Palominos, Purple Mountains’ Majesty and a Little Prince

David and I (Sarah) are at the start of a new holiday adventure. This one takes us from the San Francisco Bay Area to Whitefish, Montana and back via some Canadian hot springs. We will be gone for about 3 weeks and it is a driving holiday: We are touring in David’s convertible. I call it “Little Sissy” because his license plate contains the letters “SSY”. This will be the first time we have house sitters and it is nice to know we don’t have to close up the house, stop the mail and papers or even wash all the dishes before leaving! As we leave here, the big news is about the birth of the new little prince in England. As yet, he has no name.

Sweet Hummingbird at Home in a Redwood Tree

As nice as traveling is, it is hard to leave our home. Last evening, as I sat on our beautiful deck watching the sunset and the hummingbirds I was reflecting on the abundance that Nature has to offer right here at home.

But we are adventouring (my word) and our trip will take us to Whitefish and Glacier Natural Park by way of Ashland and Hood River Oregon, Coeur D’Alene, Idaho and then Whitefish. I will be attending a professional nutrition symposium in Whitefish and we will also enjoy the activities and touring that has been planned for us there. Our trip back home will take us into Canada where we will visit several hot springs: Fairmont, Halcyon and Harrison, before we “hot tire” it back home. We have no set plans for the trip home but will probably try to get back as quickly as possible while taking into consideration the fact that we are both much closer to 60 than to 30 and marathon drives are just not so much fun anymore (were they ever?). We will be in a hurry to get home because our daughter, Holly, and her David have just received notice that their departure date for a year spent teaching in South Korea is the end of August.

Today’s journey takes us from the Bay Area to Ashland, Oregon via Route 5. I’ll continue this blog once we have reached Ashland….

Later. It took us about an hour and 45 minutes to reach Interstate 5 from home. We have taken this route before and I remembered that we would be seeing a lot of the hot central valley and miles and miles of farmland and mostly flat areas until after Redding, California, where we would start to climb up to high plateau area before descending a very long 6% grade hill into Ashland. It is summer now but we left a beautiful temperate day near the Bay.

My memory has served me well and within minutes of getting on Interstate 5, we felt as though we had opened a gigantic oven door and were stepping through it. The temperature soared to 90 and kept on going up. David has a rule about driving Little Sissy: “If you are in California, and it is not raining, you have to have the top down”. He says it is California State Law. He once tried to apply this rule to driving in other states, and we found ourselves driving into Bryce Canyon in November after a snowfall. It was gorgeous, but it was also negative 4 degrees that morning. I don’t know what the wind chill was but I imagine that if you drive in a convertible with the top down in that type of weather, you create your own wind chill!  David hastily decided to amend his rule to read “…you must have the top down unless it is below 32 degrees”. He has yet to amend his rule at the higher end of the temperature scale. So we kept going.

Purple Car

Friend and stellar acupuncturist Jodi Weitz told me that I must take interesting photos along this journey and post them here on this blog. She specifically asked for “big things that you find along these highways”, perhaps like the “World’s Largest Jackrabbit” which resides in Odessa, Texas. I think she is hoping for dinosaurs.  Sorry, Jodi. The best I could come up with after this days’ journey is this colorful car.

The scenery along the central valley part of Interstate 5 is not that spectacular. But we did see some beautiful palomino ponies grazing in a field along the highway. I love their golden coats and their white manes and tails. I believe that “Trigger”, the horse of Roy Rogers, was a palomino. Sadly though, we passed a very large truck right at the time I was going to take a photo of them. So no palomino photo. On the roasting ride into Redding, we saw some field workers, who must have been absolutely sweltering doing the backbreaking work they do, and we saw a crop duster drop his load on a field. I don’t like to think about what they are dumping on these fields of food so no crop dusting photo.

We decided to stop in Redding for lunch and stopped at the Black Bear Diner. This is a chain of 60 restaurants in 9 different states, mostly in California and Oregon.  The food is

very good, but in my opinion, they give you too much of it! I ordered a steak salad and was expecting a bowl, but got a large plate. Back home, I would eat about 1/5 of this! The 1/5 that I did eat was very good, though. The service was good and we appreciated the constant refills of our water glasses after our driving-through-a-furnace adventure. By the time we finished lunch, it was well over 100 degrees outside.

David decided it was time to close the car and turn on the air conditioner for the rest of the trip. It was over 100 degrees. The second half of the trip to Ashland had us climbing in our elevation. Fairly quickly, we reached 3000 feet above sea level. The scenery drastically changes and it took us into mountainous forested areas. We passed Lake Shasta and noted that the water level seemed quite low. We also got our first glimpses of Mt. Shasta in all its glory. The source I consulted puts it at 14,179 feet. It still had snow on it. It is a very spiritual place. Interstate 5 took us part way around the mountain and into the high plains. We were treated to different views of the mountain for quite a few miles. It well fits the description of America’s mountains in “America the Beautiful” as being an example of a purple mountain majesty, though the song was originally written atop Pikes Peak.

Mt. Hood

As we continued on our travels, I was changing CDs in the car in order to keep us in music for the entire day’s drive. I had made a number of CDs of various kinds of music that we like and our favorites are the ones Holly has made for us in the past. I started to think about how music fits or doesn’t fit the scenery we were driving through and it occurred to me that some of our favorites really work well while others do not. “Eagles” and “Doobie Brothers” fit well for this trip while “Enya” does not. At one point we were listening to an old Johnny Cash favorite, “A Boy Named Sue”.  This was one of his humorous songs and one of many examples of his great ability to tell a story.

Right before Ashland is a very big hill, about 7 miles long, with a 6% grade and many warnings about runaway trucks. At the beginning of the descent is a place where trucks can check their brakes. Several places during the descent are areas where “runaway trucks”, or trucks whose brakes have burned out, can pull off the road and onto an uphill ramp which has a big sand hill at the end. I don’t like hills like these which scare me. It is a dramatic way to arrive at Ashland though. The exits to the city are at the end of this long hill.

We pulled into Ashland late afternoon and realized that our journey had taken us about 5 ½ hours, not including the lunch stop. We checked into the Ashland Springs Hotel and discovered that we were in a “boutique” room which they explained to us, was like the boutique hotel rooms in France. We instantly realized that this means “small” ! It was a very small room but comfortable and very accessible to the entertainment district of Ashland. The view from our window was of one of the two majestic eagles that grace the hotel’s entryway.

We got settled, walked to the river area where there are outdoor restaurants which are a great place to stop for drinks. After having a drink, we found a restaurant that served Italian food. It was not one of our better dining experiences, but it was O.K. A better choice was the ice cream shop across from our hotel where we stopped for dessert. We turned in for the night and mused that our eagle friend was keeping watch for us. The evening news informed us that the little English Prince still did not have a name. I mused that whatever name(s) they picked, he will NOT be a boy named Sue.