Arctangential

Because I don’t fly (wings not strong enough), we drove to and from San Francisco. It’s between 14 and 16 hours each way, depending on the route and the driver. We got up around 9am on Friday, and were out of the house before 10. Stopped at Burger King for a quick breakfast, and then onto the open road.

Let me stop for a second and talk about fast food breakfast. Now, I’m a big fan of fast food burgers. They are good. I would eat them every day if I didn’t think it would kill me. But the breakfasts — they’ve felt like a bolt-on since the first time I tried them. The meats never come out quite right, the ersatz eggs are unpleasant at best, the constant attempt to have the bun represent some other kind of breakfast food never works… they’re just almost always horrible. Maybe it isn’t possible given the constraint of the American fast food restaurant, but I think if one could come up with a truly palatable fast food breakfast, one could make a good amount of money.

Anyhow, crappy food in hand, we hit the I-5 southbound and didn’t stop until Keizer, Oregon, where we got some lunch (a disappointing sandwich at Shari’s) and some gas.

In another aside, I discovered on this trip that gas stations in Oregon all seem to be full service. I haven’t seen, much less visited, a full service gas station in probably 10 years, so I was a little bit confused at first. I pulled up to the wrong pump, and I tipped the gas pumping lady, which I guess isn’t normally done; it’s not that she didn’t take the extra money, but she did seem very surprised by it. I’m not sure why Oregon has full service stations, but it’s weird and I don’t really like it.

So, gas tanks and stomachs full, we got back on the road. Oregon was mostly pretty nice, until we got into the more southern part of the state. It turns out, and I had not been aware of this, but it turns out that southern Oregon and northern California are populated by an embarrassment of mountains. And of course, where there are mountains, there are windy roads, even major interstates like the I-5. The fact that we hit this section of roadway at nightfall didn’t help any, and I was really not enjoying driving up and around and down and around and up again and around some more. However, we’d picked out a good town to stay the night, and there wasn’t anywhere between where we were at that point and our destination, so we just pressed on.

In order to take a little break, we stopped in a town called Yreka for gas and food. We ate at a “wonderful” restaurant called Grandma’s House. We thought it might have some good home cooking, but in fact it was just a cheesy dive, filled to overflowing with ugly knick-knacks (all for sale at absurd prices), and food that reminded me more of a college cafeteria than anything else. We did pick up a recipe book from there, which I plan on sharing in part with my loyal readership, later on. After leaving Yreka, we pressed on through the night and mountains to a town called Redding, where we stayed the night at a wholly unremarkable Holiday Inn.

The next morning, breakfast in Redding at a wonderful diner called simply “Lumberjack’s”. the whole place was done up like a log cabin, with tree-felling hardware festooning the walls. More importantly, the food was excellent. I had what was described as an “egg tostada”; basically a thin round omelette, cooked with onions and jalapenos, topped with beans, ground beef, salsa, sour cream and guacamole. Yum! We left Redding, and 5 or so hours later, we were in San Francisco!

This turned out longer than I thought. I’ll write up the trip back in a later entry.