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Los Banos

In about 18 hours I’ll be in Los Banos, meeting Mark at the Wal-Mart (it’s central and well-lit, after all). This means that (a) the 12-day separation will be over, probably resulting in much mushiness and gushiness in my next journal entry, (b) we’ll be doing our first overnight road trip, meaning there may be really cool pictures and stories to follow, and (c) if I didn’t answer your email tonight, it’s probably not going to happen until Sunday or Monday…

Now it’s late and I’m going to bed knowing much more about the Gabors than I did an hour or so earlier…

Los Baños

Mark and I agreed to meet at the Wal-Mart in Los Banos on Friday night. I’d arrived a little early to find accommodations for the evening. And when I say “a little”, that’s exactly what I mean. It took me over three hours to drive that 115 or so miles, thanks to traffic jams everywhere on 101, and then again across the Pacheco Pass.

 

Maybe my fatigued state was the thing which made the Sunstar (Sunspot? Sunstroke?) Inn look relatively benign. Either way, it looked better than most of the other motels along Pacheco Boulevard. There’s no Motel 6 in Los Banos.

Anyway, I figured it would be OK for one night and it pretty much was, despite the fact that it had been remodeled about 1989 and was apparently last cleaned about the same time. Apparently missed in this renovation was a cool lampshade from the late 1960s, which we both craved and pondered stealing. The place had full cable, although the TV picture was disturbingly green. And there was heat. And a bed, which was an absolute requirement for Mark’s first round of motel sex ever.

We met at 7:30 and spent just long enough in the Wal-Mart to buy an extra pillow. Then we went back to the room and befouled the bedspread. It had been almost two weeks, after all. Squishy sex, shower, and time for dinner.

We drove around Los Banos looking for food and, upon realizing that nothing but Burger King seemed to be open, we ended up in Santa Nella. There, we found a Denny’s. A good Denny’s. Not one of those stupid Denny’s Diner nightmares, nor even one of the ones renovated in subtle and noring pastels. This was a semi-original, albeit with some new paint and chairs, and it even featured the cartoon-style logo.

It was good. And so was the, ummm, creative way we burned off our calories afterward.

Los Baños to Salinas

Unfortunately, I didn’t sleep too well. I think it was the heater I’d been so excited about earlier in the evening. It made me stuffy and made my mouth feel like sandpaper. I was a little draggy all day. Didn’t affect our morning farewell to the Sunblock (Sundried?) Inn too much, though.

Breakfast at Jake’s Cafe, featuring four very large pancakes and one very small egg. I cheated on my cardiologist and had coffee. It didn’t kill me, and may have helped make our tour of downtown Los Banos more successful.

 

Los Banos is an interesting town, and there’s more going on there than there seems to be any reason for. Downtown is a nice stroll, although we seemed to be about the only people strolling it. Mark almost scored a pair of maroon Chucks and I drooled over a (closed) repair shop full of antique TVs and radios.

 

And we sort of wished we’d had breakfast at the lunch counter in the drugstore. Drugstores which smell like bacon are my favorites.

We decided to spend the rest of the weekend in Salinas.

We had two cars and there was no realistic way of orienting this trip other than driving both of them to Salinas. Once again, we decided to meet at a Wal-Mart, maybe because that’s where my road atlas came from, so I have every location in the country at my fingertips. So it was back across Pacheco Pass for me, through Gilroy, and south on 101. We both made good time, and we were both happy to be in a nice, clean, relatively pleasant-smelling Motel 6.

The room required initiation, so we took care of that before doing further exploring. First time for either of us in both Merced and Monterey counties. There were other firsts too.

 

Afterward, we made the drive to Castroville for dinner at Norma’s Giant Artichoke, home of deep-fried artichoke hearts. To say that Norma piles on the food would be a severe understatement. The gastric revenge started in the gift shop (where Mark bought me a way cool miniature shopping cart) and didn’t completely let up until Sunday morning. But there will be no further details. And, lest this sound like a bad review, the food was great. There was just way too much of it.

 

After dinner, we hit Castroville for a few minutes, including a stop where we acted on out mutual passion for older Mexican supermarkets. Then I took Mark on the Salinas neon tour.

 

Salinas is an interesting town for fans of neon and old commercial architecture. One section of South Main Street features an amazing bowling alley (with full functioning neon), a former Lucky supermarket, and assorted other oddities.

 

Downtown and North Main are worth drive-throughs as well.

 

We also managed to scope out our likely breakfast establishment.

 

We concluded the neon tour with a somewhat vintage Safeway on Alisal, which I’d photgraphed before in the daytime. I was a little disappointed to see the sign neither illuminated nor spinning, but it was still impressive.

 

We picked up beer and other necessities at the Safeway and headed back to out Motel 6. We managed to get the heat working after about a half hour or so. And then we settled in and curled up for “Saturday Night Live” and other entertainments. For added flavor, we listened to out next door neighbors having very loud sex. That was fun. We vowed to annoy them by even noisier on Sunday morning.

I was close to comatose by this point from the food, from the previous night’s sleep deprivation, and from my first two beers in about six months. I slept hard.

Salinas and Home

 

Good sleep makes me happy. Waking up next to Mark on a rainy morning after good sleep made me very happy. We made noise, as planned, and heard even more disturbing noise from the neighbors. At one point, it sounded like they were trying to come through the adjoining room door.

When Mark was in the shower and I stepped outside for a cigarette, I was a little freaked out to see that one of the occupants of the room next door was a kid about 10 or 11. I chose not to think about whether he was a participant in the noisy sex or was just forced to watch and/or listen. His dad, or the adult with him at least, was a real redneck shitbag so I figured it could have gone either way.

 

After breakfast at the Armory Cafe, which we’d discovered the previous night, we strolled Main Street and the downtown area. Mark took pictures of lots of intact theatre buildings. I was fascinated by Hubert’s Shoes.

Then we ventured into the spiffy new National Steinbeck Center. It’s a great idea for a museum, and Steinbeck’s is some of the only fiction I actually read. Mark has even more of an obsession than I do. Unfortunately, it was one of that disturbing new breed of museum which seems to have a graphic designer as its curator rather than a historian. There were lots of gimmicks (too many of them child-intensive) and not nearly enough in the way of actual artifacts or information. The best part of the tour was a 13-minute documentary which wasn’t available for purchase in the gift shop, even though they had plenty of room for cookbooks which were unrelated to John Steinbeck in any way.

The afternoon concluded with a Watsonville drive-through. Interesting town, and a pretty lively one at that. There was some sort of immigrant protest going on, but we never figured out what it was about. Note to protesters: if your signs are illegible, it’s sort of hard to make your point.

At about 4;30, we both needed to get to our respective homes. I always hate this part of the weekend, and today was no exception. But it was a damned good weekend. And I think our weeklong trip to the Northwest next month will be a big success. I’ve found my travelling companion…

Way Down South in Watsonville

Stories of Los Banos, Salinas, Castroville, and Watsonville coming tomorrow, maybe. Also: stories of love, noisy neighbors, spiders, child abuse, neon signs, chorizo, Steinbeck, artichokes, and more…

Hmmm. Seems I like travelling with Mark just about as much as I like doing everything else with him. He’s passed every test so far, and this was a damned important one…

On the Way

Congratulations to Shane on his first gallery show. If I were anywhere within a thousand or so miles of Kansas City, I’d go. Come to thingk of it, I think the last gallery show I went to may have been in Kansas City too…

  

But I am going to be leaving for Portland and Seattle tomorrow with Mark. It’s sort of snuck up on me in a way and i have an awful lot of stuff to do before leaving, from laundry, to bill-paying to house-cleaning, to maybe dinner at Tad’s tonight with Dan, Jamie, and Sarah…

What all that means is that this will probably be my last update for several days. And that most of the email in my inbox probably will not get answered until I get back. Why no, as a matter of fact, I’m NOT going to spend my vacation in front of a computer, thanks…

I was going to close out the test (quiz closed; link is to results) before departing, but I’ll leave it up for your amusement. Gotta go make some room reservations now. See you all in about nine days, probably with a big smile on my face…

SF to Eureka

It had been five years since my last trip to the Pacific Northwest, the land where I’d move in an instant if no external considerations were present. Last time I’d driven up on my own, stayed with friends in Portland, and met a friend from Minneapolis for the drive to Seattle and back home. Everything was great until I met up with said pouty friend and was frustrated by not getting to spend any significant time in Seattle.

This time around I was riding with Mark, who promised to be a much more entertaining travelling companion. I was looking forward to one of the best road trips ever, and I pretty much got it.

 

Mark showed up at my house about noon, having already driven three hours from Fresno. We packed up and got in the car, and after spending more than half an hour in traffic trying to leave this hellhole of a city, we were on the Golden Gate Bridge, headed for Eureka.

 

We took the scenic route, up US 101 through Santa Rosa, Ukiah, Willits, and any number of other small towns, most of which had numerous roadside stands specializing in carved bears and miscellaneous yard ornaments. There were motels and diners and all the things which make US highways more interesting than interstates.

 

We stopped in Ukiah for provisions and ice cream. It was really hot. Our ice cream melted. And at Myers Flat, we hit our first big milestone: Mark was, at that time, farther from home than he’d ever been. We took pictures to commemorate the event.

We also pissed in the woods, but that was more of a “back to nature” sort of thing…

We arrived in Eureka about 7:00 and checked into our reserved room at the Motel 6. Well, not exactly, as they’d lost my reservation. But we got a room anyway, and used it to stretch our muscles a bit. We felt much better afterward.

 

Eureka is a pleasant enough place, and the cool weather was a significant improvement over the heat in Ukiah. But it’s not quite as interesting as I’d somehow thought it might be. We toured the city by night, ate at a Mexican restuarant which was passable, if not authentic, and came home to bed, where I had a little trouble sleeping due to a bit of stiffness in the leg. We decided to make more stops to walk around on Sunday’s drive.

Eureka to Portland

 

We had breakfast in the restaurant by the Motel 6 and were pretty much on our way without significant delay. We explored Eureka a bit, and we motored through Arcata and most of the rest of Northern California pretty quickly. Neither of us was particularly in the mood for hippie oceanographers on this Easter Sunday.

 

It was all very scenic. And I’m not saying that in a sarcastic way, even though I’m not really a nature freak. It was a good day for a drive.

 

And for a stop at the Trees of Mystery, where we visited the gift shop (if not the actual trees) and wondered at Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox, noting that the latter evidently has the largest set of testicles on the west coast.

So Crescent City was just plain ugly, and I usually have a pretty high tolerance for that sort of thing. Highlights included a very old, very unmodified Denny’s and a Kmart which was among the unlucky ranks of those soon to be closed. My Funyuns were extra cheap.

 

Just north of Crescent City, we left US 101 for US 199, headed northeast to Grant’s Pass. We made it to Oregon pretty quickly, and we’d arranged our gas consumption in such a way that we only had to fill up once in that strange state with no self-service gas.

 

I like Grant’s Pass. It’s small and sleepy (and way too Mormon), but it’s an interesting little town in a redneck sort of way. There’s a cute (but not really cutesy) downtown and one of every fast food restaurant imagineable. And tons of cheap motels, although we weren’t in the market this go-round. You have to love anyplace which offers a last call for decadence.

We did fairly serious driving after Grant’s Pass (OK, Mark did fairly serious driving) and didn’t make a big stop until that Taco Bell in Eugene, where we also got gas. By the time we arrived in Portland (OK, Tigard), we were a little punchy. We searched the streets near the Motel 6 for an open restaurant, found none, and bought a late supper at the Safeway across the street. Then we slept.

Portland

 

Portland. Everyone’s idea of the perfectly-planned city. And by and large, it is. A dense, thriving downtown surrounded by a compact, thoroughly pleasant city. Good transit, water and bridges, hills, and more. And there are an infinite number of not terribly expensive short-term parking spaces downtown. It works well, and it hasn’t been overplanned to the point of looking like a theme park.

 

We hit downtown relatively early so as to allow plenty of time for exploring the central city and Powell’s City of Books, which is an absolute essential and may be the single most compelling reason to visit Portland. It provided several hours of entertainment and caused Mark to paart with quite a bit of money. I spent less, but was still quite entertained.

 

We roamed around downtown for quite a while, ate lunch, and made the rush hour drive back to Tigard via old US99W. This was about the point we started noticing that Portland’s suburbs have an unusually high number of adult bookstore chains. And that 99W (aka Barbur Boulevard) was going to be an interesting drive at night, what with all the neon to be seen.

 

And we were right. We spent a good chunk of the evening driving around Portland at night, looking for views in the hills, looking for beer at the QFC, and taking pictures of neon signs. I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves on the next page.

 

The Burlingame Fred Meyer is a wonderful thing. Fred Meyer is an interesting Portland institution to begin with: as one of the first large suburban retailers in the area, they demonstrated an uncanny knack for knowing where development would occur and being there to meet it. They were innovative stores as well, combining general merchandise and groceries, and introducing such things as rooftop parking, etc.

 

Hollywood, where I bedded down last time I visited, is always worth a look.

 

As is Sandy Boulevard (US 30) in general. The area around Lloyd Center, Portland’s first shopping center outside downtown, and the convention center would be more interesting if anything looked much like it did when first constructed.

 

After the tour of Portland by night, we took the long way home via old US 99E (aka McLaughlin Boulevard), through scenic Milwaukie, and found the place where we’d be having our morning meal.

Portland to Seattle

 

We bypassed the drive-in in favor of the Bomber Restaurant. A little history: the bomber in the parking lot used to act as the canopy for a fairly famous (among roadside history buffs) gas station. Now the restaurant remains, serving cheap and damned good food in a friendly sort of way, all to the accompaniment of 1940s pop standards.

 

After breakfast, we drov through downtown again and made our way upto the Pittock Mansion, where you’ll find a mildly entertaining house overlooking some of the best views in Portland.

 

Cities with active volcanoes overlooking them are always picturesque, if a little nerve-wracking. And I also like cities with actual vegetation, although my allergies don’t always agree. That allergy thing would come back to haunt me.

 

It was time to leave Portland now, since a one-week trip only allows so much time in any one place. We crossed our final bridges, stopped at Waddle’s and Safeway just before the Columbia River, and were on our way still farther north. Oregon thanked us on the way out.

 

Crossing the Columbia River, we escaped personal income tax and those weird speed limit signs which read “Speed 50”. We gained a really high sales tax, really expensive cigarettes, and self-serve gas.

 

Portland to Seattle is a pretty quick drive, actually, but along the way we were treated to a couple of active volcanoes, one very pastoral nuclear power plant, and the Tacoma Dome. Well, there was that gaggle of skate rats at the ARCO station in Kelso too, but I didn’t even steal a glance. Really.

 

Upon seeing Mt. Ranier, we knew we were pretty much there. A few more miles and we found our Motel 6 in scenic Sea-Tac. It really was; we had a view of Seattle’s favorite volcano right from the window of our room. We christened said room by taking care of one minor emergency and then set off into the night in search of food.

 

As might be expected, we found it on old Highway 99, which is known as Aurora Avenue north of Seattle. Cheap pizza, spaghetti, and beer in a smoke-filled environment. Who could ask for more? After dinner, we sampled the neon of Aurora Avenue and one chain drugstore…

 

 

Aurora Avenue. Home to enough neon motels, old diners, and supermarkets to give me a permanent stiffy. We went up and down this stretch of what used to be US 99 many times. Pictures were taken with reckless abandon.

 

We never quite made it to the Elephant Car Wash for the purpose it was intended to serve.

 

We found neon in Green Lake, neon in Wallingford, neon downtown, and neon in the university District.

 

And we headed home by way of downtown. Where we took pictures of each other under some of the most famous neon around.