Day 2
Saturday, July 31
“To be where little cable cars
Climb halfway to the stars!”
San Francisco and Tony Bennett are inseparable now but did you know that the song was written in Brooklyn in the 1950s and before Bennett was offered it Tennessee Ernie Ford turned it down?
“Sixteen tons and what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt!”
It’s hard to make the case that there’s a prettier city in America than San Francisco and why would you try? During my career with ABC News I loved getting to do stories here whenever I could. Spent a day once on the Golden Gate Bridge with a man who after 9/11 walked across it daily for months waving an American flag. Another time followed a guy as he made the rounds of ethnic restaurants collecting their used cooking oil to fuel his car. Spent an evening in the San Francisco Bay floating in “McCovey Cove” with the flotilla of souvenir hunters hoping to retrieve a Barry Bonds home-run ball. And yes, on another night was on hand to actually see Bonds break Hank Aaron’s record and then be sternly reprimanded for not observing press box etiquette– I jumped up and clapped when he hit it and as I learned there’s no rooting allowed in the press box.
We had a great day and a typical SF one– cool and overcast. Drew’s husband and Jo’s son-in-law Aaron is an urban explorer of the highest rank. From a bacon donut to a synagogue with an exterior that looked like a half pipe from the X Games he led us on a wonderfully eclectic urban safari during which we filled our senses to the hilt. Two other highlights were Paul’s Hat Works, a tiny store that dates back to 1918 and the Kingdom of Dumpling, a hole in the wall that’s to Chinese dumplings what Langer’s in LA is to deli pastrami. Did I mention I have always loved eating here? I’ll miss my mostaccioli and shrimp fix at Caffe Sport in North Beach and the incomparable meat pies at Hunan in the Embarcadero. And on an earlier visit Jo introduced me to the cannoli at Stella. I think I could have been a food writer. Only problem my book would have been titled “Weight, Weight Don’t Tell Me!”
One of our last stops was by the ocean and a place I knew nothing about. Aaron ushered us into a restaurant called the Beach Chalet where there are murals painted during the Great Depression. Stunning murals painted by artists commissioned by the W.P.A. Go there if you get the chance! And if you like them thank FDR and his generation for all they have provided us.
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Day 3
Sunday, August 1
Had a tough time starting the car when we left San Fran. I figure our Volvo wasn’t used to the cold weather. In LA the only time it got near anything resembling Sweden was the Ikea parking lot. We headed north up the 101 and then turned west toward Mendocino on the 128, a wonderful road. The town sits back from a bluff above the ocean and we hiked along it and marveled at the beauty.
Before we left Mendocino I took a photo through a store window. It’s the “wood stock” edition of Jerry Garcia on sale no less to mark his birthday. This one was cherry Garcia, but he also comes in mahogany or teak– and if you believe that, then you don’t know me very well. Jerry would have turned 68 on August 1. I have to confess I never got what the fuss was all about. I didn’t need a particular band as a reason to get stoned.
Driving north on the 1 afterward required a lot of concentration. Endless sharp turns on a narrow road. I don’t remember ever turning a steering wheel so much and this was an unexpected challenge that I don’t recommend if you have any history at all of vertigo or carsickness. Overnighted in Eureka which is another place I got to with ABC News several times, often enough in fact to look forward to breakfast tomorrow at the nearby Samoa Cookhouse serving flapjacks to lumberjacks for over a hundred years.
By the way if Archimedes ever really said “Eureka, I’ve found it!” it’s ironically apropos when uttered here, especially by airline pilots. Flying to Eureka can present a navigational challenge. When the Navy built a runway at this location just before WWII it soon discovered that the area had the third foggiest weather in the world. Flights into the tiny airport here get cancelled frequently. I’m not big on instrument landings.
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Day 4
Monday, August 2
Today we continued up the coast to Bandon, Oregon. It’s a stop I chose for a reason and a friend of ours suggested we stay at the little motel we’re in tonight. It has as stunning a view of the ocean out the window as I think you’ll ever find for under $100. In fact the Oregon coastline we just traveled to get here is for my money just as majestic as Big Sur.
By the way there is a b in Bandon but no brie in Bandon. We wanted to buy some to go with bread and wine while we enjoyed our ocean front vista at the motel but the supermarket didn’t have any, plenty of Tillamook cheddar though.
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Day 5
Tuesday, August 3
My friend Brian Rooney used to think I worked people too hard when we were in the field doing our pieces for ABC. He called my shoots “Imber Death Marches”. Well, I finally wised up and found a story about an uniquely fabulous restaurant in the Oregon wine country, booked us into an exquisite B & B and got us two dinners and a lunch gratis from the subject of our story the master mushroom and truffle hunter, chef and owner of the Joel Palmer House. I never heard another complaint from Rooney.
Well, today I introduced my wife to my old way of doing business and it was only fitting that we are back in Oregon. I didn’t mention previously that Bandon, Oregon has in the space of only a decade become a premier golf destination in the United States. A guy who made a fortune in greeting cards has now built four golf courses in the dunes by the Pacific and every year hundreds of private jets bring golfers from around the world to Bandon. Golf has also meant plenty of new jobs for this area which badly needed them. And yes, I did manage to sell this story to ABC News and produce it. Click below if you want to watch it:
I helped the local economy myself today and played the newest of the golf courses, getting Jo up at 6 to make my tee time. She had never walked 18 holes before and at Bandon everybody walks, no golf carts are allowed so that the experience resembles Scottish golf where nobody rides around the links. Jo agrees that even if this weren’t a place with little holes with flags in them, it would still be a most worthwhile hike.
Having starved Jo until after we finished playing at noon we picnicked in the parking lot of an Indian casino in North Bend and then drove several more hours up the coast before heading east for the first time on our journey to a town named McMinnville. I’d been here before, too (I’ve been a lot of places.) and wanted Jo to see its incredibly well preserved main street. When I was here the first time I thought Jimmy Stewart was going to run out in front of my car and kiss the hood. Didn’t happen but this time I did indeed have my own Donna Reed (Wasn’t she the hottest sitcom mom ever?) with me today.
After dinner we finally got to our lodging for the night at 10 p.m. just over the Columbia River in Vancouver, WA. That’s about 16 hours door to door for the day– a certifiable Imber Death March experience. We’ll head back in to Portland to explore in the morning.
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Day 6
Wednesday, August 4
“We had a great many horses, of which we gave Lewis and Clark what they needed, and they gave us guns and tobacco in return.”– Chief Joseph
“Such a deal!”– Me
We started our day in Portland’s Japanese Garden on a hill above downtown. It’s lovely and we bought our first art of the trip at the garden’s gallery. It’s a print of a Japanese family in kimonos having a picnic in front of Mount Fuji. But there’s more. The family is looking up at the sky at a squadron of fighter planes. I don’t know the artist’s intent but now I have the rest of my life to guess.
We drove past Portland’s renowned Powell’s Books, a city block of books, but didn’t stop, figuring shelves of books look the same everywhere. Lunch was special though. Jo found a Thai restaurant that a couple runs out of their house. When we entered we said hello to the wife in the kitchen as if we were coming over for dinner. The food was great.
We drove away and to the east on the Lewis and Clark Trail, which is highway 14 and runs on the Washington State side of the Columbia River as opposed to the faster Interstate that hugs the river’s southern bank. Jo asked me if I knew the first names of Lewis and Clark and since I didn’t have a clue I said Jerry and Dick, which got a chuckle but gave me no chance of returning tomorrow to defend my title on Jeopardy. Then I thought about it and realized that if Jerry Lewis and Dick Clark had really made first contact with the Indians instead of Meriwether and William American history probably would not have been all that different. Instead of alcohol and smallpoxed blankets, our Native Americans would have been introduced to dumb movies and boring awards shows. With such a mind numbing media barrage I feel sure we could have still robbed them of their spirit and stolen their land.
Our first stop along the Columbia was at Cape Hope and this is definitely a must see. One of my top ten vistas in the U.S. when I come up with the other nine. Our second stop was the Bonneville Dam. You know those fish ladders that are supposed to provide safe passage around the dam for the fish? Well, turns out they don’t work for all our fine finned friends. We learned that 30% of the “juvenile spawners” don’t find their spillway exit and end up passing through the blades of the power station turbines. Some make it out alive but a bunch of them end up as ceviche or sashimi– a sort of existential bait and switch.
We ended up tonight in Richland, WA. The mural on the wall of Richland High School here tells this town’s story. Ever heard of the Hanford Project? No, it’s not a low budget horror movie, for horror it’s the real deal, it was the site nearby where plutonium was produced for the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. The Richland H.S. sports teams are called the “Bombers”. The center of the school’s basketball court has a drawing of a mushroom cloud. Needless to say, over the years there’s been fallout over this but one resident put it this way. “It’s like the Civil War — we killed a lot of our own brothers, but it ended slavery.”
So tonight we had dinner in town at the Atomic Brewery Pub and Eatery. Jo asked me if it was safe to drink the water. I told her it was, figuring by the time any possible radioactivity we were being exposed to here could affect us we’d already be very decayed material.
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Day 7
Thursday, August 5
Up until now I could say there has not been a dull moment during our trip but the drive this morning from Richland to Spokane put that observation to rest– straight, flat and empty. But after picnicking for lunch we had some drama. Outside of Cour d’Alene, Idaho Jo realized we had left our pillows at the Red Lion in Richland. Yes, our pillows, not theirs because we had brought ours from home. We like them that much. But not to worry we won’t have to bury our heads in sorrow for long, the hotel found them and they will now get to Maine before we do. Thank you, Red Lion Richland! We’ve brought way too much stuff in the car for sure but are getting our unloading, loading routine down. I haul, Jo packs.
Today was pretty much a driving day. In Spokane we had stopped downtown briefly to check out the over the top lobby of the Hotel Davenport, a real period piece circa World War I. We got off I-90 to cruise the two main streets of Wallace, Idaho, an old silver mining town that could still serve as the set for Gunsmoke. By the way even as a kid I knew Gunsmoke wasn’t shot in Kansas. Occasionally, you’s see there were mountains in the background. I had to move to California to learn that the Simi Valley set was actually an appropriate stand-in for Dodge City with so many of Simi’s residents lawmen commuting to jobs as cops in LA.
We crossed into Montana which is one of the states Jo has never been and wanted to see. The business about this being Big Sky Country is not hype. The sky seems bigger here. Why? Maybe because Montana has the least number of people per square mile of any state in the lower 48 with the exception of Wyoming.
This evening we’re staying in Missoula, MT, home of the University of Montana Grizzlies and a pretty gentrified little city. Jo pointed out that having the option to actually choose steamed vegetables with our dinner was an indicator. When I got the bill that was another.
In addition to having been here before for work I was here for the first time in the summer of 1968 with a college friend. We’d hopped in my parents’ car after watching the televised police riot outside the Democratic Convention in Mayor Daley’s Chicago. Just took off and drove from Pennsylvania across all of Canada stopping to see a Canadian Football League game, Joni Mitchell’s hometown of Saskatoon, Banff and Lake Louise and to flag down a kindly truck driver who towed my parents’ car out of a ditch we had landed in near Kamloops, British Columbia. On the way back through the U.S. we detoured to Missoula to watch Evel Knievel jump his motorcycle over 13 parked cars. I’m no stranger to “make it up as you go” road adventures.
We have now completed our first week of travel and the odometer says we’ve driven 1,798 miles. We’ve been in five states and today crossed our first time zone. Tonight we did our first laundry and we have still not turned on the TV anywhere we’ve stayed. We have gone by four serious accidents and seen way too much animal road kill.
The first few days we listened to All Things Considered but now we just keep the iPod on most of the time. The driver gets to choose the tunes and we’ve pretty much split the driving 50/50.
Tonight also is the first time we have decided to alter our planned itinerary. We were going to go to Yellowstone but have decided that we want to avoid the traffic and crowds and if we hike, it will be better to do so off the beaten path.
We haven’t been booking motels ahead more than a day but tonight I had trouble finding a room for Friday night in Bozeman. A quick Google search showed me why. It’s a big weekend there and tomorrow Jo will be going to her first rodeo. Hey, there must be a name for using cliches when they’re not actually being used as cliches. Don’t you think?
I like to shoot pictures of neon signs and Missoula has some nice ones.
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