Rehearsal Dinner

 

From Susanville to McKinleyville to Crescent City to Grant's Pass, Oregon

 

We had originally intended to drive west from Susanville through Lassen Volcanic Park and then roughly northerly through California and Oregon.  But towns and hotels are scarce up there and we couldn't find a route that made sense, so we changed plans and drove due west across California along insanely twisty mountain roads to the Pacific Ocean. (When I say that "we" drove, I mean "Tom.")  Then came a scramble down a sandy bluff to Agate Beach on the Pacific, followed by a walk among towering redwoods, and another twisty mountain drive northeast into Oregon.  

Small boy, big tree.

From Lone Pine to Susanville

Our journey for the day

Here's the view from across the street from our decidedly pedestrian motel as the sun rose in Lone Pine Tuesday morning. Not so pedestrian after all. 

And behind the motel -- nobody told the bunnies!

The Sierras seen from California 395

Horsetail Falls on the June Lakes Loop

 

 

 Silver Lake on the June Lakes Loop

Grant Lake

Mono Lake in Lee Vining, a million-year-old lake with water twice as salty as the ocean, decorated with weird and lovely "tufa towers" made of calcium-carbonate, that grow out of the lake water because of interaction between freshwater springs and the minerals in the lake water.  Several ospreys thought the towers were put there for their convenience as nesting platforms.

Heading onwards on California 395.  Around every bend, another splendid landscape appears.

After Devil's Gate Pass, Route 395 runs through a beautiful canyon alongside the glorious West Walker River.  In the 1990s, a devastating flood washed down the river, taking with it all of the canyon's pines, cottonwoods and other vegetation and destroying 10 miles of Route 395.  The road was rebuilt in six months and the greenery began to grow back, but a fire in 2002 destroyed it all over again.  That's in the past now and the place is wild, pristine and indescribably lovely.

From Plymouth Reservoir to Lone Pine, California via Death Valley

We woke up at 5 a.m., left home about 6:20, and flew out of Syracuse around 9 a.m.  Taxiing down the runway just ahead of us was this: 

It turns out to be a military "Reaper" drone, also known as a "Predator," flown on training missions out of Syracuse by the Air National Guard.  Turns out they've been flying unescorted out of Hancock for years, at least one has crashed, and apparently everyone knew this but us.

We were in Breeze Airline's "Nicest" seats, which are their equivalent of first class and were quite roomy and comfy, in the bulkhead row at the very front with two whole windows of our very own and plenty of leg room.  Only two seats abreast on each side of the aisle, with clever containers here and there for phones and such and enough room to tip back the seat and recline. We were first off the plane in Las Vegas, too, and the price was right. (No wi-fi, though, so I couldn't track the trip on Google maps.  But, using an old-fashioned road atlas, I'm pretty sure we flew just a little bit south of Canon City where Luke and Monica briefly lived. Ah well.)  All in all, so far, we recommend Breeze. 

In LV, we made it through the airport with surprising speed and ease and met a taxi driver who's a Hoosier college basketball fan and knew all about the recent performance of the Syracuse Orange. And we got out of Las Vegas (Dad driving) with only one wrong turn (my fault), visible on the map above but corrected fairly easily. Our rental car is nothing to write home about but so far we're safe.  And Death Valley was just spectacular.  So many people were so worried about our plans to drive through there in July that I gave in to the stress and bought not one, not two but THREE gallons of water-- which is what the Park Service advises for a summer trip.  They might have been needed, I suppose, had the car died, but it didn't, and we didn't, either.  I didn't even make it through my bottle of Mexican mineral water. 

But what a place.  It's not just a huge bleak desolate valley at all, as I had somehow imagined, but many valleys like that plus a seemingly endless mix of salt flats, Joshua trees, range after range of mountains, sand dunes, an enormous sky, a surprising number of healthy-looking tourists considering that traveling through Death Valley in July will certainly kill you, and, yes, it's true, mind-boggling heat.  The mountains alone are indescribable, each one entirely different from the ones before and after, as if God said let's see how many different kinds of random mountains we can fit into one place -- sandy eroded not-so-big mountains, rocky enormous sky-touching mountains, rainbow-striped spectacular mountains, black volcanic cinder cones, gravelly stacks-of-rocks mountains, and that's just the beginning and before even mentioning the flats and valleys. We didn't make it to Badwater Basin, with the lowest elevation in North America, but along the trip we went from 190 feet below sea level to almost 5,000 feet above and then back down again and partway up again as we dropped into various basins and climbed back out again.  With such a long day both behind and ahead of us, we contented ourselves with pretty much driving straight through and stopped only at a few places for a few moments each, but every moment in every direction was staggering. 

And I guess I'm too tired to write any more right now!

 

It wouldn't be Christmas without it!