Day 4: Not the Way We Drew It Up

Today started off with saying goodbye to our gracious hosts, the Watsons, and heading north.  Our first stop was Chico, CA because it fell roughly a nap-length amount of time from Roseville, where we'd been.  The drive up through the Central Valley was peaceful.  The valley is the source of much, if not most, of our nation's fruits, and has hence come to be called the "fruitbasket of the nation" (nb: previous to today, I associated the word "fruitbasket" exclusively with the expression "getting kicked in the fruitbasket").  Erica, who harbors strong locavore tendencies, was drooling over the endless series of fresh produce stands lining the highway.

Our first stop in Chico was a grocery store for road trippin' supplies, and then we headed to In-n-Out Burger and got everything Animal Style.

Healthy

James--who was a champ today, again, by the way--was getting a bit restless in his seat, so we found a local greenspace and let him sprawl out on a large beach towel, where he spent the better part of a half an hour rolling back and forth.  Quite an accomplishment for the little fella!

The drive to Lassen Volcanic National Park was beautiful.  It's 85 miles from the city up a twisty road to the park's interior, and in that stretch you rise 8,496 vertical feet.  We stopped off at the park's impressive new visitor's center, where James got a National Park passport book and his first stamp.

VERY excited about Dad affixing the stamp

Overwhelmed, even

Our next stop in the park was the so-called "Sulfur Works", a wet fart of a hole in the ground that belches noxious fumes with every toot and splatter.  Geologically cool, because it marks the site of the central vent of the once immense Mt. Tehama that collapsed eons ago and formed the Lassen area,  it's a must for lovers of the sight of boiling grey mud-water and/or the aroma of latrines.

Insert your own fart joke

Heading north through the park, we snapped this beauty at about 8,000 ft.

Our last stop in Lassen was supposed to be for a short hike around an alpine lake, but James was falling asleep.  So we decided to capitalize on his napping, skip the hike, and proceed to our next stop, McArthur-Burney Falls State Park (which features a 129-foot water fall that Teddy Roosevelt once outrageously called "the 8th wonder of the world" despite it not being one of the ten highest waterfalls in the state) where we'd take a short hike instead.  Mistake.  As we drove out of Lassen, a park ranger at the station gravely informed us that the road to Burney had been cut off by fire, and all traffic was being routed to Redding.  James was asleep, so all was good with him, but Redding was not on the way and, given that James was due to wake up about the time we were due to arrive there, we had to find something for us to do.  

There is nothing to do in Redding.  Downtown Redding, at least.  I took no pictures because it merited none, and we couldn't even find a patch of grass on which to pitch a blanket for James.  It was at this point that, Erica's patience for the detour running low, I let one of James' glass milk bottles slide off the hood of the car where I'd set it, and it smashed to pieces in the street.  So that makes three broken glass containers in three days.  Consistency!

The last leg of today's drive was completed in a dark mood.  James woke up a bit earlier than anticipated and was none too pleased to find himself still in the carrier.  We made it into Mt. Shasta to find the top of the actual Mt. Shasta itself shrouded in clouds.  But once out of the car, the boy did great, and was smiling when we put him down for bed.  Afterwards, Erica and I enjoyed take-out Italian while watching the sun go down behind the mountains. 

Thorns: Fire re-route and more broken glass

Roses: Romantic, plastic cutlery dinner; In-n-Out; summit views

Buds: Crater Lake!

Today's Car Miles: 297

Total Trip Miles: 2236.5

Day 3. Vacationland

Today was spent lounging by the pool, strolling quiet neighborhoods, napping, and drinking qual-it-tye wine. Although there's not a lot of exciting doings to report, today was just what we needed.

In picture form, today's highlights include:

Coffee and Crosswords

Doing Rodney Dangerfield impressions for second cousins

Swimming with the tyke

Grilled shrimp dinner with Amador wine and perfect weather

Thorn: Breaking ANOTHER glass of the Watsons', this time a cool, 70s decorative tumbler glass.
Rose: Enjoying a wonderful meal poolside with great people
Bud: Taking James to his first National Park tomorrow.

No miles today.  Why leave this place?


--Grant

Big Pig Day 2 - The Watsons!

James slept until 7am Central Time this morning, but in Oakland, CA, so we were up and at them so early that we had the Bay Area roads to ourselves.  We got into sunny Roseville--a Naperville twin of a suburb 20 minutes northeast of Sacramento, around 9am, and met up with Erica's cousin George and his wife Amy, and their 3 kids.

I love driving east out of the Bay Area.  In the summer, all the grass dies on the mountains, turning them gold.  Once you begin your descent out of the coastal range and into the Central Valley, you leave the cold and drear of the Bay behind.  Whereas in Oakland it was 68 and dumpy, in Roseville it was 100+ and sunny as a lark.  Better yet, within a few minutes of reaching the valley floor from the west, we could already make out the silhouette of the Sierra Nevada rising over the eastern horizon, meaning that we were seeing all the way across the state.

After catching up with the wonderful Watson clan in their cool-ass house with a pool, we left for the lovely Amador wine country (free tastings!), one of several nice wine countries in the state which are proud not to be, but are also sort of jealous of, Napa and Sonoma.  Amador's thing is growing big, bold Zins and Cabs, varietals that thrive at elevation.  Cousin George is a regular at the humble Amador Cellars, where James pulled a BYOM in the tasting room.

The '14 milk drinks particularly thick when temps pass 102 degrees

After the tasting, we enjoyed a delicious picnic lunch (what Americans believe is) the Continental Way: with wine and cheese and bread and fresh fruit and capricola, etc.  After that, we visited the Cooper and the Runquist vineyards, before calling it a day.

Barrels, barrels everywhere at Cooper Vineyards

James was his usual cheery self again, keeping it real by sleeping at all the right times and not really fussing much.  Erica kept it very real, too, by sleeping through most of the day's drives along with her son.

Thorn: Breaking one of the Watson's neato colored wine glasses.
Rose: The Petit Verdot at Runquist.  Hot cha!
Bud: Pool time with the kiddos tomorrow and a local microbrewery I've been hearing so much about.

Car Miles: 90
Total Trip Miles: 1939.5

--Grant

Oakland

I'm sitting at a very brightly lit sports bar called Diamonds.  It's right off the lobby of the second Holiday Inn we tried to check into tonight (we went to the wrong one of the two the first time.  They're more or less right next to each other). These Holiday Inns are by the baseball stadium, cleverly lying in wait to ensnare sleepy A's fans.  Despite Diamonds objective crappiness, former Athletics great and 1989 World Series champion Dave Henderson just walked by me!  Good enough for Dave, good enough for me.

Erica is up in the room pumping and elected not to test the signal strength of the baby monitor and join me in the bar.  James is out.  James was a giant peach today on the plane.  He cooed peacefully for the first forty-five minutes or so before drifting off to sleep on Erica's lap for the next 3 1/2 hours.  Much better behaved than a certain 12-week old in the row next to us (didn't catch her name.)  He woke up about 5 minutes before landing, smiled some, and then more-or-less happily endured the walk to the baggage claim, the wait for the rental car shuttle bus, the long rental car shuttle bus ride, the upselling attempts of the rental car company minion, the drive to the first Holiday Inn, the unloading of the stuff, the finding out that we didn't belong there, the repacking of the car, the getting to the Holiday Inn, the checking in to the right Holiday Inn (whose computer system was on the fritz), the unpacking in the room, and the eating of the bottle of milk.  When I left for Diamonds, he was cheerily yelping in his pack-n-play, but, per Erica's recent text, he's asleep.

Here's the only picture we snapped today:

All hail the Baby Merlin's Magic Sleep Suit!

Air Miles: 1848
Car Miles: 1.5
Total Miles: 1849.5

--Grant

The Big Pig 3: West Coast Boog-A-Loo 2

Well, the day has arrived.  Erica awoke me with a sleepy rendition of the Go-Go's "Vacation".  The official itinerary:

Day 1 (Friday, Aug. 1): Chicago → Oakland 

Day 2 (Saturday, Aug. 2): Oakland → Roseville, CA (to see Erica's cousin George and his family)

Day 3 (Sunday, Aug. 3) Roseville (Amador County for wine tasting)

Day 4 (Monday, Aug. 4): Roseville→  Lassen Volcanic National Park →McArthur-Burney Falls Memorial SP → Mt. Shasta, CA 

Day 5 (Tuesday, Aug. 5): Mt. Shasta, CA → Crater Lake National Park → Medford, OR 

Day 6 (Wednesday, Aug. 6): Medford, OR →Rough and Ready Creek State Park → Jedidiah Smith Redwoods State Park → Crescent City, CA

Day 7 (Thursday, Aug. 7): Crescent City → Del Norte Redwoods State Park/Redwood National Park → Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park → Arcata  →Eureka

Day 8 (Friday, Aug. 8): Eureka → Humboldt Redwoods State Park → Drive-Thru Tree Park → Ft. Bragg 

Day 9 (Saturday, Aug. 10): Ft. Bragg → Mendocino/Mendocino Headlands State Park → Salt Point State Park → Bolinas →Muir Beach → Novato 

Day 10 (Sunday, Aug. 9): Novato →Battery Spencer/Golden Gate Bridge → Oakland → Chicago

Days 2 and 3 will be a relaxing segue into vacation.  4 and 9 look ambitious, with long driving times and multiple stops.  Au revoir.

--Grant

Smith Family Reunion

This weekend we headed to Carmel, Indiana for the Smith family reunion.  Technically it was a destination reunion since no one in the family actually lives there.  The town is quite classy; it has a public waterpark, where Dad, Mark, and I took the girls for a few hours.

It was great to see the fam.  It'd been over a year since Erica and I saw the Carlsons, more than three years since we'd seen the Freers, and the poor Gazleys we hadn't seen since our wedding.  Here's the cousins photo to prove I'm not lying:

Not Pictured: Adam Freer

Unbelievably, this is the only good picture we managed to get with just James and the girls.

Finally, a real cousin!

We stopped by Danville on the way home to see mom and dad's new lake house.  They are to be congratulated on their awesome new digs.  I can see spending many a' future weekend there worrying about James falling off that rickety pier.

Speaking of the boy, he was very good during the long car rides, which bodes well for our trip to California in a couple of weeks.  He even woke up 45 minutes before we got back to Chicago and just chewed coolly on a towel for the remainder of the ride (Erica just slept through the whole thing).

Total car miles of trip: 441

--Grant

Why "The Big Pigs"?

For years, Grant saved up loose change in a little pink ceramic piggy bank which he spent only on travel. Occasionally, he'd go stretches where he'd devote a whole $20 bill from an ATM visit.  When he pitched to Erica the trip that became their 3.5 week European adventure in 2011, he pointed out that he had socked away quite a stash in his pig.  Dryly, Erica observed that they were going to need a "much bigger pig."

The Little Pig

Erica's wasn't wrong.  While the little pig did disgorge quite a bit of cash, it was only enough to pay for about 2 nights accommodation, and so for the rest they plundered their accumulated credit card points and frequent flyer miles, and dipped into savings.  (But it was worth it.)

Venice, The Big Pig

It wasn't long before Grant and Erica began to refer to their trip itself as the "Big Pig".  The subsequent big summer trip of 2012 (Sequoia NP, Yosemite NP, Lake Tahoe, Napa, Berkeley) became "Big Pig 2: West Coast Boog-A-Loo".  And while Erica insisted on taking 2013 off from excessive traveling to gestate James, all future week+, multi-destination adventures will inherit the sobriquet.

Yosemite, Big Pig 2

That doesn't mean that our travels are limited to "Big Pigs".  We're always going somewhere.  Check back at this space for updates.