Return

I had such a great time in the US. So many good things happened and we saw so many wonderful sights. Now that we're back all of the condensing and summarizing and boiling-down begins. Everything usually seems so long and expansive when you are actually on holiday, and then you get back and it begins to feel quite short. It's always a disappointing feeling.

O and I got back yesterday morning from San Francisco. We're very fucked up by jetlag at the moment though. We slept a few times yesterday then were awake in the evening and went to bed at 1. I was up in the middle of the night from 4:30 til almost 7. O was also up from about 9 to noon. We woke up at 5:30 after sleeping away the afternoon. I had tried to wake up at about 11:30 this morning when O was still awake, but it was hopeless, I was a total zombie and just aching to go back to bed. I hope tomorrow goes better and we actually start shifting to a proper schedule...

So, the trip. It was in three parts: Portland, drive down to SF, then week in SF, and by the time we'd been in SF for about a day, thinking back to our time in Portland already seemed like it wasn't even part of the same trip, and after we turned in the rental car it was hard to remember that we had been, just a few days before, been driving all day in it.

The weather was very good to us. Yes, there were some cloudy days and some rain, but the rain was confined to only a day or two in Portland, and there were only about 2 or 3 really cold and nasty days during the whole vacation. We had the sun when it really mattered: a day out to a farm and hanging around downtown in Portland, my friend's wedding (which was outdoors), the whole drive down to California (minus the fog and gray on the northern California coast), and a few days in SF, especially the last couple of days when we took boat rides and walked on the Golden Gate Bridge.

Some random notes about the holiday:

- In total, we drove 1435 miles with the car, but part of that was doing things around Portland. I said in my last post that we drove 1000 miles from Portland, but that's not entirely true because that included the drive we did down to San Jose to the Winchester Mystery House, and San Jose isn't as close to San Francisco as I thought it was, so that day alone was 117 miles. Portland to SF then was about 890 miles, in 3 days. On both days 1 and 3, strangely enough, we did exactly 285.7 miles.

- It's a good thing I'm not too susceptible to car sickness because day 2 and 3 of driving was nothing but curves, curves, and more curves. It felt weird after awhile to hit a straight bit. On day 2, we drove a bit more down I-5 from southern Oregon to Redding, CA, then turned off into the mountains and drove on 3 different two-lane highways. But even that part of I-5 was curvy because you hit some mountains and go very near Mt Shasta. But at least they are curves which, for the most part, you can still take at 75 mph. Once we went off onto the highways, I think we managed an average of 30, maybe 35 mph. O drove that whole part, and I just hung on in the passenger seat and yelled at him occasionally to slow down around some of the sharper curves he was taking a bit too fast. When we were still on I-5, we had already gone over four mountain summits, ranging from 3000 to 4300 feet high. On the highways, I don't know how many summits we hit because nearly the whole drive was going up and up, curving the whole way, and then finally heading back down only to do it all over again in a few miles. Only once or twice did we eventually bottom out in a valley, where there would finally be a small town and some civilization and some blessed straighter, flatter parts of road. But, despite my body getting tired of shifting around for the turns, I couldn't really complain because the whole drive was also incredibly beautiful. Sometimes we were in more typical pine forests which blanketed all of the surrounding hills. Other times the forest thinned a bit and became more dry and deserty, made up of scrub brush and a different sort of pine tree. There was the occasional lake way down below. I was glad O drove and I could enjoy the views. After one town there was one freaky section of highway where they decided to not put any lines in the center of the road. Fortunately there wasn't much traffic (there wasn't for most of the drive), but there was a truck going the other way sometimes, or someone who just didn't stay to his side very much, and the road also got narrower in parts, and it was all just a bit scary. I can't imagine having to drive that in the dark.

- We came back with decidedly more than we left with. I don't plan to bring back as much food as I used to, but I did end up bringing back a few things this time. I got some Halloween stuff to take to work: candy corn and mini Reeses peanut butter cups. I got some instant oatmeal (after enjoying having some for breakfast at our hotel), and also a bottle of bbq sauce. That was all really though, no graham crackers or cooking supplies which I often take back. We ended up lugging around entirely too many books. We bought 6 new ones in the US and had taken 4 with us, not counting the Rough Guide for SF I had. I also gained a bunch of maps for the drive down. I bought two pairs of pajama bottoms and at the last moment, in the SF airport, I found a Swatch watch which I instantly fell in love with. It has a suede brown strap with light blue and white stitching, then the face is blue and, along with having all the numbers (I don't like watches that don't have the numbers on the face), it has a date dial. I didn't know exactly what I was looking for when looking at watches, but this one is perfect. The main thing I didn't find in the US was a Jansport shoulder bag. I couldn't find a shop that really carried them, and then I had a look once at Timbuk2 bags, but in the end decided to wait and have a look back in Amsterdam. I really need a new bag though.

- Main attractions we saw and things we did, which I will hopefully write a bit more about at a later date: went through a corn maze in Portland; went to the Oregon Vortex in southern Oregon, which did not disappoint; drove through quite a few redwood forests, which were just unbelievably gorgeous; went through a drive-through tree; visited the Winchester Mystery House; went to Alcatraz; visited many neighbourhoods in SF, such as Haight-Ashbury, Chinatown, the Mission, and Castro; walked a bit over the Golden Gate Bridge (and walked all the way to the bridge from our hotel which was a long walk and my legs are still recovering); rode a cable car; and watched the sea lions that hang around near a pier on the waterfront.

So, I'm trying to catch up on everything now. I still have quite a few email newsletters to read. We are now watching the first 3 episodes of the new season of Lost. Just watched episode one and O is waiting for me to finish so we can watch the second episode, so I'd better finish this then.