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| Day Three - Wednesday, August 6th, 2008
Tom continues his travel up the coast of Northern California, bidding a fond farewell to San Francisco in the process. He has a fast food incident, some ice cream, delicious mexican food that really hit the spot, and a hotel room view to die for.
Our day in San Francisco behind us, we woke up to now-familiar views and a noon deadline to check out of the hotel. We do so, and it isn't until after we drive out of the parking lot that we left our car in that we realize that we probably should have eaten some breakfast in the surrounding area after we had checked out, but before we had left the lot. Parking fees were not a factor at that point in time. Thus, genius points awarded, we decided to continue exiting the city and see what kinds of eats can be had on the other side of the bridge.
The bridge, of course, being the Golden Gate Bridge. I don't personally ever recall being on a bridge of this length before, so it was quite an experience to approach the thing from a distance, close in, and ultimately driving on it. As you can see from the pictures, it was still quite foggy, even at about 11:30am, so I wasn't able to see the entire bridge.
I'm guessing that it's more of a testament to how weird the weather in San Francisco can be, because once we crossed the Golden Gate Bay and stopped at the vintage point, we could see the low cover of clouds over SF. Our side of the Bay was all blue sky and sun.
This is me at 11:30 in the morning, Golden Gate Bridge and tourists in the background, looking Asian. You can see Eddie in the reflection of my right (your left) sunglass lens.
Once we had our fill of the view of the Bay, SF, Alcatraz et al, it was time to address our next issue: breakfast/lunch.
I'm going save space by saying that we ended up going to McDonald's. It was off the freeway (as it usually is), I had a craving for Chicken McNuggets, and we didn't want to look for a place to eat anymore. In we walked, me looking around hopefully for a poster that advertised a $1 4-piece McNuggets deal. No dice. So I set my eyes on the next best thing: the 6-piece Chicken McNugget Happy Meal. Those of you snickering can stop. It's perfect, you see; you get McNuggets, small fries, small drink, and a toy! So I sauntered up to the cashier, and while laughing (to create rapport with said cashier because, well, it is a bit silly for a grown man to order a Happy Meal for himself, and if the dude was going to make a stink out of it, at least he now considered me an acquaintance; not just customer #334), ordered the aforementioned meal. I'm feeling victorious at this point, because I was going to get all that I wanted plus a toy!
So I pick up my 6-piece Chicken McNugget Happy Meal and sit down. Everyone knows that first act of the Happy Meal Protocol is to see what toy you got, and... I got a girl's toy! Ya, really funny, cashier man. I know you probably frown upon adults partaking in a recommended-for-children value package, but did you have to ruin my victory with a toy manufactured for the intent of amusing a 6 to 12 year old little girl? I was hoping for a cool set of binoculars disguised as a plastic book (actual Wendy's toy), or a Happy Meal box that transforms into a red dinosaur (also real), but instead you got me an un-posable orange-haired girl on rollerskates. Thanks.
The above picture was taken about a week later at my home, where the perpetually peppy girl in a yellow vest and her monkey sporting too-cool-for-you stunners (read: sunglasses) now reside.
After our first meal of the day, we continued our journey 400+ miles from where we originally started to... hit traffic for the first time. Ironic, as we had kind of left Los Angeles and its congestion of car in search of the open road. After a while we left civilization behind and entered the dense, sparsely populated forests of Northern California. The drive was scenic, but after the first hundred winding curve up and down the sides of mountains, a craggy wall of rock on either side and steep drops into the unknown on the other, it all looked and felt the same. This is the part of trips where your mind wanders, your eyes straining to see between the trees lined up on the sides of the highway, looking for giant moving shapes that could be bears. You think about getting flat tires and wrong turns, and inbred cannibal cousins who depend on green travelers for sustenance.
Anyway, after about three hours of that we reached Mendocino. Perhaps it was the overcast weather, but the place didn't look like how it did in the brochures. Maybe we just didn't venture far enough into the heart of town, but we both got the eerie sense that the town, nay, the village, was more akin to the cinematic cultish communities of yore. You know, the ones that snatch road-weary travelers at night from their rooms at the inn and then proceed to ritualistically kill them in the town square to appease their pagan gods. I am pretty sure that the apex of their local church was topped by a statue of a dude wielding a scythe. I could be wrong; it could just have been hysteria. In any case, it was time for a stop at the local ice cream shop, which I heard was quite excellent.
Frankie's Hand Made Ice Cream was a small, quaint ice cream parlor with free WiFi that sat close to the 101. They served the more traditional flavors, like chocolate, vanilla, strawberry, but also more exotic flavors like mushroom. Yeah, I know it's a vacation, but I wasn't about to hand the happiness of my stomach over to such a blend of milk and fungi. I settled for chocolate.
Being so close to the end of an immense forest didn't seem to diminish the spirits of the locals any, as the back of their overhead menus was a blackboard covered in the random things they have been asked transcribed by the parlor's workers. Some classic ones: - What kind of bread does the ice cream sandwich come with?
- Do people actually live in Mendocino?
- How far away is civilization?
- Is this a Mexican restaurant?
Clearly driving through the trees made people a little less logical and a little more paranoid. On the other hand, I think I was one of the only Asian people there, so + points to you, Mendocino.
Snack complete, we went back on the road to Eureka. There was a whole lot of what the next picture shows on this leg of the drive, though I do want to point out the lone cyclist in the picture. He's pretty far out from dense civilization at this point; he's a brave soul indeed.
Here are more pictures highlight pretty much all there was to see in this neck of the woods. Can you imagine living in that house? There is no other house for miles, by the way. I can't.
Before you get to Eureka via the 101 you go through the legendary Redwood Forest of California.
It was here that we encountered more of my kind, in the form of travel that only my race can fathom. Why they were going to Eureka, I don't know. For the slow, it's not the Prius.
If you didn't know, the redwoods are tall. It got more and more ridiculously tall as we went, eventually stretching to a height that in a photograph a car was diminished to perhaps less than a tenth of the photograph. Useful for a frame of reference.
We didn't do the whole drive through the giant redwood bit because, well, it wasn't free, and it didn't seem like it was worth however much the tourist trap operators wanted to gouge us with. I would have stopped to take some photos along the way, if not for my irrational fears of getting mauled by a bear. We made it to Eureka just at dusk. Eureka is a pretty ghetto-looking town (read: El Monte) that is famous for its Victorian era architecture. My scouring of the Eureka wikipedia entry unearthed the factoid that the actor Brendan Fraser is from Eureka.
We arrived in the city just in time for us to get hungry. Luckily, I had prepared for such an event, and had found a Mexican restaurant that was conveniently across the street from the Red Lion Hotel that we were crashing at for the night. When I found it on yelp.com, its name was Carmela's. When we got there, the restaurant was actually named Puerto Escondido. Whoops. In any case, the food was fabulously authentic. I had the chicken enchiladas, which came on a hot plate with fresh rice and refried beans. It really hit the spot. Highly recommended in my book.
Our appetites thus satiated, we retired to our room, in order to veg out in front of the TV. Speaking of our hotel, I had wanted to keep all the pictures with the days that they were taken, but our hotel room's view was so magnificent, so glorious, that I decided to travel to the future and bring you a photo of our view that was taken the next morning here to you in the present as a present to you, loyal reader. (Much the same with the previous picture) It is with this picture that I will leave you. Until Day Four.
His trip now a third over, Tom gears up for an eight hour expedition through the entire state of Oregon, only to find that the details of even the best plan don't always favor the prepared. | | |
| Day Two - Tuesday, August 5th, 2008
Tom becomes a part
of the horde of tourists exploring San Francisco, enjoying the local cuisine,
art, and culture, and would have gotten rained on if not for the umbrella that
he thought to bring on the trip.
We will
begin this chapter the same way I woke up the second day: to a view of city hall
in the late morning. Neither Eddie nor I are morning people, so for us to have
woken up at 10am is an amazing feat in and of itself. We all like to joke that
certain inane things our friends "accomplish" are deserving of medals, awards,
and accolades, but this is an authentic achievement, I assure you.
Anyway, Tuesday was our first full day in a city. There
were a couple of these planned throughout the trip, and this being the first
really tested my day planning abilities. Because our hotel was so close to the
center of San Francisco, all of the things we wanted to see were within
reasonable walking distances. They were, in this order, Morty's
Delicatessan, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Chinatown, and
Empress of China. Of course, we did do some exploration here and there,
but that was the general area we stuck to.
We left the hotel at about
11am and headed off to grab some breakfast. Morty's Delicatessan was this
hole in the wall sandwich shop that I found through yelp.com. I had their egg
and sausage breakfast sandwich which was fairly good and in good portions. I was
barely able to finish it, but then I'm not used to eating too much in the
morning. From there we made our way to the main part of Market Street, where
pretty much everybody was. The crowd was quite sizeable and the sidewalks at
least two or three times the width of those in Southern California. There was a
lot of traffic, which reaffirmed our decision not to drive in downtown San
Francisco. I would come back to take a few pictures later on in the
night.
As we approached the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,
there was a swarm of people. Apparently, it's not a secret that this museum was
free the first Tuesday of every month. The sidewalk here was regulation-sized,
so you can imagine what a madhouse it was, with two lines starting from the
entrance that wrapped around either side of the building, on top of the regular
foot traffic going through the street.
At this point
I was about ready to say screw this, but then I had Eddie wait in line while I
forged ahead to check things out. As I wandered from the end of one line to the
other, I spied the usual museum gift shop, along with a museum cafe. Looking
through the windows of the cafe, I could see that the cafe was connected to the
lobby of the museum.
This is where it gets shady, folks. Some of you will
no doubt have moral reservations about celebrating my exploits. I figured I
could get into the museum via the cafe, thus bypassing the throngs of humans (is
that redundant?). So I did. Once in the lobby, mental Tom said to physical Tom,
"Well, it can't be this easy". Sure enough, there were two museum dudes standing
on the staircase up to the exhibits, and they were checking people for tickets
as they ascended. I looked around for where people were getting said tickets and
I spied another museum worker, parked where the door was, asking people "Do you
have a ticket? Can't get in without a ticket" while handing them one if they
didn't have it. So I went up to her, with the best confused Oriental tourist
look I could muster, and was handed the free permission slip to enter without
any question. Of course, I did wait until she was overwhelmed with people. So
with museum ticket in hand, I called Eddie through the magic of cellular phones
and instructed him to enter the museum and procure a boleta the same way
I did. Thus, mission accomplished and leaving the waiting herds outside, we
ventured up into the world of modern art, through the eyes of San Franciscan
curators.
A lot of art,
in my eyes, isn't really art. If I can take a toilet seat and mount it on
the wall and call it art, it's not. If I can put up three solid white
panels and shine a black light at it at an angle (?!), it's not art. If I
spend 1,000 hours handcrafting butterflies and various shapes out of paper and
stringing it together into a huge tapestry, then ok, it might be art. If
it requires me to have actual artistic skill, then it is art. The old
crotchety dude on CBS's 60 Minutes has it right, I think. You have to pay
your dues as an artist, like Picasso before his cubist days, before you can do
art (cubist Picasso, obviously).
But regardless of my misgivings about modern art (because
it is true that art usually isn't realized as such until much later in
history), the SFMOMA was still very interesting. I was suprised to see that the
Apple G4 Cube is considered a modern piece of art, along with the OLPC. The
architecture of the museum itself was cool, too. Our stay at the museum was
fairly brief, though I did find their exhibit of Chinese art done during the
Cultural Revolution to be quite interesting. There is a sad undercurrent of
cynicism beneath the facade of hope in most, if not all, of the works on
display. Yes, I've read a poem; try not to faint.
Venturing across the street from the SFMOMA I ended up at
this fairly sizeable park/quad where a lot of the tourists and locals alike were
gathered. Business types, yokels with backpacks and cameras like us, and people
walking their pets lounged around this area, with a view of artifical water
constructs and a small part of the San Francisco skyline.
From here, we
traveled our way up to Chinatown, stopping at random sites like this low-traffic
back alley. That moniker is misleading, as this was behind one of the major
hotels near Market Street, and the chair setups were outdoor seating of a hotel
restaurant. It also happened to be close to another museum, devoted to Jewish
artifacts. We didn't patronize this particular establishment, because it was no
doubt not free, so instead I took a moment to sit down and look
regal.
Eventually we
made our way to the outskirts of Chinatown to a park where a bunch of old
Chinese people were gathered. I observed from the recommended safe distance when
dealing with the Chinese man and took a picture to dissect later.
Chinatown was
also a hotspot for tourists. I had half expected to see well-dressed Asian men
standing outside of their clothing stores, gesturing to you in a welcoming yet
urgent way, as if your life depended on you purchasing one of their
"cheap suit". Instead, there were just as many non-Asians as Asians roaming the
streets. Like Solvang, the architecture is meant to invoke the feeling of
stepping into the streets of historic China, but because of San Francisco's
Chinese history, I have no doubt some, if not most, of it is authentic.
You can see
from these pictures that Chinatown is on a hill, so I must confess here that
much of our exploration is determined by whether or not we would be walking up
streets with steep grades.
There was one
doorway that was eeriely reminiscent of something out of the Hellboy
movies; see if you agree with me.
Of course,
San Francisco isn't SF without the next mass transit vehicle. They just stop in
the middle of intersection, allowing indecisive foreigners to hop on and off as
they liked while the rest of us pedestrians wait for the light to
change.
At this point
it was still much too early for us to eat dinner at the Empress of China
as according to plan, so we headed back to the hotel to relax. We made use of
our two TVs, which we would miss in subsequent hotel rooms, to watch our own
programs. Eddie made use of the ridiculously big couch with its ridiculously
large pillows to take an epic nap, while I surfed the airwaves lounging in my
own bed.
Eventually
the Armenian woke up and we left for the restaurant. By this time the sun was
setting. You don't go to Empress of China because you get great value for
the food you pay for. On its own, the food was not bad, but for the price (about
$15 per plate on its own, $30+ for their party specials) you better be getting a
view and an experience. Fortunately, the restaurant is on the sixth floor of an
building unobstructed by other, taller, buildings, and in the late afternoon you
get a great panorama of the bay and the rest of SF. The decor is old school
Chinese restaurant, the kind you see in old martial arts flicks from the Far
East, but with much more detail and trimmings, mostly done in dark wood. The
staff speak Cantonese and are quite speedy and cognizant of the fact that you
need something. I'd have a problem with going there if I had lived there, but
seeing as how I was on vacation, a little splurging never really hurt
anyone.
Nighttime
photography is a little difficult without a tripod or a steady hand. I had
neither, so some shots from this trip turned out less than desirable, but here
are some better-than-the-others shots.
I had saw this earlier in the day,
but it took a second passing in order for me take this picture of a Chinatown
business. You can probably figure this one out; all I have to say is that I
find that racist!
Strolling
down Market Street back towards the hotel while full, I came across some nice
lighting of a Bloomingdale's. Business must be slow, apparently, because
replacing lightbulbs must be fairly high on their upkeep list, right?
The city hall
again... again. Funny thing about my fascination with this building is that I
never walked the two blocks from where this picture was taken to see it up close
and personal. On the other hand, this prompted me to, about nine days after this
was taken, to go up to the city hall in Pasadena and see that place, finally,
with my own eyes and my feet planted firmly in the middle of its
courtyard.
It also was
starting to rain by the time we got here; for once the weather forecast was
right. Here I am, being either afraid, confused, or constipated. I have yet to
decide, and am currently taking speculations.
Oh, did I
forget to tell you that our hotel was across the street from the Orpheum? That
night some play/musical was going on; I don't remember the name, just that it
held no interest for me. Irrelevant. I was captivated by all the pretty lights,
which explains this photograph being here.
And with our
stomaches full of hot and sour soup, fried wontons in sweet and sour sauce,
Mongolian beef, sweet and sour pork, jasmine tea, fortune cookies, and BK
Lounge, we slept.
Tom definitely knew there was a lot more to SF than
meets the eye in the short time he was able to spend there, and would definitely
like the opportunity to explore it in the future with a local guide. Luckily,
this city is only about six hours away from where he lives (by car), so he
considers this experience an appetizer. In the next chapter of Seattle And
Back Again, Tom travels further up the California coast, where he encounters
more ocean, trees, and cliffs. He also has a fast food incident, and he returns
with photographic proof. | | |
| By the numbers
Miles traveled: 2,610
Photos taken:
390
Hours gone: 207
Chicken McNuggets eaten: 6
Number of hotel TVs:
5
Number of hotels stayed at: 4
States traveled: 3
Cats caught
lounging: 2
Premade houses seen transported by trucks: 1½
Number of bugs
killed: Hundreds
Salutations
I have returned from the
north! For a while I had wanted to do some traveling, and once TyroneFromUSC, my friend from
second grade whom currently lives in Seattle for the Navy determined that he
would be taking a vacation and coming back to Southern California, the road trip
was officially born. Problem was, my travel buddy, Eddie, and I had a week to
plan it.
It was a fairly crazy week. Once we got a rental car, within the
span of the next 48 hours we went from not knowing where we were going to sleep
each night to 3-star hotels in San Francisco, Eureka, and Vancouver, Washington.
The next 3 days after that were filled with searching online for things to do
and places to eat while we were there. Looking back, it was a fairly tall order,
but by the time Monday, August 4th, rolled around, with a car full of our
luggage, twenty bottles of water, countless granola bars, and a roll of toilet
paper, we were ready.
Day One - Monday, August 4th,
2008
In this part of the trip Tom travels along the coast of
California, finds the Danish Disneyland, sees Hearst Castle, eats at a pizzeria
in Monterey, and ends up in a hotel room he did not expect to have.
We left
my home at about 10:45am, but it wasn't until about 11:15am that we started our
road trip. Surprisingly, we didn't encounter any traffic and we reached the
coast via the 101 in good time.
I had thought
to proclaim that we were on a road trip, for real, sometime soon after this
picture was taken, but I waited too long. Eddie beat me to it.
 " It's
official... we're on our road trip." - Eddie
Our first stop was
Solvang, a town described to me by my sister and Wikipedia as a treasure trove
of awesome cheese danishes and a population consisting of 90% white people.
Hunting for great places to eat while in Solvang lead me to Paula's Pancake
House. They are known for their thin crepe-like pancakes and cheap prices, a
perfect combination. The ones stuffed with danish sausage was the one I ordered,
and while the portions were generous, I was not a fan of the sausages. Still, a
good place as any in Solvang to try again.
We were in the heart of downtown Solvang, and they really
played up the whole Danish aspect. Outside of the main boulevard and its
adjacent blocks, Solvang looks just like Anytown, USA. Still, the main part of
Solvang looks just like Disneyland in certain aspects. The architecture was
interesting; something you don't really see around El Monte.
We also went foraging for some scrumptious danishes, but
we couldn't really find any. I even covertly took pictures for future analysis.
I suppose I was just still too full from the pancakes earlier to investigate
closer.
Walking back
to our car I spied a cat chilling on some steps out in the Solvang, California
sun. It watched me closely and with a bit of contempt as I snapped its picture.
Cats are awesome like that.
Road trips
are awesome because you get to see scenic sights that you normally don't get to
see. Road trips suck because after a while it all just blends into a repetition
of the same kinds of views. On this trip it was either rising hills with low
hanging clouds and people who live in lone houses out in the middle of nowhere,
high hanging cliffside mountain pass roads surrounded by trees, or flat land as
far as the eye can see, with the occasion blip of civilization; porches and
rural architecture et al. But once in a while you get some fantastic company,
like this biker gang that looked like trouble. They were badass.
At about five
hours into the road trip we made it to Hearst Castle. Up until this point I was
still undecided about touring this monstrosity of a building. I think that
calling Hearst Castle a building is a little understated. It is so
ridiculously huge and decadent that perhaps we should start referring to Hearst
Castle with the plural form of building, regardless of how grammatically
incorrect it is.
Apparently William Randolph Hearst was rich enough to
build enough rooms to house the entire population of a small nation, yet didn't
leave enough inheritance to his kids so that they wouldn't have to charge the
rest of the world for the privilege of touring 1/6th of the estate at a time for
a paltry sum of $24. That's right: to see the entirety of Hearst Castle (and
presumably so Hearst's descendants can eat McDonald's like the rest of us), you
would need to fork out $24 x 6 per person, minus any special packages. It is
also a guided tour, so roaming on your own is not allowed.
I don't think
it was worth it, and that, coupled with the fact that the journey up to the
Caste of Hearst is a 20-minute ascent and that they had a mini-exhibit of the
various things you can expect to see in the residence, I just went to the
vintage point at the very end of the visitor's center, turned on my camera, and
utilized the reason why I got a camera with 10x zoom. Hello, Hearst Castle.
Goodbye, Hearst Castle. Maybe sometime in the future our paths will cross again
and I will feed your stewards.
It takes two
hours from Hearst Castle to get to Monterey, California. As we rolled in in the
evening so did some dark, oppressive clouds (example below). We made a food stop
at a pizza chain popular in the region called Pizza My Heart. I leave it
to you to figure out the pun; an explanation of its finer nuiances is beyond the
scope of this simple weblog. The slice of chicken and bacon pizza I had was
quite delicious, though I do not doubt my hunger contributed to my analysis.
Unfortunately, we didn't stay in this city long enough to make an accurate
assessment, so I would like to visit this place again, preferably with a local
to guide us through Monterey and its surrounding area's intricacies.
Another two
hours later we arrived in San Francisco a little after 8pm. It was already dark
as we came up with the bay on our right, so epic views were not to be had. Our
hotel was the Whitcomb close to the heart of downtown San Francisco, as I had
heard of SF's legendary parking impossibilities. We were able to book this one
for about $85 per night, for two nights, through hotwire.com, which is pretty
cheap. The Asian in me approves.
We were situated on the fourth floor,
and as we opened the door to our hotel room, this is what we saw:
My initial response was, where are our beds? Then,
as I continued scanning to my left, I spied a open doorway, through which a bed
and a desk were clearly visible. Our room had two rooms; certainly not what I
was expecting. More over, each room had its own TV. And our view was fantastic.
In the night time, San Francisco's city hall lights up, cutting a pretty
imposing figure. Had I a camera tripod and an actual open window, this next
picture would have came out much better. (I do get better pictures the next
night, though.)
Here's the view from a far corner in the bedroom. The
open doorway on the left is the entrance from the first room, and the one to its
right leads to a hallway that connects to the bathroom. At the end of that
hallway was another door that opened to the floor's main hallway, so we had two
doors to enter and exit our room from! Later I gleamed from the floor plan
posted as a fire escape plan that we had gotten one of the two biggest rooms on
the floor, and they were corner rooms, to boot. We definitely got a great deal,
even more so considering how close we were to our points of interest the very
next day.
We fell asleep, exhausted from over eight hours on the
road.
Tom went to sleep that night, a little homesick already. While
he quickly overcame the feeling the next day, it would serve to help remind him
throughout the trip how glad and lucky he was to live in sunny Southern
California. Stay tuned for his adventures in the heart of SF, as he explores
art, culture, and food, and exercises just how Asian he can be. By Asian
I mean scheming and/or conniving. | | |
| This'll be
a short one.
Recently, a friend of mine whom I had not seen in a while
came back to LA. When she and I hugged and she said, "It's so good to see you
again!", my immediate and reflexive reply was, "I know."
Even though I
could not believe the words that just came out of my mouth, that, my adoring
fans, is me in a nutshell. | | |
| I'm normally not a man for musicals, save
one Avenue Q, but Dr.
Horrible's Sing-Along Blog is one of the most delicious things ever. I
am tempted, as of right now, to declare this one of the things you must have
watched in order to be my friend. Try to catch it before the 20th, because
that's when all of this gold gets turn into lead (a.k.a. becomes worthless, or
is taken off the intertron forever). | | |
|
