Summer Camp

For summer holiday Mary spent the week at an Episcopal Church retreat -- Camp Noel Porter -- and now it's time to fetch her home.

Jonathan & I pull out of the driveway a little before 8:00.  We figure an hour to get to South Lake, then another 45 minutes to Sunnyside -- we can be back before lunch.

You can reach Tahoe only 2 ways: corporate jet or winding two-lane mountain blacktop.

We've decided against going corporate jet and opt for the hairpin-turn blacktop -- this means you can't look up from the road, even for a second, else you crash (and then everybody in the county knows your name, and is mad at you for shutting down the road).

I'll watch the road and Jonathan will be the smartphone GPS navigator and photographer.

We begin from 1500' elevation in the foothills and will cross the Sierra Nevada through a gap at 8,000' -- all in a hour's time.  The temperature will drop 15 or 20 degrees, the oxygen about 25%.

Highway 50 follows the American River South Fork for much of the assent.  The river is boiling and tumbling and freezing cold from snow runoff.   "How much gold is being washed down?" -- that's all that my boy & I can think of.

We turn on NPR radio for laughs and aren't disappointed.
* Moira Liason interviews a hipster couple who form a two bass duet.  For 20 years, through marriage to each other followed by divorce, they play to empty coffee shops.  Naturally, NPR thinks they're heroic.
* Next Robert Siegel proves that just because the current heat wave doesn't prove Global Warming, it still proves Global Warming -- if you'll tilt your head and squint just right.  The whole piece is desperately delusional but delivered in a measured dulcet voice.  The NPR demographic laps this kind of stuff up.
* Then a Tibetian rapper is profiled.  He's spent a decade as a Buddhist monk but he's now liberated himself to a life of liquor, promiscuity, and ghetto jive talk in NYC.  "My guru understands."  NPR predictably swoons.
* Finally, a segment on waterbirds.  Jonathan & I begin to relax but "Global Warming" pops up its ugly head to spoil it all.

At 6000' we're in the middle of vast granite basoliths -- single pieces of rock miles in diameter.

To the right Horsetail Falls barrels down the hill like a freight train.  The guy is huge.

At the very tippy-top, Echo Summit (the Pacific Trail crosses here) and suddenly we're on the other side of the divide, looking down into the Tahoe Basin.

That's the lake in the distance.

Into the town of South Lake Tahoe.  Mom & pop hotels, mom & pop restaurants, mom & pop vendors.  It's touristy but not too garish.

Every visitor is on a bicycle.  Paved bicycle trails course through the woods.  On the roads there are more bicycles than cars.

Since we're ahead of schedule (Mary's camp isn't dismissed until 10am) boy & I get out and take a walk.

I pose Jonathan for a photograph and he pleads "Dad, what do I do with my hands?"  He never knows what to do with his hands; he ran his track meets this year with his hands in his pockets.

There's nobody else around.  It's perfectly still and quiet.

Back in the car, we continue around the west side of the lake.

This is Emerald Bay, with pleasure boats streaming in & out of the broader lake.

(Nevada over there on the other side.)

Soon we come to a 20 mile stretch of tourists.  Everyone is biking or jogging.  You sense that dirty ol' cars are at the bottom of the hierarchy and we'd be lynched if we bumped somebody;  it's slow going.

All the joggers are girls, each one looking California identical: white tank top, blond ponytail swinging, designer sunglasses, running with a duckfoot sashay canter, iSomething in one hand, etc.  I asked Jonathan to take a picture of these specimens but he's too embarrassed - use your imagination...

In the midst of all this self-indulgence stands a little unassuming church.  Our destination!

Mary and her friend are very happy to see us.  They had a GREAT time.  We toss their stuff into the trunk and we're driving again...ugh...

Birders: an osprey hangs in the air above the cliffside road.

It was an uneventful ride home, coasting downhill for 2 hours, listening to the little girls in the backseat gossiping about campmates.

Daytrip

Since the inlaws are returning to China next week, we plan a last daytrip -- to beaches north of San Francisco.

It will be a two or three hour drive to Bodega Bay (where Hitchcock filmed The Birds).

Six squeeze in the soccer van - mother, father, son, daughter, grandmother, grandfather -- with a month's worth of travel food (it's a Chinese thing).

And changes of clothes: no telling what the weather will be.  Up at Tahoe it snowed this week, we are in the nineties, and the coast is predicted at sixty.

30 minutes down the foothills to Sacramento: just in time for morning rush hour.  I don't get out much, so I always feel assaulted by cities.

About 1 hour to cross the Great Central Valley: rice & corn & hay & almond orchards.
Flaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat.  They use lasers to mark the rows, GPS to drive the tractors.

I-80 is a narrow black ribbon that cuts through the vast farms.

"No, we won't tour the Jelly Belly factory."  Every trip this way, the same plaint.

Then it's the hills of the Pacific Range.  This is my favorite part of the drive west.  Our own Sierra foothills look something like this, but not quite as mellow and cartoon-like.  It resembles a pneumatic Grant Wood / Thomas Hart Benton landscape

Close to Oakland/San Francisco, we veer north through Marin and Sonoma counties, traveling the back country roads.

Cattle farms and dairy farms and vineyards, bucolic and slow.  Small crossroad towns, the storefronts and churches 100 years old.  Farmers working their fields.

This is supposed to be Limousine Liberal Mecca, "Home of the Hot Tub" -- where the last Republican was chased out decades ago.  True, I see no Tea Party signs like back in El Dorado, but I also see no limousines -- just tractors.

Where Central Valley agriculture is hi-tech and gargantuan, here are small (1000 acre) traditional family farms.

Clouds in the distance mean "ocean."  Now we pass through fishing villages perched on the edge of estuaries and bays.  "Bar-B-Q Oysters" must be a local specialty.  These ramshackled joints are for locals, not rich tourists.

Again and again we pass through stands of eucalyptus and the smell is overpowering.

What would it be like to live here and smell Vicks Vapor Rub perpetually?

And finally we intersect Route 1, the Coastal Highway -- a  two laner that hugs the cliffside.

In my youth, this was the highway that movies stars driving sport convertibles sailed off of.

Portuguese Beach

There's no one on the beaches this Thursday morning.  The air temperature is maybe 65 with a sea breeze.

As you can see, it's quite unlike the Gulf Coast.  The sand is dark and coarse, the water is painfully cold, the rocks and plants are strange & marvelous.  There's no teeming life of crabs and darting fish and biting insects.  Much more austere.

Goat Rock Beach

Lining up for the obligatory Chinese "picture with famous thing" -- there were lots of these.

We had a blast.

However... there was one disturbing incident at the beach.

"Undocumented workers" making landfall right where we stood.

And a disturbing billboard roadside.

Octogenarian playing the casinos.  "Caps" mean "bald".  Not shown are walkers.

Finally, on the trip home, we were caught in traffic north of San Francisco Bay -- the afternoon rush hour overflow from the city? -- and sat for an hour in the middle of a marsh.  It happened again as we approached Sacramento.  Ughh, we wanted to be home.