Friday Night Halfway... on Monday?

[canyonwalker]

Oregon Cascades Travelog #1
Klamath Falls, OR - Tue, 1 Jul 2025, 00:20am

It's like Friday Night Halfway... except on Monday! We hit the road Monday afternoon after work to get a jump start on our 4th of July vacation. We're headed to Bend, Oregon for several days. Tonight we've gotten as far as Klamath Falls; thus the Friday Night Halfway comparison.

With getting 8 hours of driving behind us, though, it's technically more like 3/4 of the way there. But I call it halfway because it's more lyrical. Would Bon Jovi's 1986 hit Livin' on a Prayer have been as successful if the band had crooner, "Woah we're 3/4 of the way there"?

Oh, but the map above/right shows 6 hours not 8, right? Yeah, that doesn't include traffic or stops for dinner and gas. The drive of 387 miles took us almost 8 hours. We left just before 4pm and arrived at the hotel at a quarter to midnight. Along the way we stopped in Fairfield/Vacaville[1] for dinner[2], Red Bluff for ice cream and a bathroom stop, and Redding for gas[3].

[1] Yes, there's a town in California that's named "Cow town" in Spench. Or is it Espançois? Frañol?

[2] We ate dinner at Del Taco, a fast-food chain restaurant we kind of make a point of visiting when we're outside our home area as there aren't any near us. You could call it a guilty pleasure but that's a misnomer because we feel no guilt about it. I'll be happy to explain why it's a slightly odd pleasure, but it won't be a guilty explanation.

[3] We drove 30 more miles from Red Bluff to Redding before filling up on gas because (a) I wanted to run the tank reasonably far down before filling to stretch the time 'til the next fill up and (b) there's a Costco in Redding, where a fill up saved us over $10 versus buying gas in Red Bluff.

So, we're at our hotel for the night. It's a Days Inn that looks a bit dowdy from the outside, though the rooms are... slightly... nicer on the inside. And it's less than half what the local Holiday Inn Express was asking. It's quiet— even the two vagrants outside are politely minding their own business, quietly— and the bed's very comfortable to stretch out on. Those are the two main thing I ask for right now.

The drive this evening was a long one, especially on a day when I'd gotten up at 4:45am (dratted neighbor's howling new puppy). But the good news is there's less driving for Tuesday. It should be an easy 2.5 hours to Bend. And that's the point of a Friday Night Halfway. Even if it is on Monday.

Comments

[canyonwalker]

Hawk told me she thinks one of the vagrants was a tweaker and the other was possibly a drug dealer. I'd gather that's from the way he was hanging around in the parking lot next to his car. Though honestly IDK what the profile of a small-town drug dealer is other than what I see on TV shows.

[some_other_dave]

I wonder why the map shows your route as going through Reno?

[some_other_dave]

...and now the map shows you going through Winters and Red Bluff and such. No idea why it showed a route to Reno earlier.

[canyonwalker]

The map is Google Maps's result for the query about how to get from Sunnyvale to Klamath Falls, it's not a breadcrumb trail of the actual route we drove. While the actual route we drove generally should be the primary result displayed it's possible some of the alternates could be pretty wacky. For example, last night it suggested as "Plan B" we could detour east from Redding to Susanville and add 2 hours to the trip. Yeah, no.