Crescent City

November 29, 2023

We have a full day ahead of us, so we plan for an early start. It’s a six hour drive to Crescent City with reasonable traffic, we plan on stopping to visit our friend Lynn in Eugene along the way, and we want to arrive before five because Highway 199 along the Smith River is scary enough even in the daylight. We’ve done our homework - we completed the storage shuffle yesterday afternoon and most preliminary packing last night, so a 7:30 departure seems reasonable. I’m out of breakfast food at the apartment, so I plan on going over to nearby Ovation for coffee and a pastry not long after they open at six.

At 7:15 Rachael calls me to point out that we’re supposed to leave in fifteen minutes and I haven’t taken down the garbage yet or packed the car except the bikes. I quickly bolt down the last of my second cup of coffee and head back, stopping just long enough for a quick snap of the developing sunrise.

Along Marshall Street again. Conditions are changing fast here. Yesterday was the last of our clear, cool days and rain is due to arrive tonight.

So we don’t make it out by 7:30 obviously, but we do pretty well. At 7:45 we’re at the elevator with the last of our stuff, when Rachael realizes she still has one of the keys and runs back to leave it. At the same time another man shows up to ride down. We tell him to go on and we’ll call it back up when Rachael returns, but he knows how slow this elevator is and waits for us - and in the meantime he helps me load our pile into the elevator. Nice guy!

On the way down we have a nice but brief chat, congratulating each other on our excellent timing. Two straight weeks of rain are due to begin tomorrow, and we’re both leaving for the warmer, sunnier south - he departs for Phoenix tomorrow morning.

The first leg of the drive goes well. There’s less traffic and congestion than I expected for this time of day, and we arrive at Lynn’s apartment in the hills of south Eugene just past 9:30.

Off to a good start. 25 down, only 1,800 to go.

Lynn is one of our best friends. We’ve known her for 36 years (over half Rachael’s life, I point out to her later) and we have a lot of shared history mostly dating back to when we all lived in Salem. She arrived in my office very close to the time Rachael did, and she reminds us today that she first became aware of us when we broadcast our engagement in a message to the entire office we composed late one evening, excited but also nervously wondering if we’d get in trouble for using the network for personal business in this way.

We only get together once or twice a year now, mostly when we stop in on our way to or from Tucson. There’s a lot to catch up on - especially from Lynn, since she follows us on CycleBlaze and knows much more about the details of our lives than we do of hers.

An aside: she surprised us by saying she’s started following Bruce and Andrea too. Lynn went to Southeast Asia with her son this summer, knows they’re friends of ours, and took interest when she saw they set off for Saigon last week. While we’re talking about their trip she hauls out a map and wants to see generally where they’re going. Lynn is quite well travelled herself, but she can’t quite get over the fact that they’re just showing up and doing it. She’s very impressed, and while she’s waiting for the next day’s installment she’s getting some background by reading their first published journal here, Both Sides of Paradise.

With plenty of ground to cover, the time flies by.

We’re here for the visit of course, but in the back of the mind are the turkeys. There’s a flock of wild turkeys that lives in the nearby woods and that roams around freely through the street and in folks’ yards. I think it was the first time we came down to Eugene to visit Lynn in her new home that we arrived to find a half dozen turkeys on her porch railing.

Turkeys are a pretty common bird now in Oregon if you’re in the right sort of habitat, but I haven’t seen one this year so I’m hoping I’ll see one today. I’m disappointed though when none are in sight when we drive up, and while we visit I’ll get up every so often to hopefully look out the window.

I’ve about given up when I look out one last time just before we’re readying to go, and see a parade of about fifteen of them saunter across the street and mill around in the neighbor’s front yard. I grab the camera of course and take a few shots before they start disappearing into the back yard.

I think this is wonderful, of course. Even better though is when we get in the car and start to drive off and here they come again, crossing the street right in front up of us and then parading along the curb right past our car.

Here they come! This is about half of the whole gang.

There’s not too much to say about the rest of the drive. It’s a fast run down I-5 south to Grants Pass, where we leave the freeway for 199, the road cutting southwest through Cave junction and through the Siskiyous along the Smith River. Driving conditions are excellent - dry, modest traffic, and a partially overcast sky that spares me from a few hours of driving into the glare of the afternoon sun. As we drive we listen to CD’s we haven’t heard for years until I swapped in a new set from storage earlier this month. Its wonderful hearing some of this music again - especially Dave Carter and Tracy Grammer’s Tanglewood Tree, an album we enjoy hearing again so much that we start listening to it for a second time.

Leaving the Willamette Valley, we start climbing through hilly southwest Oregon.

The view toward the Siskiyous from the summit of Stage Road Pass.

We’re doing really well, and it’s looking like we’ll make it to Crescent City by 4:30 - time enough for us to spend some time walking along the waterfront before dinner, I suggest to Rachael. That doesn’t happen though, because suddenly we come to a traffic stoppage for a road maintenance project of some sort. Traffic is alternating in batches through the single open lane, but the batches are huge. We wait a long time for the first oncoming cars to appear, and then they just keep coming - maybe a hundred of them. And then we keep waiting, and waiting, and waiting. We wait 35 minutes, which is as long as I can ever recall waiting for a traffic delay.

So getting there in time for a walk along the waterfront is out. I’m happy that we make it out of the mountains and the narrow, twisted route through the Smith River Gorge before dark, but it’s right at five when we drive up to the waterfront - precisely as the sun is going down. We quickly park the car to get out and look, and within two minutes the sun drops below the horizon. After that we hurry on to Crescent Seafood, a fresh fish market that has a few tables and a great menu. We ate here on our way through last year, and I’m pretty sure we’ll do so again.

What timing! When we drove up less than two minutes ago the sun was about halfway below the horizon.

The Battery Point Lighthouse. Also, I see we just caught the head of a seal in the lower left.

After the long drive I feel I’ve earned this Eel River Brewing Organic IPA. And I have no idea what the guy in the back is pointing at.

We decided to save disc space on the website by ordering the same thing so we’d only need one photo. King salmon with smoked Gouda sauce, asparagus and grits.

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Steve Miller/GrampiesWe just heard from an old friend who we met in 1974 when we first moved to Winnipeg. My gosh, 48 years goes by quickly. Just like with you and your friend, Lynn, there are some people who you can see or hear from infrequently, and yet pick up where you left off quite seamlessly. Now THAT is a genuine friendship.
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5 months ago

Andrea BrownHave a great trip south, and tell Lynn we’re delighted to have her along.
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5 months ago