Toto and I (yep she’s still Toto) started our first day off by bustling around the house like chickens with our heads cut off. I had gotten all the clothes that I planned on taking in a laundry basket the night before and had gone out bowling with some friends (Ashley Burson, Kyle Smith and Jared Brownlow). Toto thought I was crazy for going out and coming home late (got into bed about two am) the night before we left for our grand adventure (well I guess this is our second grand adventure this year). We managed to get everything packed and in the Tahoe by about 12:30 and pulled out of the driveway at 12:53. Our plan was to be gone by noon but Josh had spent Friday night elsewhere and Dad had gone to work, so we couldn’t leave until JD got home to watch the wee man.
I have homework due Monday morning for my Romanticism class (that’s the English Romantic literary era thank you very much, NOT smut books) so we had to stop at Borders so I could pick up a copy of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus. I have it on audio book and we listened to it in the car, but I wanted to be able to highlight it and make notes in the margins too, which is hard on an MP3 file.
The very first thing we put on the iPod was Billy Joel. I think my subconscious was working its magic here because I know (deep down somewhere) that when Toto was my age and drove to Yosemite the last time, the only tape her 1980 Honda would play was Billy Joel’s “Innocent Man”. So it was all sorts of appropriate that I put that on first, though it wasn’t a conscious decision. After we went through that album, we listened to the audio book for a couple of hours, but had to turn it off somewhere in the windy hills of southern Oregon because we were both dozing from the narrator’s droning voice. I thought I was just dozing because I was tired from staying out half the night before, but nope, it was Frankenstein. Which I find entertaining because in the introduction by Mary Shelley herself she states that this story terrified her when she came up with it and she wanted to terrify her readers, and well, I was falling asleep. Granted, I hadn’t gotten to the scary part, just the background info on Dr. Frankenstein himself, though at this point in the book he is still just some guy that Captain Robert Walton picked up off a chunk of ice in the Arctic Ocean. It isn’t a horrible story so far, it’s interesting enough, I am just not loving the guy reading it.
We stopped in Grants Pass for gloves. The last 400 feet (that’s elevation, not distance) of the Half Dome hike is basically straight up the side of half dome itself. This covers about a quarter mile (that’s the distance), maybe. So there are 2x4’s and cables to pull yourself up that last leg. You NEED gloves for this, leather gloves. We hadn’t bought any in Gresham, and Toto wanted to get them before we entered the land of sales tax. I discovered the most amazing ATM in that Freddie’s (I am sure they are in other Fred Meyer stores as well): while depositing my first paycheck from WHBM I discovered I didn’t need a pen or a deposit envelope. The ATM has a special little mouth for checks and it just sucks it in, reads the check info and KNOWS how much it is for (when it is a paycheck like that). How awesome is that?! It pretty much blew my mind for the next 15 minutes or so. It was the most exciting thing of the day so far.
We got down to the California border without much excitement happening (aside from the aforementioned ATM of course). Toto had me hide the Subway sandwich we had gotten in Grants Pass when we approached Cali’s “Border Patrol” as she didn’t want to take any chances that they might take it from us because it might contain “fresh produce”. I told her what I have always wanted to do as we drove towards the flashing red lights and the incredibly bored looking border agents: Border agent: “Do you have any fresh fruit ma’am?” Me: “Yes. I do. But I’m not going to tell you where. Find it.” How much fun would that be?! They wouldn’t be as bored then would they? That got a good chuckle out of Toto, and we passed through the checkpoint without so much as a glance in the car after answering “no” to the “ya’ll have any fresh produce?” Right as Toto rolled up her window (which is a long process because it’s broken and the motor goes about four times slower in the drivers window than in all the others) I yelled “HA HA SUCKERS!!! WE GOT YOU!” When I say “yelled” I mean pretended to yell. I didn’t even yell loud enough for Toto to wince, but I didn’t really feel like getting detained by the California Fruit Police so I only said it for Toto and I to have a laugh at.
Immediately after this I looked up and saw Mt. Shasta. Toto had been saying that you can always tell which mountain is Mt. Shasta because it has the little side volcano thing on the side of it.
We stared at it for a while and then I said to Toto, “It’s like the circus freak with the half absorbed twin.” I made this X-Files reference without expecting her to know what I was talking about and she smiled and said, “I had that exact same thought about half an hour ago. This is like our X-Files themed summer.” The episode which we refer to is S02E20 and it is called “Humbug.” Here is a link to a weird site, but you can watch the entire episode there (it has a bunch of weird Arabic letters and things, but the episode is in English, don’t worry):
http://www.clipmass.com/movie/7721591282964
We drove until nearly midnight. All the little towns down between Red Bluff and Sacramento were all booked up for some random reason so we couldn’t get a hotel room any closer than Woodland. Woodland is to Sacramento sort of like Troutdale is to Portland on I-84. The first day of our trip concluded on several high notes: first, the hotel next to ours (a Hampton Inn) had little baby palm trees out front whereas ours were huge; second, the guy at the front desk’s jacket could have easily fit three more of him into it and he was a bit of a dunce (this proved entertaining for us at midnight after driving for 10 hours); and third, we got to sleep in a huge king size bed!
Playlist
Billy Joel
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
The Eagles
Sara Evans
Trace Adkins
Lady Antebellum
License Plates Seen
Montana
Georgia
California
Idaho
British Columbia
Kansas
Mississippi
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