When i was in the limo business in the eighties i had some delightful British clients who, struck by the enormity of the distances in this country, observed of San Francisco, “it’s only halfway up the left side of California”. Well, i’ve stopped for the day in Bandon, a fifth of the way up the left side of Oregon. I’ve found a cheap motel again (both nights so far have been $45 plus tax) because the only amenity i need is a wifi connection since all i’m gonna do here is type until i can’t keep my eyes open and then sleep until i wake up.
This morning i got up and realized that i ought to be writing my account of this road trip under the pen name Tarmac McCarthy but Googled it this evening and found two references to the name, so it’d been used… although only slightly and not for such a high purpose as i intended.
Not far north of Ft. Bragg i crossed this splendid little bridge. Dontcha just love that sideways morning sun!
I do some of my best thinking while driving but foolishly turned the radio on first thing this morning and got a series of foam-spewing right wing ranters who probably quite correctly count on the average American not being able to remember anything that happened more than eighteen months ago and who thus feel free to pretend that Saddam Hussein actually possessed weapons of mass destruction other than the chemical warfare agents we sold him to use against the Iranians. Sigh.
So to take my mind off all that i took the serpentine scenic route through the Humboldt redwoods, one of the more gorgeous drives on the planet. I should have waited until a truck came along to better show the scale, but that tiny little asphalt thing at the bottom is a full width US highway.
I stopped for lunch in Arcata mainly because i have had a twenty-year love affair with the internationally acclaimed police log in the Arcata Eye . And yep, when i went to the paper tonight i couldn’t help noticing their front page coverage of the local Occupy group, to which i gave a supportive toot-toot as i passed it just a couple of blocks away from this Hansel and Gretel confection. Do go back and click on that police log link.
For lunch i got lucky and blundered onto the Arcata Coop, which reminded me of the Berkeley Coop forty years ago. While the deli was making my pastrami sandwich, i asked a stock clerk at the cheese department where the local artisan cheese section was. Silly me, they don’t organize it that way in the first place, and in the second place she was apparently just passing through the cheese department and didn’t know nothing about cheese. I settled on a Humboldt Fog, not knowing what the other local cheeses were, and knowing that there cannot be many cheeses on the planet better than Humboldt Fog.
And shortly before i crossed the Oregon border i caught this little red schoolhouse.
