has several meanings, but the first, and most obvious, is the name of the town the book's events take place within: Resurrection, Colorado. Resurrection is a small town that has been dying a slow, economic-failure induced death for years. The main character is a sheriff named Rick. So I, of course, pictured Rick Grimes from The Walking Dead every time I read "Rick" in the story. I don't know how close my mental image of the book's "Rick" was to the author's conceived image of Rick, but my mind's eye's Rick was a pretty bad dude. Bad in a good way, that is.
"That's nothing to you guys. You and I both know it," Rick said. "And I figure it's worth twice as much not to have the entire town up here a couple of hours from now picketing this place." Rick indicated down the hill. "Tomorrow's the Fall Festival. People from all over are coming into town. Most of them from other mining communities. Bet we could get a thousand people up here. The press would eat that."
Keefer narrowed his eyes, looking Rick up and down as if just seeing him for the first time. "Marines always were a pain in my ass."
Rick ignored Keefer's show of knowledge about his background. He almost let a Oorah slip, but instead just stared the man down.
"Fifteen million and I get three days," Keefer said. "Anything sooner and it goes back to ten. The town gets out of control once it finds out and it's on you. The money goes away. All of it."
Rick assumed the money was off the table if the town blew up either way, so he didn't feel like he was giving anything up. He knew he couldn't tell anyone, not even Bertie. If she knew then she'd call off the festival and march right up the hill herself. No, he'd have to keep this secret. What difference would two days make? "Agreed," he said, holding out his hand.
Keefer shook it, and when he did, he pressed the stack of cash into Rick's hand. When Rick pulled his hand away, there was ten thousand dollars in it.
"Down payment," Keefer said. "Do with it what you want."
Rick weighed the money in his hand. "Really?"
"Sure," Keefer said, his tone saying he'd known all along Rick could be paid off. "It's all yours."
Rick bent the paperclip back slightly on both the front and the back of the wad of bills. Then, with a quick movement that made Keefer flinch, he chucked the money at the fence. When the paper clip hit, the money exploded into a ball of spark and flame, sending tiny fragments of paper money into the air like confetti.
"Oorah, asshole," Rick said. He turned and walked back to his Blazer, a smile spreading across his face. He might have to do business with the man, but that didn't mean he had to like it.
In George RR Martin fashion (yeah, I know he's not the only one - but he's the one you kids are most familiar with), there was little reluctance to kill off major characters throughout the story. It felt like no one was safe, which is both good and bad - I suppose it depends on how much "control" you need to fell like you have in the story. Or something. What do I know? I'm just a hack talking about a book I enjoyed.
Don't be fooled into thinking this is an extended anti-American diatribe. This dark future is just a logical progression of the events taking place today. If they're not careful, today's politicians could easily take us right to this dark future. Other than some of the tech that doesn't currently exist, there's little in this story beyond imagining. And I read the eBook version (which is a medium I don't love) and actually finished this book before completing the physical book I'm currently reading (one of the new Star Wars novels).
I really wanted to talk about Greg Bear's War Dogs and Killing Titan because of the futuristic military connection and the aforementioned One Year After for its dystopian/military elements that also relate to this book (I read them months ago), but I've run out of steam. Next time. Maybe.
Art Attack!
Quite a while back, we discovered Pizza Studio in Poway and it quickly became our favorite pizza place. The price is fair, the quantity is perfect, and the selection of unlimited toppings is awesome. But I'm not going to talk about pizza now. I'm going to talk about something else I discovered in Pizza Studio - local artists displaying (and selling) their art on its walls. I've tried to buy one of these paintings, though its creator has been very non-responsive to my contact attempts, and I'm also planning to try to buy another of these if I ever get around to it.
The first of these paintings I noticed is titled Growing Together, by a local artist named Tina Staub. My first thought, when I saw the painting, was that it was very Tim Burton-esque (which is funny, since the contact email address for this painting was Vampire_Hottie2000). And then I looked more closely at the actual content of the painting and decided it was more Groot than Corpse Bride. If you don't find the Groot character to be anthropomorphically lovable, then pick your own animated tree character. It isn't really very Treebeard-ish and I can't think of any other anthropomorphic trees, so for me it's all Groot. But the the artist either really doesn't want to sell it or just really doesn't want to sell to me, because my emails have gone unanswered.
The other Pizza Studio painting I've really liked is, as are many of the paintings, ocean-themed. It's a painting of a swimming turtle called Into The Deep by a local artist named Deborah Collins. I've always had an affinity for turtles. Maybe it was the long, skinny neck (before obesity turned it into a series of chins) and my introvert-ish tendencies. Or maybe I'm just weird. I haven't tried contacting the artist yet, so I'll probably be too late to get this one.
I came across another, even more amazing, piece of art at the Sparks Gallery: Unconditional by AmandaLynn. The Sparks Gallery is an art gallery in downtown San Diego where my multi-talented daughter, Emeli, was performing for a fundraiser/benefit a few months ago. I've been meaning to mention Unconditional forever, but...well, it fell into the abyss with the rest of the stuff I've never bothered to mention. The Sparks Gallery had a whole bunch of art that was interesting, but very little that I found amazing. Unconditional was clearly amazing - a pencil drawing on a big piece of wood. You could clearly see every pencil line if you stood close enough to the piece, but the whole blended beautifully. It's just an amazing thing. Weird, but amazing. If it hadn't been so pricey, it would be hanging in my living room. Pizza studio's artists are about the limit of my art purchasing power. And I haven't even managed to get one of those yet.
And while on the subject of Emeli and art, here are a few things my amazingly talented Emeli has created. She's so much more talented than me. And just about everyone else, too. I actually created a web site for her to showcase her talents, but it's not quite ready yet. It will be sooner or later.
One last art-related thing. A few months ago, Disney (or possibly someone else, I forget - the list I saw was put out by Disney) put out a bunch of more life-like images of the biggest Disney princesses. The Ariel one was super sweet, so I grabbed it. I didn't hold on to any of the others. I think they were all slightly animated.
And I don't want to sound like a big ol' bragger, but I have a complete set of The Little Mermaid trading cards from the 90s. Yeah, I'm quite a catch. I know.
Speaking of alternate versions of Arial, this version of Arial has been showing up on a lot of t-shirts and posters lately (well, lately when I had origially planned to mention it) and Joe Linsner's Ariel from many years ago has long been a favorite.
I was having fun doodling again for a little while, but have lost interest again. I'm still working on one doodle of a train (when I say "working", I mean I'm avoiding working on it at all), but it's far from being worth showing here. here's just one last thing I'm going to blather on about before I slither back to the shadows again...a movie that I liked well enough that I felt like I had to recommend it to other people right after seeing it.
Gifted
I heard about this movie, though I didn't realize this was the movie I was hearing about, on the Ana Faris podcast (Ana Faris is unqualified) many, many moons ago. Chris Evans and Jenny Slate were the guests and Chris Evans was super cool. I became an even bigger fan of ol' Captain America after hearing him speak freely on the podcast.
Mckenna Grace, the little girl in this film, steals the show. She's only ten (her character is seven), but already has some serious acting chops. If you're not convinced she feels everything her character feels in this movie...well, maybe you don't have kids. I don't know.
And Chris Evans is basically the same cool dude he is in everything. I suspect he's just playing himself (as most actors seem to do most of the time). He just seems like the kind of guy that would be easy to hang out with - just a regular dude.
As for the movie itself, it's not exactly relatable (there aren't a lot of genius-level elementary kids out there living with their uncles because their math-genius mothers killed themselves), but who says everything has to be relatable to your own life? The characters draw you in and make you feel what they're feeling and even a heartless old troll like me got teary a few times.
McKenna and Chris did a bunch of publicity stuff together that you can find on YouTube that's well worth watching, too. Very cute.
Also...I just saw that David Sedaris has a new book coming out in May. And I realized that I totally forgot to mention his stuff when talking about the comedic autobiographies I've read and enjoyed. My bad. He's a funny guy, too. It's been a few years since I read any of his stuff, but it was really funny as I recall. Maybe I'll pick up Theft by Finding: Diaries (1977-2002) when I see it.
