The Two Thousand Mile Entry

Photos

Davis, CA

Leaving the merry San Francisco to its own devices, we drove to Davis, CA, where another ex-Chinaclimber called Dan led us to the American River in the late afternoon, where we plunged gaily off rocks into the cold and swift water. A shame we couldn't spend more time hanging out, but Lake Tahoe loomed unseen over the distant horizon, beckoning us with its sapphire waves.

Lake Tahoe, CA/NV

En route to Lake Tahoe the sun took itself off to sleep and left us with a dazzling wash of colours as we climbed through the forests of evergreens. It was truly dark by the time we arrived, and armed with Alex's address we immediately set to getting lost. After half an hour of turning down identically labyrinthine streets we were forced to admit defeat and make a call. Alex and family came to extract us and provide an honour guard back to their home. What a home! Half way up a mountain and facing the lake; we had lucked out on accommodation! In the evening cool we drank a couple of beers on the balcony, caught up with Alex and marvelled at the starlight reflecting off the breeze-ruffled water. Having hammed up the food logistics (regrettably not literally) we were forced to scour any fast food establishments that might still be open at 10pm, but unfortunately we were in a respectable neighbourhood (Incline village) that had very few. Even Subway was regarded as slumming it. Mercifully, Alex and family took pity on our poor shrivelled stomachs and stuffed us with hotdogs.

The next day Alex and his sister were heading back to the UK, and Angus (Daddy Graham) off somewhere else for a few days. We were expecting to camp (surely no better place?) but had become a little nervous from the number of "don't camp; there are bears" warnings. One had the impression that Lake Tahoe was filled with bears, crammed in between the trees nose to tail and piled up in the Lake such that you might run from one side to the other. Mercifully we never had to chance the bears, as Angus very kindly offered the use of the house for as long as we needed. Later that day we went for a hike from Eagle Falls (shouldering our way between the bears) up to Dick's Lake. We took a wrong turning and never quite made it to Dick's Lake, but were more than content with the breathtaking scenery (quite literally, the mountains were steep and we have become fat and weak) we had found. 

Day 3, mountain biking! The strongly recommended "Flume Trail" turned out to be 4 miles of sandy uphill, which was not quite what we had bargained for, so we returned to the car (at relativistic speed), dismantled the rented bikes, unclogged the bears from the chain and chucked all the parts into the back of the faithful Steed. We then went to the Tahoe Rim Trail, which was utterly, utterly mind blowing. It was 12 miles of ridge-top trail 500m above the lake, through sandy, rocky woodland bathed in the golden light of late afternoon. Never been on anything like it. Joe ate dirt once on a sneaky turning jump, but was fairly pleased with his overall lack of significant damage. In the evening we rewarded ourselves with beers at Rookie's sports bar. All in all our impressions of Lake Tahoe are of a rich community of outdoor-loving (hiking, mountain biking, diving, boating in the summer and skiing in the winter) holiday makers. Of the people we met and spoke to, very few were actually from Tahoe. No-one in Tahoe is from Tahoe. 

Route 50 and Nevada

After an entire morning of faffing and trying to leave, we finally got on the road (bears ricocheting wildly off the front bumper) sometime in the early afternoon, striking out for mid-Nevada for stargazing camping. The change from California to Nevada was drastic. Within 15 miles of leaving the Cali border the trees stop in a disciplined line and handed over scenery duty to the dusty desert and low rocky hills. It turns out Route 50 is "The Loneliest Road in America". There were towns roughly every 80 miles but otherwise nothing but sweet desert to either side. As dusk fell the mood of the journey lost its franticness to "get going" and took on a more relaxed, cruising kind of attitude. The kind that eats up miles and hours without effort, and was perfectly augmented with Pink Floyd and a distant lightning storm, internal flashes lighting the clouds pink. One town we passed through had a police cruiser, a courthouse and jail all within about 500m. The cruiser kindly flashed his lights as we passed, causing us to drop a brick apiece. If we had been breaking the law we could have probably been caught and processed to a cell in under 3 minutes. After driving as far as we felt like, we pulled off the road onto a sandy track, and then again into the scrubby nothing. We ate a hasty meal of week-old boot cheese, nectarines and mouthwash and went to sleep in the car. Our plans for stargazing were foiled partly by the clouds overhead and partly by the sandy wind. It is very windy in the desert.

Utah

Mark's eyes slammed open at 6am with the rising sun and he set to driving immediately, grim determination in his eye and jaw. Today we were heading for Moab, Utah, so that we could visit the nearby Arches National Park. Joe, ignoring Mark's pleas for his co-driver and in-car entertainment, did his best to sleep, still in his sleeping bag. 2 hours later, coming across a sizable town we didn't know existed, we discovered to our surprise (nay, dismay) that we had taken a wrong turning, or missed a turning, or did something 80 miles earlier and ended up in Wendover, home of the tallest mechanical cowboy. Joyous as we were to see this visionary piece of engineering we were somewhat galled at adding mileage to what had already promised to be a formidable day. No matter. We manned up and got on with it, and a couple of miles later we were in Utah. Long, straight roads. Salt flats. Heat. Sometimes dust. Dark green scrub, yellow dirt, pink rocks, blue sky and white clouds (the fluffy continental kind). Tumbleweed. More salt flats. The saltiest lake ever. Words written in stones and beer bottles on the side of the road. Birds of prey wheeling above the highway. As we progressed south, the landscape changed from salt flats so vast and flat that the perfectly flat horizon looked like the edge of the world, to shallow rocky hills, to bigger rocky hills, finally to ravine and cliff like features -  the kind of thing you imagine old cowboy convoys rolling past. As we neared Moab, the geology became more and more outrageous. Who needs the Grand Canyon when you have Utah? So far we love Utah. Perhaps if you are desperate to be getting somewhere, then you will not enjoy Utah. If you are travelling for the love of the journey, then it is a fantastic place to be. 550 miles after awaking in the desert, we have reached Moab.

The Future

Tomorrow we head to Arches National Park and get a proper taste of Moab.

The Thousand Mile Entry

Welcome to the travel blog of Mark and Joe as they gad across America in their faithful car The Steed.

Photos

Well, where to start? At the beginning is as good a place as any. The best some say. I digress. We met in Seattle/Tacoma airport at 10am on Monday the 16th of August, after a gruelling and invasive (not physically, I hasten to add) interview by the US customs people. Both utterly jetlagged and bewildered by the shiny surfaces and aroma of coffee floating through the doors it took some time to work out that we had to leave the airport in order to continue the adventure. On the free shuttle bus to the travelodge we gawped at how American everything is. Hardly surprising, you masters of language might suggest, but it is. Everything is exactly how it appears in the TV and films that pervade our culture. Exactly. But bigger.

Seattle, WA

Having an entire day ahead of us we set off to explore, drinking "Peace tea" that comes in 1 dollar gigantic cans and has fabulous decoration on the side. We love peace tea. We went to the sci-fi museum where we oggled Captain Kirk's chair and the terminator replica, debating whether or not we could take one in a fight. We went to the Experience Music Project, which is more or less a large shrine to Hendrix and were saddened we couldn't get a slot in the "jam booths". We saw about ten trillion Starbucks, but decided not to grace them with our company and coin - a gesture of defiance as Starbucks was born in Seattle. Seattle is wide, clean place with fresh air, plenty of trees and a pervading aroma of fresh coffee. A place we both agreed would be little hardship to live in. On the second day in Seattle we went in search of an army surplus store that we might buy very cheap sleeping bags and a tent. Joe also wanted a spork, which was to be found at an outdoor shop manned by very pleasant people that gave us a modest "being British discount". More coffee was drunk. A visit to the famous Pike Place Market yielded little as we arrived as it was closing. Taco bell was tested. It passed. In the evening we took to the cheaper bars and marvelled at the fact we had made it to America and had a car full of petrol and a fistful of dollars. Nothing but the open road ahead.

The Car

On day 2 in Seattle we returned to the airport to pick up our car, where we found out we had been "upgraded" into what appeared to be smaller and less practical cars. Splendid. The choice was between a hyundai accent and chevrolet HTT (or something like that). The chevy came in a choice of 3 colours, but no colour could hide the fact it was essentially a Hearse. The hyundai appeared to be built using a technology similar to that used in the production of disposable takeaway containers, and contained a similar number of luxury features. In the end we decided the takeaway container was probably more efficient than the corpsewagon and went for that, dubbing it The Steed.

Portland, OR

Portland is what a city would be like if hippies and greebos got together and built one, which may be exactly what happened, given the Pacific Northwest tendency to grunge (Nirvana from Seattle, anyone?) and the overall inclination to liberalness. Fashion tends toward black t-shirts and jeans whilst food and drink tends toward independent franchises. Arriving in the evening we took the tram in for a quick drink at the Ash Street Saloon, which later turned out to be an "English style pub". News to us. Portland is well organised and keeps its citizens well fed with legendary "food carts", from which we ate a Hawaiian style breakfast/lunch of rice, sausage, egg, pineapple and orange pieces on the second day after riding into town on the tram. We searched for "Stumptown Coffee" (Stumptown being an old nickname of Portland due to the large amount of logging in the area), which was an excellent establishment, serving cheap, quality coffee with cheaper refills. A large number of beret-wearing applemac-using clientele littered the one large room and lended a pretentious, refined, independent air to the place. Not to be missed. 

We lunched on "Honkin' Huge Burritos", which were excellent and even the "small" lived up to the franchise's name. In the afternoon we rented bikes (Portland is loaded with cyclists) and cruised the streets looking for another army surplus to secure further camping items. In the evening we met with a "couchsurfer" called Alex (go to www.couchsurfing.org if your interest has been piqued) who showed us around the bar scene with her friend Louis. We started in a bar that had $5 infinite play arcade machines all over the place, so we enjoyed a few rounds of House of the Dead, Dance Dance Revolution (Louis: "Loosen up guys!". Us: "We can't; we're British"), X-Men and PacMan. Truly oldschool. After this the night becomes something of whirling blur of local beer (our favourite being Deadman ale), voodoo doughnut and jokes about the British. So thanks Alex and Louis, we had a wizard time.

Route 101

Ah. The legendary Route 101. A few hundred twisting miles of coastal beaches, jagged rocks and misty redwood forests. Before Route 101 between Seattle and Portland we quickly grew bored of the interstate I-5 and, taking a lesson from Zen and Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, turned off and followed the American equivalent of B-roads (somewhere around the size of a UK dual carriageway...well, almost) for the rest of the way. What a difference! From drear tarmac and glimpsed hills to small towns (our favourite was called Vader) framed in golden wheat and emerald trees. Anyways, Route 101 from Portland was awesome. We made deliciously slow progress, ate Philly cheesesteaks at Eureka and camped both nights, amidst the sprawling grandeur of gigantic pick-up trucks, RVs, and a plethora of outdoor gear including ATVs, windsurf rigs, dirtbikes and mountain bikes. Our toy tent and sleeping bags worked excellently. Somewhere along the way, turning into a road, Mark temporarily forget which side of the road to drive on and nearly drove us under a gigantic blue monster truck driven by two identical, slack-jawed barbies. What a sight.

San Francisco, CA

We landed mid-afternoon in San Francisco; blithely turning a corner on Route 101 we found ourselves on the stunning Golden Gate bridge, a monolith we could only have claimed to have seen in pictures and on Microsoft Flight Simulator '98. We met up with Joe's friend Josh from Chinaclimb and his friends in Fort Mason for a sunny picnic, and watched the happy, beautiful people of San Francisco at play for the rest of the afternoon. In the evening we went out for Mexican, and Josh gave us a quick driving tour of the city, including the quintessential superbendy part of Lombard Street. Day 2 in San Francisco was spent taking time out from the relentless grinding boredom of travelling and exploring to read our books, check our email, plan the future and write this blog.

The Future

Tomorrow we head to Lake Tahoe.