Calistoga Vacation 2014

Part 4 of a 5 part travelogue.
This should be fun
I made special Google map of the trip so far. On it you can click the icons to zoom in and look at street view. Some places have lots of extra photos too.

Story is, that if you click on these words
you will be whisked off to a cool interactive map.

Below pictures I took on the trip. 

If you click one you will get a bigger version as a slide show. 

But not my occasionally clever captions.
The post below this one has the actual vacation part of the vacation.
For some reason the 5th part of this travelogue is on the next page.
At the bottom of this page click where it says Older Posts.

How I'll always remember ye Modesto

The tunnel to the Bay Bridge

On the bay Bridge. No line for the toll booth.

Suspension bridge but not the Golden Gate

This bridge is dbl decker. The deck below goes east

There it is San Francisco

Looking back from whence I came.

Now time to cross 6 lanes in the middle 2 are light rail.

Where did this come from? in the embarcadero?

Inside the Ferry Building - Shrooms!

It's like a mall but with stalls kind of like in the 3rd world except everyone smells nice.

Grow your own mushroom kit

Big display too.

Wait what's this next door? Baked goods?

Gluten free bakery?! neato!

In search of my friend's old digs - wrong end.

Here is the way in.

It this where the 103 year old lady's house was?

Or was it here.?

Wait now the other place was . . here?

Not here. 

The Golden Gate being eaten by fog.

I can see the other tower.

Damn those things are big.

My old sleeping place.

Looking back at San Fran from Sausalito side.

This was the view I woke up to.

And Horseshoe Bay also

Alcatraz - You can tell it isn't Alka-Seltzer because it isn't fizzing. 

Also the vista point

The unknown seaman.

San Fran has lots of unknown seamen.

Looking back the other way GG bridge.

Road from St Helena to Calistoga

Almost there. I can smell the sulphur now.

I would never have thought to do this.

Put a painting behind the headboard.

My room & new car.

Nice pool & spa at El Bonita Motel

Even a fountain. Loved this place.

It's all about the journey on day 2.

Part 3 of a 5 part travelogue.
Finally the weekend came and it was Sunday. My appointment for the mud bath was at 3 P.M. on Monday. I had packed on Saturday but somehow with this and that I didn't get on the road till 7 P.M. Or so.

First stop; Fresno to visit my sister Stacey. She usually visits me but hadn't the time for a trip in months so it was my turn. In the past I had traveled the state quite allot. Not so much in the last 20 years and not at all the last 10. Back then I used paper maps. The folding kind. I went traveling so often then that I bought a Thomas guide. It was a spiral bound book that had an awkwardness of it’s own but was better than the big folding map when you were in the car. The new car has a few extra bells and whistles, even a touch screen in the dash but no pussy GPS thingy. I bought myself an iPad for christmas and have enjoyed it very much. It has the Apple Map App and the Google Maps App so I’m good to go. Part of this adventure will include navigation by tech gadget & App.

Stacey’s house was the first target on my Apple map app. I set it to beep at me when I was 20 miles away. It did and I called her at around 9:30 P.M.. Luckily she was still up and said it was okay to visit late. I pulled off the freeway and down the road to her house. She lives on a farm in the countryside about 10 miles west and a little south of the main part of Fresno. That is the way I remember it being arranged 15 years ago when I was there last. This is where the fun "Map App" subplot really begins. When I had been there before it was day time. All the new buildings threw me at first so I pulled into a parking lot to take a closer look at the map. There was a little arrow tracking where I was on the map. 

I pulled back on the road. New construction faded and I saw a little country store and other landmarks I kind of recalled. The little arrow on the map hadn't gotten to the turn but I didn't remember her street being this far out. I started looking for street signs but on a dark country road you are usually past them before you see them. I had noticed this earlier but my lovely new car has those fucking blue LED headlights. Until that very moment I thought the worst thing about blue headlights was the way they are way too bright when they come at you at night. I have no idea who thinks these things are a good idea. As I found out, they show an intense clear blue light on the roadway in from of you for 100 feet. No where else. No peripheral visibility at all. It’s like you are driving through the night in a tunnel. 

This is kind of the problem

Forget about road signs........ Anyway, I had passed her street so turned around and passed it again...... I got there after 10 PM. It should have taken 5 minutes. Whatever,...... I was glad to be away for Col. Baker’s fields. That’s what mattered. We talked non stop for an hour and a half or two. It was great to see her. She and Mike have made a cozy home for themselves with many cool extras only they would have.

Back on CA-99. Next stop Modesto. I figured that in the morning a stop over in San Francisco for lunch would be just a hop and a skip away. It occurred to me that I had never gone all the way up CA-99 past Fresno before. For those long trips I always took I-5. Not that I was enjoying any new scenery what with the blue headlights and all. After a couple of hours the little arrow thing had moved but I didn't trust it. I got off the freeway to look for food and all I found was a Circle K where got a couple of hot dogs and a drink. Ironically the only 2 places open in Wasco after midnight were the 2 Circle K stores. This was about the time I would have been at one of them. Huh.

Funny the people you run into in Bumbfuck California

I asked the clerk where I was and where Modesto was. He and the customer that was there were quite warm and friendly. Turns out I was past Madera but south of Merced. Atwater wherever that is. Modesto was north. Still over hour to go. Once at the edge of Modesto I set the app to plot a course to the cheap motel I had booked for the night. This turned into another fiasco of wrong turns, missed exits and missing street signs. I blamed being sleepy and 6 hours on the road. I’m better than this with technology. Usually.
Cheapo motel was clean and all I needed it for was 6 or 7 hours of sleep and I was off again.

There ought to be a law. A ‘not everybody is from around here’ law. As soon as I got into the car and the little MiFi puck got logged on I plotted my course to San Francisco. This time I zoomed the screen in and out and got the lay of the land the best I could. It wanted me to go south which didn't sound right but I didn't see any easier way to get to the main highways going west towards the bay. I had all but given up on the little arrow on the map keeping up with me. I headed south out of town toward an intersection that I was to turn west on. I thought I was there but there were no street signs telling what street. I turned around and went back to see if I could see any street signs but had to go miles since I was again in the countryside where streets are miles apart. This went on for a while and I was at last on a road I assumed would lead me to I-580 and to the bay. I brought food and beverages in a cooler to save time and money. My morning didn't really get going till I spotted a drive thru coffee hut and got a hot mocha.
This business of no street indicating signs was to be a recurring theme. What are they thinking? “The people that live here know what street is what, fuck those strangers and their tourist dollars”.  There ought to be a law. Sorry I already said that.

Ah Ha! So someone is hoarding them all.

The trip to the Bay Bridge took longer than I would have hoped but it was a nice day, cool with just enough overcast to cut the glare and let the colors saturate. One thing I remembered learning from my earlier journeys to the north was to have a task, Even a small one, something to find, a quest as it were. Just walking around as a tourist is boring and you don’t learn anything. Besides wandering herds of tourists look too much like schools of feeder fish. Walking chum.

Once in San Francisco my mission was to find places that sell gluten free food items. I miss french bread and other things I used to eat. I’m not really obsessed with it. I treat it like a hobby. But remember what I said about having a quest. In advance I did a little research and pre loaded the location of several places into the map app from my desktop computer. My first pilgrimage was to a gluten free grocery. Once I was able to stop and give the map a good look I saw that the desktop version of the app left out the note indicating that the place was temporarily closed. The others were mostly restaurants and I wasn’t hungry. It’s a tourist place but a nice one so I went to the old ferry building in the embarcadero district. This is the location of a gluten free bakery. One thing about San Fran that I remembered but block from my mind is the parking. Every parking space in the city is filled at all times. There are not even places to stop and survey the terrain or look at a map. Glancing at the iPad at stop lights I made my way to the embarcadero area. After what seems like an hour of driving around 4 spaces in front of the post office that were “No Stopping” from 6AM till 10AM opened up. It was 10AM. I think this was the 2nd time I had used a parking meter that takes debit cards. Space age.
It was a short walk and not only did I find gluten free baked goods but one stall had shelves and shelves of exotic mushrooms. Once upon a time I belonged to the LA Mycological society. This was a glorious find. I got a cinnamon roll and a croissant. And a bag of dried Lion's Mane Mushroom. I haven’t tried it yet but the story is that it tastes like lobster and is easy to grow. (money making opportunity?)

During most of the 80s my best friend was a person known by one name that I called them by anyway. My old friend was called another name in one band. In a different band my old friend was something else. For a time in our band of misfit partiers the special name was an homage to Maceo Parker, James Brown’s Saxophonist and side man. Hey I said we were partiers. We were usually very drunk and/or stoned in those days) Sad story short my old friend drank till my old friend could drink no more. Sober my old friend moved with remarkable guitar skills to the bay area to seek destiny. 

They had the hardest time finding a drummer.

After a year or two in San Jose my old friend moved to San Francisco and got a roommate. Many of my visits to northern California were to visit my pal from the band of misfit partiers and look for what sober adventures we could find in the city. There are lots as it turns out. On one visit my old friend and one other took me for a tour of the underground nightlife. I remember one place in a basement. Packed in with a couple hundred (it seemed) screaming sweating lesbiens and a punk band. Not altogether unpleasant but I was glad to be out of there. 
There are many distinct neighborhoods in the small area that San Francisco takes up. Was I looking for SOMA (south of market area) ? or The Tenderloin? Or?

Anyway the old San Francisco of the 60s is gone forever. No low or even middle income housing remains. Tech industry hipsters and other kinds of people with money are the only ones who can afford to live there. The place is rife with gentrification. A few years back the house they lived in was sold for big bucks. So that was that for San Francisco. The house and I guess the apartments next door were torn down and replaced with stacks of million dollar plus condos. I had hours till my appointment in Calistoga so I went on a mini quest to find the old place. This turned into a jumble of half remembered streets, missing street signs and the map app always telling me to turn the wrong way. I finally found the street. Just like when you pick up a plastic bag and inevitably try to open the closed end first, I found the out end of the one way street first. Pictures are in the next blog post down. 

Time to beat it out of town and on north. I switched from the Apple map app to the Google maps app but that was little help. Neither app seemed to ever know which way my car was pointed and the tracking me thing was always off. It would be helpful if the map stayed true to north no matter which way you held the iPad but it doesn't do that. Maybe it does but like I said there was no place to park and figure out how to make it do that.  It took longer than I wanted to get to the GG bridge. This map navigation thing was stressing me out. I did finally make it to the Golden Gate Bridge. No toll leaving the city. Yay! See photos below.

At the Sausalito end of the bridge there is a vista point. In 1990-1-2 or there abouts I had a minivan set up as a cargo van (no side windows). After a Saturday night of partying in the city. Comedy clubs were still a very big thing at the time. I would back into one of the spaces there to sleep. I woke up to a remarkable view of the bay and the city. One that the high rollers in the fancy hotels didn’t even get. I did this a number of times with only one strange incident. One morning I awoke to noises outside the minivan. When I opened my eyes operating a rake or some similar instrument was a giant dyke in an orange jump suit right outside my window. Crews of prisoners clean the place up on Sunday mornings I came to know. The back window and the one in the side door were tinted so I laid quietly in my sleeping bag till she left. Then I drove on, in search of breakfast at a big farmers market I knew of .

Huge farmers market at the Marin Center (Frank Lloyd Wright)

In theory the new car would go 440 miles on a tank of gas. That is if you are going 55 on a slight downhill grade the whole way. As you have read, my driving was varied. The fancy schmancy readout on the dash tracks all of this and gives a constant update of how many miles you can still go on the gas you have left. I had 36 miles I could go. The first gas station that I spotted displayed $4.25 a gallon. Yikes! I had a vague memory of discount gas on up the road but didn’t remember just how far. This part of the world is not like back home where there are gas stations every few blocks. Back that up, even back home doesn't have that any more. Time slip. 20 miles of range left. I’m screwed no gas stations in sight. One of the happy functions of the maps apps is that they know where to get gas. No help there. Then I was out of cell range so no data. If you look at the area on a map there is allot going on. Out the window is open space. Ok intuition if you are such hot stuff, do your thing. North was not working out so I turned off and went east-ish. There must be civilization over that hill. Okay the next hill. Okay I’ll turn right again. Now I am on a kind of low bridge or thin strip of land with a marsh on both sides. No end in sight and I have 5 miles of range left. Now zero miles of range left. Land ho! The sign says Mare Island. The first set of buildings look like the set of a post apocalyptic movie. Huge industrial buildings with hundreds of windows. Many broken out. A different sign said it was a naval base so I went that way. After some twists and turns I saw houses and a town. Finally gas. On my receipt it said I was in Vallejo.
The maps app said it was 43 miles or 57 minutes to Calistoga. My appointment was in an hour. Crap! I called and begged them to move my appointment to the next morning. Yes! they had an opening at 10:15 AM.

This must have been taken while it still had a few windows.

Suddenly I am free to move about the state. I’m remembering now. I had several trips like that; where I just set out and drove. Most times alone but with one of more members of the band of misfit partiers I spoke of earlier too. The muse almost a tangible presence. One such journey landed me in Petaluma having the most surreal and delightful dinner of my life. I want to go there. One of the gluten free restaurants on the list with very good reviews was in Petaluma. More digital misdirection and missing signs but I finally found the place. The tech wasn’t all to blame. It was inside some other kind of building that had been made into shop spaces of different kinds. So now I know what they meant by “Nestled in the historic Great Petaluma Mill”.  It was kind of small but efficiently designed I sat at the bar with a view of the kitchen. I told the proprietress that I had grown up in a restaurant and admired the way her staff worked in the small space. I had a margherita pizza and iced tea. I was complimentary but it was no better than I make. Except that I didn't have to make it.

The trip to my lovely little El Bonita Motel was easy and smooth. The desk clerk was very helpful and pointed me to a local market. This is when my trip really began to have the northern California feel.

Just one more twist in my plot before hitting the road.

Part 2 of a 5 part travelogue.
I am composing this text on April 6th (when I should be doing my taxes) a full 3 weeks after my last Wasco run. My body clock is still running upside down and backwards but with the fatigue going away I am well on my way to getting my bearings. The whole world is seeming different.
On March 17th, and the month or three before, I was running on instinct only I think. I spoke about my spiritual side briefly in a February post but that topic really needs it’s own blog. Long story short I allowed my long cultivated rapport with gaia or the universe or whatever you call it to guide me. Like any relationship, my relationship with the universe is a living moving thing. It was happy I was finally moving on and presented me with many options and that feeling that everything that had come before was leading me someplace. Most spiritual practices have stories like this, why should my dogma free one not have one too?

When I bought the 2012 Scion xD in 2012, In the back of my mind I knew it was a temporary arrangement. It was just a feeling. In 22 months I had put 83,000 miles on it. I knew from a few years before when I owned a retired police car that most departments sell them at around 72,000. This is the tipping point when high mileage and wear and tear begin to take bigger and bigger bites out of resale (or trade-in) value. If your particular car is prone to breakdown this is when the breakdowns start to cost more. This is one of those things you get to know from being a middle aged guy who has owned and seen many cars over the years. 

My xD still looked fine. Bright red and shiny. (the right side of the roof was a bit less shiny from having newspaper slid over it a few hundred times, but I kept it well waxed)
I got xD because Scion is a subdivision of Toyota and Toyota is known for their quality. My little car while having a little more style and trim than it’s cousin the Yaris was cheaply made and right away had minor problems. 

• Little interior lights and knobs and pieces began to break.
• Little exterior lights too. 
• The warranty lasted up to 35K. At 37K the knob directing air into the cabin to recirculate or come from outside broke. Taking apart the dash to fix it was going to cost hundred$. It didn’t get fixed. 
• At less than 10K the brakes started doing the thing where you press the pedal and the whole car shakes. The service manager told me it wasn't covered but fixed it anyway because he felt bad. I just smiled. It wasn't the time to tell him he was a lying sack of . . . Car dealerships, especially that one, don’t give things away. 
• It happened again at 50K and I paid a shop to install new rotors and pads. 
• 6 or 8 months ago the fuel gauge stopped working. It read something different every time I looked at it. The sensor, the sending unit, the pump were all one $384 piece. I told the dealer that it might be that something was just dirty or shorted out. The dealer said, even if it was, it cost $87 to diagnose and $200 something to drop the gas tank. They don’t really fix things, mostly they just change out parts, so besides hitting it with an air hose what is it they would do? Install the part. My mechanic is a great guy but the choice was $500 or $600 to fix the #$%^ fuel gauge. Instead I reset the trip odometer every time I went to fill up. A full tank (11 gallons) would get me exactly 330 miles. I found that out the hard way, but only once.
• Not a problem for me but, 83K mi. means that I put the windows up and down about 50K times each doing delivery. 

The prospect of paying $333 a month for 3 more years for a run down car that was too small to have a smooth ride, did not appeal to me. That thing where you press the brake pedal and the whole car shakes started again. So I went back to the Toyota place and traded the xD for a new Corolla. I didn't tell them about all the xDs little problems. They didn’t ask. I got more for it than I thought I would. I wanted the 40+ MPG version of the Corolla with the 7yr/100K mile warranty in pearl white and a non-black fabric interior since the black fabric of the xD showed everything and stained easily. I’m not a fan of white or silver cars but I wanted to opt for practical this time. They didn't have one. They did have a green one with a black leather interior I was assured was stain resistant. I told the sales guy I had seen it there a month ago and that since he was having trouble moving it that I should get a a few bucks off. It had all those pesky extras like a sunroof that I didn't want.

Ta Da! a new car for my trip. And I am loving it. Even the sun roof. Good thing too at $433 a month for 7 years.

Free at last and getting ready for a road trip.

Part 1 of a 5 part travelogue.
What I did on my summer vacation. Except it wasn't summer and at roughly 72 hours more of a ‘holiday in the north country’, but you get the idea.

I wrote a little summary of my time in the newspaper business.
The blog where it was posted has been deleted. sigh

I started it but don’t have the heart for it right now. The plan is to type out what I remember of my newspaper days for posterity. I'm calling it "Last of the Ink Slingers". I've forgotten so much already it better get written soon. 

I would like to say that there were emotional connections to sever like you might at the end of a long term gig but there really weren't. Of the people who did what I did with that company at the start in 2004, I was essentially the last one to go. The people who actually worked there (not contractors like me) were always aloof and only communicated when necessary. One manager saw value in interacting with us but the bullshit finally got to her and she left. The clerks and shop owners where I dropped papers were barely acquaintances. I will miss my assistant of 8 years Damien. A truly noble man. A hard working father of 3. A good friend. The work he did for me was always after his full time "real" job. The job itself was like a giant beast or machine or something. I often remarked that the long runs of no days off were like riding on the roof of a runaway train. The midnight train to Wasco.

I knew that I needed to make a clean break. I originally contracted with the newspaper because I was dealing with health issues that, while they limited my functioning, were too vague for the Dr to help much with. A night job with few people to deal with and an income decent enough to afford an HMO was a welcome refuge. 
By 2010, coincidentally when profits started falling off, I was able to identify and deal with many of my health and well being woes. No one task or part of the daily routine was hard. It was surprisingly fatiguing for a job that took me away from the house for only 5 to 7 hours a day. (plus paperwork, collecting etc.) When I got home I never drifted off to sleep. I passed out.

Customer complaints were an ongoing source of stress. Being a person of few voluntary routines I was always taken aback by the pure outrage of some subscribers who didn't get their paper. Logically they are paying a fraction of what they would if they drove to the store and bought one everyday. Figuring in the fuel, cover price plus tax and their time. Even the ones that could walk to the store in 5 minutes were paying less than half price. Using one coupon or discount from an ad would cover that. If the thing only managed to show up at their house half the time they were coming out ahead. I have in the past read a quality newspaper cover to cover. The one I sold was no such newspaper. While one in a hundred articles do detail interesting facts, the remainder are the same articles over and over documenting the passing parade of human events with minor adjustments to dates and names. I do understand in an abstract way the appeal of it as a day starter. As for me, I find the banality toxic and for the same reason don’t watch TV news or sitcoms (I suspect many who I invite to read my blog don’t finish or even start for the same reason. My blog however is free and delivered fresh). That is my quirk and I'm the one who has to live with it. To me the quirkiest subscribers were the ones that got so angry that they brandished threats to cancel like a scimitar. Cancel a subscription that meant so much to them that they got angry about it. How would never getting it make things better? And the type of outrage was the thing. It was personal. Like my carriers withheld their paper as a judgement value of them as human beings.  Always a special kind of circular logic. That was only one part of the complaint/redelivery saga. My point is . . . were was I? . . Oh yeah, I was born a poor bla . . Nooo.

I knew that I needed to make a clean break. The stresses and strains of the daily routine, the job and the rut my life was in had parts of me distorted beyond recognition. A break in routine and a whole new path. First a trip out of Jesus’ dad’s valley. The weirdness of the days prior to march 19 will also be in the Ink Slinger blog. Let’s just start with; I didn't plan my trip away till Monday the 20th. I had vague images of going to the coast or maybe catch some shows in LA. Perhaps I've never gone with a person who knows how to do it up right. I have never seen the appeal of Vegas. Except the shows I guess, that I never could or would afford. Besides, going to those places alone would be just lonely and sad, . . and lame. The solitude and singularity of the past decade (or two), is about to change also, but that will take time. I need a destination that will rejuvenate me without shared laughter.

I went to a place in the 90s called Osmosis Enzyme bath in a small town called Freestone, near Santa Rosa California. It is the most tranquil thing a person can do.

Okay, this is a big enzyme bath in Japan. Here's Osmosis

As a person newly on sabbatical from income generating activities, $239 for the whole treatment and another $400+ for lodging seemed frivolous. As good as it is, the place and the treatments are on the etherical side. I had been having more than my share of cosmic awareness the last months already. Another place I went, back in those days was in Calistoga. Indian Springs offers a similar treatment except in place of cedar chips is a mud bath of geothermally heated sulphur spring water and volcanic ash.

Yeah like that

The place has gone all gentrified since I was there the first time. The whole treatment costs even more than the cedar bath. After some research and consulting with a friend I found 15 or so spas in Calistoga and a nice one where the whole treatment was only $149. Calistoga has some nice accommodations, bed and breakfasts etc. Pricey too on short notice. I lucked into a nice little motel in St Helena 9 miles away for $160 for 2 nights. Bookings have been made and I’m all set. For the next week. So I wait. 5 days. Till I can go. So I wait. 5 days. Till I can go.