pinned to the open road
I took a trip with my family. Then we came back home. Then I went back to work and remembered that working is not as much fun as traveling. Weird.
Anyway, we flew to Portland and then drove down to San Francisco, stopping to hike and stay in some very odd Airbnbs along the way. At the end of the trip a bad thing happened. However, thinking about how the bad thing could have been much worse has given me all sorts of cheesy-cliché gratitude feelings. So come with me! First: to Portland!
The Portland sleeping spot was a tiny little doll’s house of an apartment, 600 square feet but somehow also two bedrooms, with lots of clever storage and perfectly proportioned built-in furniture. It awakened a long-dormant fantasy in me of living alone and having a dedicated place for everything; a life where everything gets put back in exactly that dedicated place, AHEM, no that is not at all a shout-out to my husband and child. Why would you ask that. This place was the apartment equivalent of having literal outlines of tools on the garage-wall pegboard. THE PEGBOARD LIFE, I (OCCASIONALLY) LONG FOR IT.
First we explored a Portland park to find the “Witch’s Castle” (which I noticed that all official Portland websites were careful to call the “Stone House”). Graffiti! Urine!
For a less urban experience, we drove out to the Mount Hood area and hiked a small part of the 2600-mile Pacific Crest trail, the part near Timberline Lodge. I guess the exterior of this lodge was used in The Shining, but I fall asleep when I try to watch that movie so it was not familiar to me. The views were very dramatic.
There were lots of chipmunks. I liked walking under the ski lifts. On the way out we saw a huge patch of dirty snow (in August!) and on the way back it was gone. WACKY. Wacky how the sun works in mountain-world.
Portland food: Hogan’s Goat pizza, Gateway Breakfast House, marijuana edibles. (For the adults.)
The next house was picked just because it was about halfway between Portland and where we wanted to be next, and because I never want to spend too long in the car. That said, I feel compelled to point out that LT was the one who picked it and booked it, out of a limited set of accommodations in the middle of nowhere (aka Wolf Creek, Oregon). I also feel that some of the features of the house, such as the outhouse and the upstairs-deck pee bucket (for nighttime), probably should have been listed more prominently in the description.
This place was a teeny cob house owned by elderly lesbians in a very, very remote location in the woods. Follow the emailed directions (since Google had not a clue), engage the 4-wheel drive on the rental car, go a mile down a dirt road past some chickens and a blue school bus with someone living in it, let yourself in the gate and you are home. No wifi, no phone service, just you and a pee bucket and a whole lot of Starhawk books. I worried a bit about meth’d-up Nazis coming to kill us in the night—the lock was a joke and no one would hear you scream—but honestly how would they even find the place.
Food here (since no restaurants for miles): salami, cheese, crackers, fruit, and wine we bought on the way. Evening entertainment: Sunset, weird animal noises in the dark, Aaron reading us Trivial Pursuit questions, drinking wine. Nighttime entertainment: me trying to use the pee bucket after all that wine. Morning entertainment: looking out the window and seeing a large orange cat patiently waiting at the gate. Aaron went down there to open it and the cat followed us into the house, yelling for salami and hard-boiled egg and everything else we were having for breakfast.
Next, several different redwood forest hikes. I like the big trees very much.
In Crescent City we ate more pizza and walked on the beach. It was low tide and thus CRABPOCALYPSE. Yum, say the seagulls. We ate the middles out of you.
Crescent City house was a grandpa-style house on the river. Redwood tree in the front yard, this in the backyard. We spent a solid hour just standing here and throwing rocks.
This house probably had the best shower of the trip. It is possible my appreciation of that shower was heightened after the night of the pee bucket.
Next we continued south, with lots of ocean views while driving, to the Mendocino/Little River area. Snuck through a cemetery to look at a blowhole/punch bowl.
The hotel had a fire pit so we did the usual, with beer.
Around this time LT started to feel unwell, with gradually worsening abdominal pain in a specific spot and none of the usual other symptoms that one can knock out with antacids or whatnot. As it got worse, we began to talk about medical care. Although it made me feel like a jerk, I proposed going driving the rest of the way to San Francisco if at all possible, because hospitals in an extremely small town? When you’re not at all sure what’s wrong? Maybe not. So it sucked, but we pushed on, straight to a (useless) urgent care that advised us to go to the emergency room. (Interestingly, when I asked the urgent-care nurse which hospital was closest, she said, “Zuckerberg is closest but…I wouldn’t go there.” Thanks! I will take your word for it!)
The ER we did take him to, in Bernal Heights, was not too bad; only a handful of people bleeding or vomiting or threatening to kill themselves. (It’s an emergency room in a big city—there’s always going to be SOME.) Scans, blood draw, elevated white cells = diverticulitis! How fun. How novel. How unexpected.
LT told us to go on to the apartment because there was really nothing more to be done. It was sad, but true, so Aaron and I took ourselves out for gelato and then back to our nice apartment in the Mission. Is that right? Do people say “the Mission”? Adding “District” like the maps do sounds stupid.) The apartment had a weird steep stairs (more of a ladder, really) behind a closed door, going up to an attic/crawlspace area. I was too chicken to investigate but Aaron wasn’t, and he reported that (a) the ceilings were too low to stand upright but (b) there was a twin mattress on the floor up there, a lamp with an extension cord, and a box of kleenex. San Francisco luxury! I was surprised that the creepy attic space was even part of our Airbnb and not being rented out separately to a Google employee for $1500/month.
Around dinnertime LT texted to say he was being kept overnight. Bad! Bad in a normal, human way—I don’t want LT to be in the hospital—but also bad in a weird, logistical, uniquely San Francisco way! We had planned to ditch the car on the way in to San Francisco, but since we ended up driving right to the hospital, it was now in a semi-sketchy unattended lot to the tune of $50/day, as well as being overdue at the rental place. This meant that I (a somewhat nervous driver under ideal circumstances) had to return it myself, in a city I don’t know, in a car I don’t understand, to a place I have never been. Aaron and Google Maps were my navigators to a tiny, very poorly marked, car rental return in SoMa (again: is this something people actually say?) I did not cry and hyperventilated only once, after multiple instances of overshooting the rental place due to the lack of signage, insane number of one-way streets, skateboarders, bus-only lanes (except not really because everyone goes in them to turn right), and old people in electric wheelchairs zooming out into traffic.
Ultimately, it worked! Car gone! Things were much better. Aaron and I walked down to the water and texted poor LT lots of photos. We’re looking at seals, you’re looking at your IV antibiotic drip! That’s fair, right?
He was discharged later the next day, just in time to get to our apartment and see us before we left for the Lights acoustic show. Which was so chill! She gave away signed prints, there were folding chairs on the main floor (although we went up to stand on the balcony rail because, as Aaron put it, “What if we get stuck behind someone with a huge head”), and she played for nearly two hours. The crowd was pleasant, bathrooms were clean, and I wasn’t even the oldest one there. Concert success.
We flew home to needy cats (YOU GAVE SALAMI TO A STRANGER????) and a ten-day supply of antibiotics for LT. No redwoods or ocean here, but on the other hand no pee bucket.
—mimi smartypants was very brave in the woods.