Honeymoon!
Jul. 24th, 2008 09:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
philenaAs I mentioned below, these images will not be as nice as the others, because they are not of me and Daniel. Instead, they are culled from various websites of hiking trail and botanical information, with nary a ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
philena or a Mr. Philena to be seen. But we had a nice time, so the proper thing to do is brag to the internet about it.
The first section of our trip was a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad drive to Ashland. It was all those adjectives because we were going up Highway 5 through the central valley of California, at the beginning of what turned out to be a week-long, killer heat wave, in a car that we discovered did not possess working air conditioning. Daniel told me that he had always assumed that the "MAX AC" setting on the air simply meant a slightly stronger fan, and it took several dozen miles of blasting hot air before he realized that an AC should make the car cool instead of merely windy. It was nightmarish, but we finally stopped for lunch at Castle Crags State Park and sat by a lovely, shady, cool stream,* and the scenery was pretty fabulous. We had actually driven right by it on the way back from Ashland last year, but if you're going south instead of north, you can't see the castle crags:
The drive from Castle Crags to Ashland was shorter and prettier. We passed Mount Shasta and Black Butte. They're pretty big. The whole drive had been pretty hazy because California at the time was battling raging wildfires that made the air hazardous to breathe**, and Daniel and I kept thinking that it should be about time to see Mt. Shasta when it was not in sight. Eventually we decided that it must be invisible in the haze, and isn't that a pity, it was so nice to see it last year---LOOK! Turns out there is no way mere wildfire smoke will block something as magnificent as Mt. Shasta:
Alas, we did not see any lenticular clouds, although we had been hoping to see them ever since we learned of their existence on a post-card last year:
Then we arrived in Ashland, where we saw three plays: "Our Town," by Thornton Wilder, and Shakespeare's "Coriolanus" and "A Comedy of Errors." "Our Town" was good, but I did not feel as moved by it as Daniel was. "A Comedy of Errors" was utterly trashed by the production, which was slick and polished and completely not Shakespeare. Yes, they kept some of the lines, but they set it in the Wild West, added some sort of gaucho-type narrator (I guess to keep the audience from getting confused), and turned the Merchant who demands his money to be repaid into a Chinaman, and their depictions were pretty offensive. The Chinaman keeps spouting in Chinese that no one can understand and handing out fortune cookies, I guess because it's funny. The gaucho character was similarly exagerated, and the rest of the cast did song-and-dance routines and had exchanges that were clearly not the original Shakespeare. The audience loved it, but my impression was that I would have loved to see the actual play, rather than try to extract the real bits from the surrounding tom-foolery. However, "Coriolanus" was just magnificent, and the best thing about it was that it was earnest and restrained and let the Shakespeare speak for itself, and I was thoroughly impressed. Corialanus was played by an excellent actor and his mother was spectacular. For those who know the play, you'll agree, I'm sure, that without a strong mother, nothing will work properly.
While in Ashland, we also explored parts of the town we did not see last year, including Lithia park, which has labels on the plants and a stream running through it and a path that we followed as far as we could until it was time to return for our play. I took off my shoes and waded in the stream, much as the children in this picture are:
After Ashland, we drove down to Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park to go camping by the Smith River,*** where we also swam in the evenings to cool off. Remember that heat-wave I referred to above? In Ashland we had an air-conditioned hotel room, but not here! There were snakes in the river also--we saw a total of three in the two evenings we were there--I guess because even the reptiles couldn't take the heat. There are no snakes in this picture, but it's about what our stretch of the river looked like, complete with the nice sandy beach:
We hiked the Damnation Creek trail, which took us from the road all the way down to the ocean, and back up again. This picture shows how it looks from the outside: the crevice is made by the Damnation Creek itself:
On the trail we saw all sorts of plants and groundcover that I liked. In particular, the redwood sorrel, which looks like large clover with brilliantly purple undersides, mingled with a kind of groundcover that had beautiful, softly-lobed leaves. I had a nice picture of them mingling, which was lost with our camera at the campgrounds. We also saw many, many, many kinds of ferns. We identified (and photographed, alas) seven different kinds, and a bit of googling has allowed us to find pictures of the four that we could actually put names to****:
Deer fern (that's redwood sorrel surrounding it)
Sword fern
Lady fern
Five-fingered maiden-hair fern
We also hiked the Boyscout Tree trail, of which the picture below is fairly representative. It is also fairly representative of just about any hike you'll do in the redwood forests:
The remarkable thing about this trail was that it ended at a small waterfall and trickle/creek, where the pool underneath the waterfall trickle was literally carpeted with dead or dying millipedes. I do mean literally, and I do mean carpeted: there was nowhere to step in the creek without stepping on the millipedes, and we could not see the bottom for all the millipede carcasses. Daniel and I had been planning to fill our water bottles from the creek using our new water filter pump, but the millipedes kind of put us off that, so we toughed it out on the way back. It turns out that this is was a good thing, because when we asked a park employee about the dead millipedes, he said it was a seasonal die-off, probably related to mating and egg-laying, and that if we pick one up and brush it and sniff it, we'll smell an almond scent that is in fact the cyanide that they secrete. The amount of cyanide in one millipede might be negligible, but I'm glad we didn't take our chances with a streambed full of them.
The first evening we were there, a ranger gave a talk about plants and pollinators, and since he had taken most of the images himself, and most of those came from a trail called the Myrtle Creek trail, we made a point of squeezing that trail into our schedule. Good thing we did, too! We saw carnivorous pitcher plants!
After Jedediah Smith camping, we spent one night in the Lost Coast, which is a 60-mile portion of the California Coast where the highway builders deemed it too difficult to build a highway, so the major roads and developments that spring up around them simply don't exist there. The trails are magnificent, although everyone must carry a tide chart, so as not to be caught at high tide, when the main trail simply disappears.The area we went to was reachable only by a steep, windy, two-lane paved road, which became a steeper, windier one-lane paved road, that eventually lost even the paving. There were puddles, rocks, dust everywhere, and only a few areas where it was wide enough for cars to pass. If we had met anyone coming the other direction, one of us would have had to back up to the wider portions, sometimes as much as half a mile. Fortunately, we met no one on the way down, and the area there was absolutely worth the terrifying drive.
We saw only a few people, and them right by the visitors' center (which, I might add, had no running water, so remote was it all, though it was manned by a brawny, leathery, out-doorsy-looking volunteer reading Madame Bovary). The campsite we chose was a mile hike from the road (such as it was), and in the middle of a eucalyptus grove, whose scent kept out all mosquitos, and which serenaded us all night with the sound of the acorns dropping. We saw garter snakes and deer, but no elk or bears, although we had to put every scented item in a bag and hang it on a high hook from a tree branch so it was out of reach if any bear did come prowling*****. Blackberries grew alongside the trail in abundance, and even more abundantly off the trail, and little streams flowed down from the mountains to the ocean every half mile or so. We used our water pump here (indeed, we had to, since there was no potable water even at the visitors' center), and it tasted very good. It was much cooler in the evening along the coast, but in the morning, depending on which way the wind was blowing, we would feel a cool breeze from the ocean alternating very strikingly with a much warmer breeze from the land. We left without actual going for a real hike, but I am determined to come back with my husband (!) for a real, two-day trip, in which we hike all day out, camp that night, and then hike back the next day.
After that, our third night and fourth day without real plumbing or washing facilities, we went to the Stanford Inn by the Sea, which is a lovely hotel in Mendocino, with organic vegetable gardens that they use in the vegetarian restaurant, beautiful flowers all over the grounds, and llamas and horses in nearby pastures. My parents-in-law (!) gave us two nights there with all the trimmings as a wedding gift. We were in a pretty disgusting state when we arrived, but the showers and comfortable bathrobes and nap put us all right again, and the food in the restaurant was spectacular. The next day, we went kayaking, my first time, in the Big River. We saw the following animals:
Three river otters:
One basking harbor seal****** (Daniel saw two swimming ones, but I didn't):
And three or four great blue herons:
It was great. Then we went home.
*By cool, we are probably talking roughly 80-85 degrees.
**Especially for women and children, the newspapers kept reminding us
***I will also add that we stopped in Crescent City to get camping food, and while we were there we went to the Les Schwab that helped us last year after our tire problems to give the manager a cake. When we told him who we were, he said at first, "Oh, yes--the Subaru!" We said no, and explained what he had done before giving him the cake, and he smiled and thanked us and we left, but now I really want to know what happened with this Subaru he referred to.
****Google images is not that helpful for "Fern that's kind of wiry and has needle-like leaves instead of leafy leaves. But it's definitely still a fern."suddenleap, maybe you can do something about this.
*****It was hard to get the bag on the tree branch, because out of reach for a bear is pretty much out of reach for us as well. We used a long stick to guide the rope of the bag onto the hook, but even then the added length of the rope plus the length of the bag, plus the fact that the hook was probably not the full recommended ten feet up, meant that any bear half-way interested in putting out some effort might have easily had our stash. Fortunately, there were either no bears or only lazy ones around, because the sack was unmolested in the morning. The dried pasta we had spilled while cooking our dinner, however, had mysteriously disappeared.
******It was so cute. It was basking in the sun and kept turning over as we slowly drifted past, and you could hear harrumphing and slapping its blubbery sides as it turned over on one side so slowly and awkwardly with only little flippers to help position it that by the time it had gotten into position it was time to turn back again.
philena or a Mr. Philena to be seen. But we had a nice time, so the proper thing to do is brag to the internet about it.The first section of our trip was a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad drive to Ashland. It was all those adjectives because we were going up Highway 5 through the central valley of California, at the beginning of what turned out to be a week-long, killer heat wave, in a car that we discovered did not possess working air conditioning. Daniel told me that he had always assumed that the "MAX AC" setting on the air simply meant a slightly stronger fan, and it took several dozen miles of blasting hot air before he realized that an AC should make the car cool instead of merely windy. It was nightmarish, but we finally stopped for lunch at Castle Crags State Park and sat by a lovely, shady, cool stream,* and the scenery was pretty fabulous. We had actually driven right by it on the way back from Ashland last year, but if you're going south instead of north, you can't see the castle crags:
The drive from Castle Crags to Ashland was shorter and prettier. We passed Mount Shasta and Black Butte. They're pretty big. The whole drive had been pretty hazy because California at the time was battling raging wildfires that made the air hazardous to breathe**, and Daniel and I kept thinking that it should be about time to see Mt. Shasta when it was not in sight. Eventually we decided that it must be invisible in the haze, and isn't that a pity, it was so nice to see it last year---LOOK! Turns out there is no way mere wildfire smoke will block something as magnificent as Mt. Shasta:
Alas, we did not see any lenticular clouds, although we had been hoping to see them ever since we learned of their existence on a post-card last year:
Then we arrived in Ashland, where we saw three plays: "Our Town," by Thornton Wilder, and Shakespeare's "Coriolanus" and "A Comedy of Errors." "Our Town" was good, but I did not feel as moved by it as Daniel was. "A Comedy of Errors" was utterly trashed by the production, which was slick and polished and completely not Shakespeare. Yes, they kept some of the lines, but they set it in the Wild West, added some sort of gaucho-type narrator (I guess to keep the audience from getting confused), and turned the Merchant who demands his money to be repaid into a Chinaman, and their depictions were pretty offensive. The Chinaman keeps spouting in Chinese that no one can understand and handing out fortune cookies, I guess because it's funny. The gaucho character was similarly exagerated, and the rest of the cast did song-and-dance routines and had exchanges that were clearly not the original Shakespeare. The audience loved it, but my impression was that I would have loved to see the actual play, rather than try to extract the real bits from the surrounding tom-foolery. However, "Coriolanus" was just magnificent, and the best thing about it was that it was earnest and restrained and let the Shakespeare speak for itself, and I was thoroughly impressed. Corialanus was played by an excellent actor and his mother was spectacular. For those who know the play, you'll agree, I'm sure, that without a strong mother, nothing will work properly.
While in Ashland, we also explored parts of the town we did not see last year, including Lithia park, which has labels on the plants and a stream running through it and a path that we followed as far as we could until it was time to return for our play. I took off my shoes and waded in the stream, much as the children in this picture are:
After Ashland, we drove down to Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park to go camping by the Smith River,*** where we also swam in the evenings to cool off. Remember that heat-wave I referred to above? In Ashland we had an air-conditioned hotel room, but not here! There were snakes in the river also--we saw a total of three in the two evenings we were there--I guess because even the reptiles couldn't take the heat. There are no snakes in this picture, but it's about what our stretch of the river looked like, complete with the nice sandy beach:
We hiked the Damnation Creek trail, which took us from the road all the way down to the ocean, and back up again. This picture shows how it looks from the outside: the crevice is made by the Damnation Creek itself:
On the trail we saw all sorts of plants and groundcover that I liked. In particular, the redwood sorrel, which looks like large clover with brilliantly purple undersides, mingled with a kind of groundcover that had beautiful, softly-lobed leaves. I had a nice picture of them mingling, which was lost with our camera at the campgrounds. We also saw many, many, many kinds of ferns. We identified (and photographed, alas) seven different kinds, and a bit of googling has allowed us to find pictures of the four that we could actually put names to****:
Deer fern (that's redwood sorrel surrounding it)
Sword fern
Lady fern
Five-fingered maiden-hair fern
We also hiked the Boyscout Tree trail, of which the picture below is fairly representative. It is also fairly representative of just about any hike you'll do in the redwood forests:
The remarkable thing about this trail was that it ended at a small waterfall and trickle/creek, where the pool underneath the waterfall trickle was literally carpeted with dead or dying millipedes. I do mean literally, and I do mean carpeted: there was nowhere to step in the creek without stepping on the millipedes, and we could not see the bottom for all the millipede carcasses. Daniel and I had been planning to fill our water bottles from the creek using our new water filter pump, but the millipedes kind of put us off that, so we toughed it out on the way back. It turns out that this is was a good thing, because when we asked a park employee about the dead millipedes, he said it was a seasonal die-off, probably related to mating and egg-laying, and that if we pick one up and brush it and sniff it, we'll smell an almond scent that is in fact the cyanide that they secrete. The amount of cyanide in one millipede might be negligible, but I'm glad we didn't take our chances with a streambed full of them.
The first evening we were there, a ranger gave a talk about plants and pollinators, and since he had taken most of the images himself, and most of those came from a trail called the Myrtle Creek trail, we made a point of squeezing that trail into our schedule. Good thing we did, too! We saw carnivorous pitcher plants!
After Jedediah Smith camping, we spent one night in the Lost Coast, which is a 60-mile portion of the California Coast where the highway builders deemed it too difficult to build a highway, so the major roads and developments that spring up around them simply don't exist there. The trails are magnificent, although everyone must carry a tide chart, so as not to be caught at high tide, when the main trail simply disappears.The area we went to was reachable only by a steep, windy, two-lane paved road, which became a steeper, windier one-lane paved road, that eventually lost even the paving. There were puddles, rocks, dust everywhere, and only a few areas where it was wide enough for cars to pass. If we had met anyone coming the other direction, one of us would have had to back up to the wider portions, sometimes as much as half a mile. Fortunately, we met no one on the way down, and the area there was absolutely worth the terrifying drive.
We saw only a few people, and them right by the visitors' center (which, I might add, had no running water, so remote was it all, though it was manned by a brawny, leathery, out-doorsy-looking volunteer reading Madame Bovary). The campsite we chose was a mile hike from the road (such as it was), and in the middle of a eucalyptus grove, whose scent kept out all mosquitos, and which serenaded us all night with the sound of the acorns dropping. We saw garter snakes and deer, but no elk or bears, although we had to put every scented item in a bag and hang it on a high hook from a tree branch so it was out of reach if any bear did come prowling*****. Blackberries grew alongside the trail in abundance, and even more abundantly off the trail, and little streams flowed down from the mountains to the ocean every half mile or so. We used our water pump here (indeed, we had to, since there was no potable water even at the visitors' center), and it tasted very good. It was much cooler in the evening along the coast, but in the morning, depending on which way the wind was blowing, we would feel a cool breeze from the ocean alternating very strikingly with a much warmer breeze from the land. We left without actual going for a real hike, but I am determined to come back with my husband (!) for a real, two-day trip, in which we hike all day out, camp that night, and then hike back the next day.
After that, our third night and fourth day without real plumbing or washing facilities, we went to the Stanford Inn by the Sea, which is a lovely hotel in Mendocino, with organic vegetable gardens that they use in the vegetarian restaurant, beautiful flowers all over the grounds, and llamas and horses in nearby pastures. My parents-in-law (!) gave us two nights there with all the trimmings as a wedding gift. We were in a pretty disgusting state when we arrived, but the showers and comfortable bathrobes and nap put us all right again, and the food in the restaurant was spectacular. The next day, we went kayaking, my first time, in the Big River. We saw the following animals:
Three river otters:
One basking harbor seal****** (Daniel saw two swimming ones, but I didn't):
And three or four great blue herons:
It was great. Then we went home.
*By cool, we are probably talking roughly 80-85 degrees.
**Especially for women and children, the newspapers kept reminding us
***I will also add that we stopped in Crescent City to get camping food, and while we were there we went to the Les Schwab that helped us last year after our tire problems to give the manager a cake. When we told him who we were, he said at first, "Oh, yes--the Subaru!" We said no, and explained what he had done before giving him the cake, and he smiled and thanked us and we left, but now I really want to know what happened with this Subaru he referred to.
****Google images is not that helpful for "Fern that's kind of wiry and has needle-like leaves instead of leafy leaves. But it's definitely still a fern."
suddenleap, maybe you can do something about this.*****It was hard to get the bag on the tree branch, because out of reach for a bear is pretty much out of reach for us as well. We used a long stick to guide the rope of the bag onto the hook, but even then the added length of the rope plus the length of the bag, plus the fact that the hook was probably not the full recommended ten feet up, meant that any bear half-way interested in putting out some effort might have easily had our stash. Fortunately, there were either no bears or only lazy ones around, because the sack was unmolested in the morning. The dried pasta we had spilled while cooking our dinner, however, had mysteriously disappeared.
******It was so cute. It was basking in the sun and kept turning over as we slowly drifted past, and you could hear harrumphing and slapping its blubbery sides as it turned over on one side so slowly and awkwardly with only little flippers to help position it that by the time it had gotten into position it was time to turn back again.
no subject
Date: 2008-07-25 07:41 am (UTC)Sad that you lost your camera, but it looks to be an awesome honeymoon! (Maybe a bear has it?)