TRANSPORT pages

From the very first news of a 50th birthday party for Damiana at China Live on Broadway in San Francisco, we planned this as a “transportation trip” from north of Santa Rosa (where the difficult driving begins) to the City and back. There's a wonderful new capability in town: the SMART train, and its schedule works well with the Golden Gate Ferry from Larkspur to the Ferry Building at the foot of Market.

So with plenty of pre-planning, the downloading of two new apps (one of which didn't work properly, Surprise!)

   And let it be said right here (as Rochelle said it): every single public-facing person we encounter, train driver, conductors, ferry staffers, restaurant greeters and servers, and wonderful Maria who saved our butts at our accommodation (another failed app; why am I not surprised?) treated us with courtesy, humor, and humanity. 

At least here in the western US, all public transport is dehumanizing – it’s intended principally for the lower, carless classes, and so unintentional, ill-conceived insults abound. We know from other countries that transit can be perfect, yet it is difficult to image how we can fix our present misconceptions. Waiting for the ferry, I remember the rails down the center of the chaotic Embarcadero, the rail ferry landing where shipments bound for Eureka and the north coast offloaded onto freight cars and ferried across to Sausalito to yard onto the Northwestern Pacific train. Before my time, but in human memory when I arrived on the north coast in 1968: City bound folk would entrain in the evening on a sleeping car at Fort Bragg station, and awake the next morning parked on a siding in front of the Ferry Building. Also, from there a ferry ride and train from Sausalito took riders to Point Reyes Station in west Marin, or a train south to Monterey. How much civilization we have given up as we surrendered to enslavement by auto!

The familiar way north – the view from just north of Westport, with Cape Mendocino vanishing as usual into the haze. 

We're on the road before the touron hordes, and get to drive the twisties between the coast and Leggett mostly by ourselves: a beautiful drive through the second growth redwoods. What BIG country this is: steep, deeply indented . . . we agree, this is our kind of country, and  dream to drive . . .

Rochelle took most of these on-the-road images, denoted with an

. . . until we come to the traffic control where they're working. Three one-lane flag-stops before Leggett. None of them too long, and they help us set the tone for the trip: taking it easy.

Lunch in Arcata at Renata’s Crêperie– more about that sweet little city below – and then it's the open road along the North Coast shoreline.

Orick is a sweet little town south of Redwood State and National Parks, a large complex of protected groves of big trees.  Much better for little ones to get their schooling in a two- or three-room blended grade classroom near their homes than the two hour daily school bus ride to Trinidad.

North of Arcata, Highway 101 threads along the coast and among some big Redwoods. A lot of touron snail traffic: elder bozos driving deep-throated pickem-ups with enormous trailers or third wheels behind. Gas is expensive in this neck of the woods – $5.89 a gallon – and so, nevermind the joys(?) of herding a 10 ton beast around all the tight corners between here and there, it's hard to understand the economy. Sure, the little lady wants to feel ‘at home’ and goddess nose we need to bring the poodle . . . but does this make for pleasurable travel? 

And they can't keep up.

Over the wooded ridges and then down to the beach at the mouth of a watercourse, and then back up again. Most commercial transport avoids this section, so it's just us tourons and the snail sub-species dragging their homes on their backs.

And finally, across the state line into Oregon, over the Chetco River, and our home for the night. Dinner at Black Trumpet Bistro, and again we forgot to take pictures. Lovely food far from the mainstream. Judging by the average customer age, Brookings is a sort of Grants Pass (“Best weather in Oregon”) with a view of the Pacific.

A lot happened today (but so far no one has yelled at us: an important distinction!

First up, just north of Brookings is the apartment development I have always thought of as the way we Casparados kept our Headlands from going.

Next, magnificent Oregon Coast just goes on and on . . .

Here's one of our favorite Oregon coastal towns, Port Orford, across the bay.

With the traffic thinned out, we proceeded on northward through miles and miles of clearcuts thinly hidden from touron eyes by a shaggy modesty screen of trees. Through the screen we could see the ecological disaster of same age monocrops. In Coos Bay – where formerly we would have seen ships loading logs for Japanese mills, we saw giant piles of sawdust and wood chips. 

The Coos Bay Bridge looks like a sort of skeletal cathedral.

The Oregon Dunes are a sacrifice zone for ATVs.

ATV tracks in the dunes

But the highway runs along the coast and every once in a while another magnificent view appears. Here we're coming down from Hecata Head on our way to Cape Perpetua.

Early afternoon, we set out across the 4.1 mile long Astoria-Megler Bridge, highway 101's crossing of the Columbia. Fun fact: its main span, over the ship channel, is 1,232 feet in length, the longest “continuous truss” in the nation.

On the Washington side, the highway winds along the shore, a basalt outcrop from the nearby volcanism, and here tucks into a tunnel.

next group : Silverton