Arctangential

We left San Francisco Thursday morning, first thing. Instead of driving back on the I-5, we decided to drive north on the 101, the more scenic route. First, of course, we crossed the Golden Gate Bridge, which wasn’t nearly as exciting as I’d hoped. I mean, it’s a nice bridge, quite big, pleasingly shaped, and in a pleasant color, but I guess I was expecting something really amazing, like Godzilla would come smash it down, or a blimp would careen into the center tower.

Driving through Marin was nice, very pretty. Our first goal was to eat at an In-n-Out Burger, which I haven’t done for many years. We were going to stop at the one in Petaluma, but due to poor planning on my part, we didn’t have a map or any directions to the actual place. I assumed I’d be able to see it from the highway, but I either missed it or pulled off too soon. This precipitated a long and aimless drive around the city in question, eventually ending when we luckily found a way back on to the highway again. We decided not to head back and try again, and luckily we DID see an In-n-Out from the highway on our way through Rohnert Park, and stopped there. I had an “animal style” burger, which was not nearly as exciting as I had expected, but was quite good. The hidden message on the bottom of the cup is a little bit disturbing, though.

Back on the 101, we pretty much drove straight through, winding lazily around the foothills, remarking often on the suffusion of cows We stopped… well, somewhere. I’m not really sure the name of the town, if it was a town; it was more of a widening in the road, really. The 101 had turned into a small two-lane highway by that time, so there was no exit name to tell us where we were, and we just stopped because I needed gas and there was a gas station. While I gassed up, Meg ran in to use the bathroom and came out with a story of great woe, which I’ll allow her to relate at a future date, should she feel the need.

After this pit stop, we enter the redwood forest. These trees, they are big. Really, really big. And there’s a lot of them. They’re really everywhere out there, and the road got (once again) all twisty and uppy and downy, and the farther north we went, the snowier it got. It wasn’t a super fun drive, especially as we started losing light. We made a quick stop in Eureka (not Yreka) to grab a tour book from a AAA office, and then off again. We drove the rest of the way up the coast to a town called Crescent City, where we spent the night. There are some really gorgeous coastal views on the section of the 101 between Eureka and Crescent City, but increasing fatigue and failing light forced up to just fly past them. Some other day.

We ate dinner at the restaurant attached to our motel; it was pretty amazingly bad. Partly it was because we were used to eating at all these extra swanky SF places, but it was also partly that the food was just terrible. I ordered halibut in what was described to me as a “shrimp and Grand Marnier sauce”, but it was just a badly overcooked piece of unidentifiable whitefish swimming (NPI) in a flavorless béchamel, with maybe a cup of undercooked bay shrimp dumped over top. Meg had a steak, which she pronounced passable, and some sea scallops, which she took one small bite of and then placed as far away from herself as possible. After choking down the food, we retired to our room and watched a Good Eats DVD before bed.

The next morning, we went for breakfast at the same restaurant. We weren’t really looking forward to it, but a free breakfast buffet came with the room, and we thought to ourselves, how badly can you mess up breakfast? It turns out, you can mess it up really pretty badly. The meats were all limp, the scrambled eggs had been overdone and were all runny, and I am pretty sure the waffles were the frozen, toaster variety. The only thing that was even kind of good were the biscuits, but the country gravy had no flavor at all. Come to think of it, the country gravy was probably just the same nasty ass béchamel from my fish, but with a tiny bit of pepper added, instead of a vanishingly small amount of Grand Marnier.

Now that I’m done complaining about the Northwoods Restaurant in Crescent City, CA, I can relate how we set out eastwards from there, on the 199. This is a very skinny road, very windy, going through a lot of mountains and alongside a lot of canyons. Add in the snowfall, which in some places had collected on the roads, and you have yet another fairly unpleasant drive. At least this time it was light out, which helped, and after about 2 hours we made it back to the I-5, and well out of the snowy area. The rest of the trip was quite uneventful; we stopped somewhere in northern California (or maybe southern Oregon) for lunch at Carl’s Jr., later got gas at another full service station in Oregon, and then onwards. We hit some kind of weird pre-rush-hour traffic on our way through Portland, and were delayed by about 40 minutes because of an accident near the Tacoma Dome. Then, we arrived back home, and collapsed.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 28th, 2007 at 1:53 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.