Tag Archives: fog

The Day of Big Trees

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24.08.2017
Ausma writing:

1st and 2nd team wake up in Motel 6 in Medford, Team 3 in motel in Weed. We take a quick sandwich and go to the Rogue Valley Inn motel to have some breakfast. This motel moved us yesterday, because there is a reconstruction and there were no places for us. Some of us have coffee and juice, others cornflakes, and then we go on a long journey to San Francisco.
The first team will try to drive to Walmart supermarket to give back the stoves and pans.

We drive along the road 190 towards the ocean coast. On the way, we are accompanied by fog and smoke coming from a burning forest near coastline. Ocean was gray, with large waves, foggy. As usual, we collect some small rocks from the ocean coast.

We drive through the Redwood National Park – on the edge of the road there are huge sequoias – very large and tall trees – biggest trees in the world. We are stopping everywhere in the road pockets, taking pictures, and flying like children through the sequoias forest. Daumants is very glad that we are in the big sequoias forest, not just seeing some trees as at the start of the trip. Impressively – the forest is in the mist, only at + 15*C outside. We are joking, that acclimatization for Latvia begins after the heat in America.
We drive along the historic 101 road, which is often referred to as the Redwood Road. We go to the Thomas Kuchel Visitor Center, named after a US Senator from California State (1953-1969). There we learn about the Sequoia trees and Redwoods. It is interesting to compare sequoias and redwoods: they are plants of one family. The Gigant Sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum) are more than 3200 years old, 300 ft or 91.4 m high, a mass about 3500 tons, a diameter at the base – 40 feet or 12.2 meters, the seed is like oat flake, but the cone is like chicken egg – they are the thickest trees on world. In turn, Coast redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens) are the longest trees on world: more than 2000 years old, up to 370 feet or 112.8 meters; mass about 1200 tons, diameter at foot 22 ft or 6.7 meters, seed like tomatoe seed, but cone like olive.
Soon we arrive at the Redwood Giant’s Avenue, which looks like a snake above and below the 101st road. Again we are in the Redwood Forest. Again stopping, taking pictures and trying to find the thickest and then the tallest trees, apart from the sequoias of redwood. In the roadmap it is written that somewhere there grow the oldest and largest trees in the World. I am not sure if we found it, but the remains we saw were both thick and long.

We visit private museum of Minerals. Ilgonis and Maris as experts buy some items (minerals, rocks, fossils and meteorites), for their home museum, others just visit the exposition.

We ride cars through the old sequoia tree, which does not show any signs of life. Glad to pay $ 8, to capture the moment, how our cars go through this tree. It turns out there is also an alive tree that you can go through for $ 5, but it stays for the next time. Team 1 traveled through that tree – Chandelier tree (height 315 ft, diameter – 21 ft, age 2400 ys) in Leggett.
Time is running on and we drive to San Francisco, still on our way to Walmart supermarket, because we need to buy some food for breakfast.

750 km traveled during all day and we are at the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. The sun has just set, but it’s a little light to finally see the bridge without a fog. We take some pictures; the wind is so strong that blows us off the feet, it’s cold.

We go to the bustling stream of San Francisco streets and it was hard to see the sign of Europe’s hotel & hostel on Brodway street, because other advertisements and signage were so bright. Maris has the sharpest sight and sees the letters above the very narrow door. We quickly load and shovel all the belongings from the car, because tomorrow we will transfer the cars back to the car rent. 5352 miles or 8563 km on the roads of USA are done. We drag the bags to the room on the third floor by very steep stairs. The room is full of stuff. The drivers go to look for car parking; the rest are struggling with suitcases. Need to pack for the journey back home.

Good night. This will be our last night in America.

Driving south again

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23.08.2017
Kārlis writing:

We are at Portland Suites Airport East motel. Another day, another early morning. Jump out of bed. All right, you got me! It’s not a jump, it’s more like a fall out of bed for me. Have a quick shower. Run…, no, not for morning exercise, run out of milk. No problem, made some hot water in microwave or on our mini gas stove, sorry, don’t recall. Put some porridge in it, as usual 2 packages each (kids included, why do they make them so small, anyway), some of us took sweet ones, some unsweet corn based ones. All tasted good. We put some real coffee in our cups and waited for the best taste. As usual, we also got some fruits. We made some sandwiches for later and put all daily food in two bags, one for each car. The rest of food went in cooler bags. Dishes were cleaned and we had 4 minutes left to collect our staff from the room. Three minutes and we were done. Here we go. Not so fast! We still had to solve a daily puzzle of squeezing our never stop expanding luggage, pots and pans included, into our cars. Well, not as hard as it may sound, we were all very experienced already at the time. Now we’re done.

The next navigation target fixed to Crater Lake, Oragona located at distance of about 240 miles from us. About 350 miles were planned total for us for today (it’s about 550 km – that’s specially for you folks who still live in metric). Ole, we are on a road again.

The road to Crater Lake was easy, at least from point of view of navigation that I did. “Take LEFT after one and a half mile”, “Copy that”, “Left now!!!” — this was how our radio conversation sounded. Maybe such kind of conversation does not seem to be very interesting for a reader but I suppose it might have been very useful for us at a time.

Just after making the last turn on the Crater road (just right after that last “left now”) the traffic suddenly stopped. Forest around had been recently damaged from a fire. Tree trunks were black and missing needles seemed to be needless. Somewhat little bit surrealistic view. And no one here to feast us with carrot bites. And I forgot to mention the fire smoke that still was smelling in the air. Under such circumstances looking around the destructed forest we spent about endless 15 minutes in traffic jam. Then we started to move inside the National park reaching the North part of the Crater. Due to the slow traffic, the officer at the park entrance did not look at our National Park Entrance Card (if needed I will refer to it as NPEC from now on) instead he was waiving getting every car inside as fast as possible free of charge. Not that it is important, just to conclude it was completely useless for us to get the NPEC out of a car shelf (I knew this new introduced acronym is going to be useful one day).

Last few miles and we got close to the very top of the crater rim. The parking place turned out to be foolishly full. We decided that our drivers will find some place to park and the rest of our team jumped out of cars. At he beginning we climbed up a path getting at the very rim of the Crater and then we got a little disappointed from a view we saw or rather what we did not see. Everything was in a foggy smoke. The opposite side of the crater was just imaginable, the central island, called the Wizard island that is in fact volcano inside the volcano, was partly noticeable. Where are all the heavenly colors that we expected to see? Where is the blue sky and greenishly blue crystal clear water in the lake? Beside that outside temperature was quite low, now I understood, the lake is so clear because it gets its water from the melting snow that is visible on several places around the crater. Later we had a chance to get closer to such a snow pile. Yes, it is a real snow indeed no doubt about that. The lake surface is about 6200 ft above sea level, let’s say we are at 2000 m or higher at the crater rim.

Next to the road there was a fire truck. Far away in the Western part there was some large smoke clouds and fire still going on. This time the forest fire started a few days ago by lightning strike. It has been monitored since then but generally fireman do not fight any small (is this small?) forest fire letting it end naturally. There was an information board set up with actual forest fire information. Some roads have been closed because of that. Our roads were opened. We met other teams at the crater.

Rihards decided to join another team that was thinking about swimming in the lake. Although I’m not sure if anybody took a swim at all in the Crater Lake that day. Anyway, it seemed too cold for rest of us and we decided to go to the next vista point at the Eastern part of the Crater (in fact I am not sure if viewing point is called as vista point in Oragon. Isn’t it only in California? Never mind, you got the point and we got to the point.)

Crater looked a bit better from the next viewpoint. Possibly fog started to clear a little bit or we get used to it or Sunlight from this direction was showing more of the lake. We took another series of pictures. Juris and Kristaps decided to walk uphill reaching the Watchman peak. It took them about half an hour there and back.

We continued to the Visitor Center and had some time at this viewpoint. There we met Rihards, our team was complete again. So, we started our way to Medford making a few stops between. We drove through a very nice forest with large pine trees around the road and hills in front of us. Very nice view, especially after many desert crossings.

We arrived at our supposed motel in Midford after 6.00 pm. Almost at the same time the team two arrived. We all were tired and thought to have some nice rest this evening because for the next day there was even a larger way scheduled ahead us. For our unpleasant surprise, motel administration said “Sorry, we have some construction going on. No free places!”. I and Ilgonis, we tried to reach Agnese on phone several times about motel booking information but failed. She was out of mobile coverage. At this stage we got to know that at this moment only free nearby places for a reasonable price were left only at Motel 6, here in Medford and in Weed. The weed was place closer t Sanfrancisco were we were heading and it also has been considered as our potential staying place before.
Additionally we took into account chance that any place that we will not take may become occupied any moment and we do not want to spend a night on a street. Since Motel 6 at Medford seemed to be no better as Motel 6 at Weed, Ilgonis called and made reservation for all our teams in Weed. Besides Weed is about 100 km closer to Sanfrancisco, we thought. We were tired but we decided to moved to Weed.

Not to go into more details, at the end our teem number 3 appeared in Motel 6 in Weed but the teams number 1 and 2 stayed at Motel 6 in Medford that the initial motel had arranged instead of their overbooked rooms. Kristaps was ready to go back from Weed to Midford another 100 km, but rest of us were feeling too tiered. So, we all stayed in Weeeeeeed. Just after we arrived at the motel, three fireman tracks followed us. There was no fire there, it turned out that firemen were working somewhere out in forest and stayed overnight in the same motel.

A few minutes later we went out for a dinner in local Hi-Lo café in Weed. They even were selling souvenirs like “I love Weed”. Just to explain, the town in fact had gotten its name from its founder of the local mill Abner Weed. What did you think? Anyway, the moto of Weed is — “Weed like to welcome you!”. This day ended not quite as planned but we were happy that we decided to have a little bit more rest and to move on at about 9 o’clock tomorrow morning. We went to bed. End of day 25.

The 2nd Day in San Francisco

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02.08.2017
Vita writing:

We woke up at 6:30am. For breakfast we had an infinitely sweet muffins that we had obtained in warehouse store the previous day (is everything really so sweet in America or is it just us… brrrrr), we had a cup of fresh yesterday’s coffee, we collected all our countless stuff left them under the supervision of Gleb. We took a subway ride to the Civic center, then took the bus Number 30 North. It turned out that you need to register the Clipper cards twice – on entry and on exit for this ride. I probably did not do it right and some additional money was pulled away. It’s good that kids were clever, they made it all right for their Clipper cards.

We went to the Golden Gate Bridge. It was foggy, thick fog all around the bridge. We were trying to see it and take pictures of the foggy bridge. We took a trail uphill. The fog did not vanish, but we were happy about the view. For a short moment even the bridge’s contours could be seen following by cheerios sounds. We went down the hill and over the mighty bridge. Wind blew in the ears and it was strong. Overall views all around were fabulous.

We started to go back to the center of San Francisco by foot. We were tired and happy. We stopped by the Dome — the beautiful art temple, built in the 20th century. We sat drained into deep philosophical reflections of life. Philosophically clever turtles swam in the pond.

Let’s go to the Super Duper burgers. And we did have real burgers. I usually do not eat such things in Latvia. Then Daumants introduced everyone with his drink of Root Beer. That got all four of our family.

Drivers went to get the cars, but we’re still wandering along ways of San Francisco. We took the trolleybus number 22 to get closer to the subway. In our way we enjoyed beautiful neighbourhoods with beautiful private houses. Wonderful flowers, roses at home gardens etc. Architecture, unusual facades and beautiful windows. Fabulous … Huge lavender shrubs that when touched by hand were smearing some sort of fabulous oil. For some time after that I still smelled my hand to enjoy the nice scent. We went to the City Hall, Opera and many other interesting places.

When we arrived at the motel, we were waiting for drivers for quite a long time. We sat on the cold floor to chill out somehow and we continued to wait for our drivers. Finally, the cars were there and we started to fill them up and we are on our way.
At first we can not find were the shopping center is located, it was dark already. After a huge shopping at the Walmart, people finally start using our walkie talkies. Now it is so much easier. Karlis ahead of the team 3 is well oriented and we are happy to get to the motel. But oh, there are cockroaches in a room. Good night. The feet are heated, the nose is burning from sun and the tiredness is huge.

Jānis, Laura, Agnese comment:
The little adventure named car rental was as exciting as tiring and long. Everything started with a long ride (but in comparison – not so long) by metro (BART) during which we had several discussions about some american choices of accessories – that is Laura does not like rings that some choose to put in their noses. After the metro trip a short distance from from the station an employee from the car rental company Enterprise picked us up and drove us to the car rental. During this trip we received a free story about the Babel tower.

The choice in the car rental was very vast and impressive. For example, there was a car available with completely used tyres, with which even the smallest rain would create a feeling of being in an aquapark. One of the cars available could not be locked, which, of course, dismisses all worries about the things inside. However, at the end, we received cars without features mentioned above and a couple of the cars where even better than what we paid for, although I must admit that the reason for it could be that the car rental company ran out of cars. Daumants received an grey Hyundai Sonata, Imants received an white Jeep, Juris got a black Nissan Altima, Kristaps a red Hyundai Elantra, Ilgonis received a dark gray Chrysler and Salvis received a beautiful, dark Dodge Charger. After all six teams received their cars we where ready to go.

It turned out that each car could only have two drivers, which displeased us, because two drivers where going to join us in Los Angeles. After we explained to the employee of the car rental company that this was a pretty big problem, we where allowed to choose three drivers for a couple of cars. At this point we heavily felt the absence of Austra and Loreta, because several teams had to be reorganized.

I Love SF

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01.08.2017
Ilgonis writing:

“I love SF”, this slogan was stamped on our hands while we waited to climb a Coit tower where we enjoyed a panoramic view of the San Francisco. I think I can agree with these words because during the day we experienced many wonderful things. We visited Chinatown with it’s busy street’s, rushing people and vegetable markets. We admired steep hills of the city that previously I had seen only on Hollywood movies. We wondered how people can park cars here and they do not roll downhill?

Then we went by a ferry to the famous island of Alcatraz. Do you remember a scene from the movie “The Rock” where Sean Connery sings a song about Sanfrancisko while taking a shower? Apart from the fact that this song was buzzing in my head for a whole day, this movie was all that I knew about Alcatraz prison. Reality was quite a different but not less impressive mostly thanking the good audioguide that revealed history of the prison and its inhabitants. After returning to mainland we listened to the furious cries of sea lions on a Pier 39. Did you know that wet sea lions are black but dry specimens lazy lying on the platform become moss green?

We were already tired and it was not easy to climb five blocks to the Lombard street but it was worth of it because we could watch cars slowly going down the narrow serpentine among flowers that are on the both sides of the road. A final crescendo (literally) was a ride on the famous San Francisco cable car that took us from the Fisherman’s Wharf to the train station. We went up and down banging and clinging while the most brave persons of our group were hanging on both sides of the cable car. The only disappointment was the Golden Gate Bridge that was hiding in the fog for a whole day. Let’s hope tomorrow we will be more lucky.