I Know
Saturday. We'll just put to rest any idea I can make detours or stop to take pictures when driving to Portland or anywhere else for that matter. I'm going to drive like an idiot until I arrive. I went up Highway 101 this morning to Crescent City near the Oregon border, took the Highway 199 exit east through the heavily forested river area, turned onto Highway 5 after about eighty miles and then didn't stop until I found a motel with a vacancy in Roseburg, some three hours south of Portland. Ten in the morning until eight in the evening.
So, any question of taking my time, forget it. Also, by the way, forget driving. Highway 101 was nice, much better than the shorter and faster Highway 5, but driving more than about three or four hours in a day sucks. It just does. Next time I'm booking a compartment on the train, the question is now a no brainer.
Oh, and in a last minute attempt to avoid traveling at all (I'm saying this without hard evidence, but I'm finding it impossible to put any other spin on it), something I ate yesterday gave me a case of supercharged diarrhea last night, the kind that has no symptoms other than you lose five pounds between going to bed at night and getting up the next morning. I wondered if driving all day might become memorable for pulling over every ten minutes to find a bathroom. I survived but it added a certain level of insanity to the moment.
Other than that, an interesting trip from what little I'm able to remember. Driving through Mendocino I picked up a local FM station that sounded like KSAN in the late sixties and early seventies. Made me wonder if I might like to live in Mendocino. Or Humboldt. Probably not - another one of those idle fantasies - you can't go back to times and places you've already experienced, but it reminded me you can sometimes get a contact high by kidding yourself about it.
Then again, running on fumes looking for a gas station off 101 on a narrow sometimes dirt section of road in far northern California introduced me to a spectacular section of the coast that got me to thinking (lots of thinking while you're driving) if I were to make the area itself a destination, I might actually stay long enough to do the pictures. Check into a motel and spend the day. Or two. It could happen.
I think you'd better do it before you talk about it.
I know, I know.
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