Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

High Desert Weekend Trip-log #1
Leaving home soon (I hope) - Fri, 25 Mar 2022, 5:45pm

Tonight we leave on a weekend trip to visit the Antelope Valley Poppy Reserve and other parks in the high desert of California. We won't actually get as far as all that tonight, though. We'll drive as far as Bakersfield. It's our Friday Night Halfway technique... which I realize we haven't employed much lately. The last was six months ago, in October; then before that, not since a night in Folsom in July.

There's good news and bad news about staying in Bakersfield tonight. The good news is that we'll actually be more than halfway there. We'll have covered over 4 hours and 250 miles of driving already. Tomorrow morning we'll have just over an hour more to get to the park. Yeah, if I wanted to be technical I could have titled this journal entry "Friday Night 77% of the Way There," but that's foolish.

The bad news is we'll be in Bakersfield. It's an overgrown dusty shit-hole town at the edge of where California's agricultural Central Valley meets the desert oil belt. The ground's almost too arid to farm, the summer heat is brutal, the air is awful, and probably half the population is on illegal drugs. ...Not that I fault them too much. If I had to live in this hell-scape I'd probably turn to drugs, too.

Another minus is that we'll arrive late at night. Though we aimed to roll from home not long after 6pm it's already looking that will be closer to 7. And we'll need to stop for gas. And dinner. And a bit of shopping— we're still trying to find more bowls matching our new set of plates! 🤣 And there will likely be traffic all along the way, even on I-5 in the remote Central Valley. A drive that could take just under 4 hours with no traffic and no stops will likely be 6 hours tonight. So I anticipate we'll get to our hotel room around 1am and I won't be able to wind down for sleep until closer to 2. 😖 That's kind of the deal with Friday Night Halfway, though. Especially when we push it to Friday Night 77% of the Way There.

But again, there's an upside to the late hour and having to be in Bakersfield. Aside from the fact that most of my time in Bakersfield will be spent unconscious, I mean. In the morning we should have an easy drive to the park, leaving more time and energy available for hiking. Should. We'll see how it goes.


Update: Good news, bad news (mostly good news) in Bakersfield

Truckee, Calif - Friday, 24 Sep 2021, 11pm

Today we packed our bags after work for a weekend trip to the Sierra Nevada to celebrate our anniversary. We're staying 2 nights in Truckee, at a Hampton Inn where we stayed 15 years ago when we got engaged.

The drive up here from Silicon Valley was surprisingly not terrible. It's a trek of 215 miles, and usually on a Friday evening we hit "Friday escape" traffic in various places around the Bay Area and on the road to Sacramento. But tonight the delays were minor. Often a trip this distance means getting in after midnight. We arrived at the hotel tonight at 10:30pm! It helped that we left home at 6:50pm, having eaten dinner already, then hammered straight through without stops.

Now I'll see if I can wind down and get to sleep around midnight instead of 1:30am-ish as often happens with these Friday night trips, the better to get up early tomorrow and start a day of hiking.

We've headed out of town this evening... and it's not just to get a shot 105 miles away from home. It's a legit, leisure road trip!

Friday Night Halfway

Tonight we're bedded down in Ukiah, CA, 155 miles from home. It was a not-hard trek up to here, well north of San Francisco along US-101. We left home at 6:45 after work and a quick supper of leftovers and arrived 3 hours later, having made a 30 minute stop for snacks and stretching our legs halfway here.

Even here is but a halfway point, too. Partly that's because there's little about Ukiah to recommend it as a destination... even though we have stayed in Ukiah a few times before! But mostly it's because Ukiah is a convenient way-station, a Friday Night Halfway stopover. Tomorrow we'll continue onward to Crescent City, on the far north coast of California, another 240 miles away.

Time for a "Vaccication"?

A lot of people right now are planning or taking "vaccications"— vacations to celebrate their vaccination. I've also seen the concept called "revenge travel". It's still too early to take revenge on Coronavirus; Hawk is fully vaccinated but I've had just 1 of 2 shots. Thus we've kept our plans for this trip cautious.

1) We are planning to travel around 1,000 miles total, but it will all be in our own car. We're not traveling via planes or trains, or transiting through airports or train stations. This cuts the risk way down.

2) We're planning outdoors, uncrowded activities; we're going hiking in remote areas! We're not visiting people indoors or even going to crowded outdoors places. This also cuts the risk way down.

3) Finally, we're planning to eat meals by buying groceries and takeout. We're not going to eat inside restaurants, or even in hotel common rooms, just because we're away from the conveniences of home. This, too, cuts the risk way down.

When will we take bigger trips again? Basically, a) after we've both had full vaccinations and ideally b) as nationwide infection rates drop from their current plateau. We did start booking an east coast trip for June earlier this week. With luck we'll see a clear path to take a flying trip before then, too; perhaps by Memorial Day.

About This Weekend...

But enough about what might happen weeks from now; let's talk about our plans for the next few days.

Saturday we'll drive up 101 out along the coast, stopping by Redwood National Park. There's a tall-trees hike there we were thwarted from being able to trek when we visited last October. We've got a permit now for it, so we'll hike it on Saturday. (Okay, so maybe there is an element of revenge travel to this trip!) After that we'll head up to Crescent City for the next two nights.

Sunday we'll visit a few waterfalls in the redwood forests around Crescent City. We've got a book of waterfall hikes with several ideas marked; really a lot more that we can do in this short trip. We'll finalize our picks in the morning based on weather and energy levels.

Monday we've taken the day off to stretch this trip out to a 3-day weekend. We've got another waterfall hike marked; this one along the coast instead of in the redwoods. We'll also visit Agate Beach at Patrick's Point State Park again as Hawk so thoroughly enjoyed picking up shells and rocks there last time. Shortly after laying out her collection of spoils, in fact, she started talking about when we could go back.