Meandering on the Way — January 7 to 17

Sunday, January 7th

Today marked the start of our trip to San Diego, where we’ll be doing a four day Road Scholar tour. When that ends, we’ll stay over a couple of extra days so M can pick up a ridiculous rental car and drive us around a little.

The whole thing started with a drive to the Eugene airport, just 40 miles away. We took the truck, of course, because E couldn’t bear the thought of her Ioniq 5 sitting outside in the economy lot where who knows what might happen to it. We had a direct flight to San Diego that took about two and a half hours. We flew on Alaska Airlines, but our plane was not a Boeing 737 Max and we didn’t notice any doors flying off. From the airport we caught a shuttle to downtown. That trip was a big surprise. It was so short! We didn’t realize that the San Diego airport is right next to downtown. In a pinch, we could have walked to our hotel. How often does that happen in a big city?

The tour hotel was a Marriott on the bay front. We checked in and had our first meeting of the tour group in a hotel meeting room. We had an orientation session accompanied by a pasta dinner. We started to settle in to the idea of be taken care of for a few days.

Monday, January 8th

Our program started with a tour of the southern part of San Diego Bay. Much of the south bay is lined with U.S. Navy anchorage and shipbuilding facilities.

Tuesday, January 9th

The highlight of today’s activities was a visit to Balboa Park, which is one of the largest parks in America, fifty percent larger than New York’s Central Park. It has a number of lovely buildings that go back to the its origin as the site of the Great San Diego Exhibition of 1915. It also has a host of Eucalyptus trees, including this relatively rare Rainbow variety.

Wednesday, January 10th

Today we toured the Midway and also visited the San Diego Zoo. Both were excellent, but the Midway was the most fascinating. We had a wonderful docent, a retired Navy helicopter pilot who had spent a part of his career serving on the Midway. We saw a large variety of vintage and military aircraft, from prop driven WW2 torpedo bombers to a modern jet fighters.

The Zoo was also impressive in its way, very beautiful. It’s a large park with very spacious animal enclosures and hundreds (or maybe thousands) of trees. The elephant area covers many acres. All the animals have a chance to stay out of sight of the public when they choose. E’s chief goal was to see giraffes, since she had recently read “West with Giraffes.”

Thursday, January 11th

Today we visited the Torrey Pines State Natural Reserve. We got to walk a couple of miles accompanied by another very knowledgeable volunteer docent. One thing he told us is that pine bark beetles by themselves are not a problem for pine trees. All pines, he told us, have bark beetles living in their outer layers of bark. A pine forest can contain many millions of bark beetles and still be quite healthy. Trouble starts when a tree is water stressed and begins to dry up. At that point bark beetles have to bore farther into the tree to find moisture. If they bore far enough, they destroy the structures that normally move moisture and nutrients up and down the tree. Once the flow of water is interrupted, the tree is doomed–and presumably so are the beetles living on it.

Today was the end of the Road Scholar Tour. We had a nice dinner and said goodbye to our guide and our fellow participants. We were both sad and glad to see it end.

Friday, January 12th

M went out this morning and picked up a rental car, a 2018 Audi R8 coupe with a 532 horsepower V-10 engine mounted just behind the seats. They say the car can go from zero to sixty in 3.5 seconds. Top speed is supposed to be 170 or so. New ones cost between $161,000 and $253,000, but you can get a used one, like the one we rented, for around $135,000. But before you run out and buy one, be aware that it has very limited luggage space.

As M had planned, we drove out to Mt Palomar, 50 miles northwest of San Diego. The Palomar Observatory is on the north east side of the mountain. There are several telescopes at the observatory, including the 200-inch Hale telescope, which was the largest telescope in the world from 1949 to 1975. Quasars were first discovered by astronomers using the Hale. We came close to the observatory but turned back due to snow on the road. There was still plenty of wonderful scenery.

Saturday, January 13th

We took a little coast drive today, going north on Highway 101 up to Carlsbad. Even though we came back on the freeway, somehow we never managed to get our speed up to 170.

We spent our last evening at the Marriott having a light supper on their fifth floor rooftop terrace.

Sunday, January 14th

Okay, time to head home. M returned the Audi and we were just packing up when we got a fatal text. Our Alaska Airlines flight to Eugene was cancelled. Oh dear. Was it because of the weather or because half of their fleet had been grounded after the blown-out door incident? They didn’t say. Instead they offered a partial routing that would have taken us to Steamboat Springs, Colorado on Tuesday and from Seattle to Corvallis on Wednesday. (It seemed that they hadn’t yet figured out how to get us from Colorado to Washington. But probably they were working on it. )

We didn’t like that and decided to rent a car and drive home. (We had just had our coffee and it seemed like a good idea.) We checked out of the hotel and ubered to the airport where we picked up another rental car, one somewhat less crazy than the R8. We were on the road by 11:00, heading north on I-5, a road that would take us all the way to Eugene. The total distance was 978 miles; we thought we could make in two reasonably easy days, which would get us home by Monday night.

The road was flat and straight going up California’s central valley. Traffic moved fast. By 7:30 PM we’d done over 500 miles. That seemed like enough. We stopped at a Hampton Inn in Woodland, a town just outside of Sacramento. We found an Indian restaurant with a sign saying Under New Management and decided to try it. The new owner was a very nice young man. He wore a turban, so we’re thinking he must be a Sikh. The food was good and also plentiful. We took away enough for the next day’s lunch.

Monday, January 15th

We got on the road again by 8:00. On Sunday we’d driven up the bottom two thirds of California; only the top third of CA and half of OR remained. There are some mountains on the border between the two states and the pass there can be treacherous in the winter. But our weather continued fine and we had dry pavement all the way across. We saw just a little snow off to the sides here and there. At a rest stop just past Lake Shasta we had a fine Indian food lunch . And by the way, here’s the car that got us there:

So going over Siskiyou pass was no problem. However, as we were coming down the other side and into Oregon, we started to get warnings about trouble farther ahead. The Eugene and Corvallis area had been hit with a series of ice storms. Rain was falling out of a warm air layer up high. But the temperature down below was in the low twenties, so when a raindrop hit the ground–or anything else–it turned immediately into ice. The more it rained, the thicker the ice layer got. Really, it’s kind of a cool process. But of course it’s not too good for driving and it’s also hard on trees. We learned that all the roads leading north were closed at a point about twenty miles south of Eugene. It seemed clear that we wouldn’t be getting home this day. We drove as far as Roseburg and stopped there for the night.

Tuesday, January 16th

This morning we checked the weather. It was still bad, with freezing rain predicted for both Eugene and Corvallis. But the I-5 was open, at least for the moment. What to do, what to do. Hang around Roseburg for a day or two? Nah. We wanted to be home. We loaded ourselves back into the Seltos and went off to see what we could see.

What we saw was nice dry pavement all the way up to Cottage Grove, a town just twenty-five miles from the Eugene airport. From there on, though, a thick layer of ice covered the road and we began to see lots of jackknifed semis and other stranded vehicles. We could also see where many trees had fallen onto the highway and had been cleared off. Traffic was heavy with lots of trucks. But everyone was being really careful and the average speed was less than twenty miles per hour. Our all-wheel-drive Kia served us well and eventually we made it to the Eugene airport where we could turn it in to Avis and retrieve our truck.

Of course the truck, when we found it, was heavily iced over, having been through several days of ice and snow storms. On the hood we found a layer of ice and snow two and a half inches thick. The windshield had a layer of clear ice about an inch thick. The passenger side had gotten the worst of the weather and was also covered by a thick layer of pure ice. We could see at a glance there was absolutely no chance of opening the passenger door anytime soon. Fortunately, there was less ice on the driver’s side and we managed to open the driver’s door, just by speaking nicely to it for a minute or two. Then we could start the engine. When it warmed up a little, we turned on the defroster. When the windshield glass finally started to get warm, the ice that covered it started to come unstuck from the glass underneath it. So instead of having to scrape the ice off, we were able to pry it off in big chunks. But what about the wipers? We were pretty sure we would need those. It took a while, but we finally got most of the ice off of them too. Just about then, it started to rain and of course those drops pretty much froze as soon as they landed. Oh boy.

But at least we were on the road. From the airport we headed up Highway 99 toward Corvallis, in 4-wheel drive all the time and moving awfully slow. There were a few other vehicles on the road but not all that many. Snow is rare in these parts and we were amazed to see how different everything looked. It was strange to realize that neither of us had ever seen this part of Oregon covered with snow and ice. Here’s what some of the farms and orchards looked like:

We made it home eventually. On the way, the truck shed some of its ice, but when we arrived there was still no way to open that passenger side door.

What a strange trip it was: beginning with an 80 mile per hour cruise up a ten-lane freeway in sunny San Diego and finishing with an 20 mph crawl along an iced over two laner. It was awful but also kind of fun in its way. It’s amazing what you can do if you’re foolish enough to try. And what was our reward? Well, it turns out we didn’t have to worry about getting dinner because H and T invited us for spaghetti. Nice!

Wednesday, January 17th

It was a cold icy morning but by midday the temperature started inching up. We managed to pop open the passenger door of the truck. Later on, when evening came around, the world was still iced over, but we heard some tell-tale dripping sounds as the melting finally began.