Viewing entries tagged
California

This Week on the Road 8/1-8/13

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This Week on the Road 8/1-8/13

Hello Everyone! It is wonderful to be back writing This Week on the Road, but not nearly as good as it is to actually be back on the road. I spent the last year dreaming of the open highway ahead of me and the wind in my hair. As much as I love my hometown and my family and friends, I missed the natural landscapes around which I have built my life. For the rest of 2025 I plan to surround myself with beaches and mountains, waterfalls and glaciers, sunsets and wildlife. I have also learned in my life that while some people thrive on routine and knowing their surroundings, I live for new places I’ve never seen or visited. I may love the museums and bars and coffee shops at home, but for me there is always something special about walking into the unknown – a town or restaurant or music venue I’ve never been in before. I can spend my time looking around and picking up on the details of the place, eavesdropping on the local gossip. I like being the stranger in town. It’s a role I embrace. This last week+ has been a wonderful reintroduction to the world of travel and vanlife for me, with a few familiar places, a few familiar faces and a whole lot of something new.

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Snapshots: Ferndale - The Victorian Heart of Humboldt County

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Snapshots: Ferndale - The Victorian Heart of Humboldt County

I have really been looking forward to visiting Ferndale, the Victorian village in Humboldt County, and it was so much more than I ever imagined it would be. This charming town is over the river and down the road from the main highway and while it’s definitely not a secret it still kind of feels like it is.

Ferndale got its start back in 1852 when brothers Stephen and Seth Shaw came to the area to claim a homestead and begin farming. They found that the land was particularly suitable to raising cattle and a small dairy community would begin to grow. William would eventually leave the area, but Seth remained and built a beautiful Gothic home, which he called Fern Dale. When a post office opened in the area, the name was adopted for the town. That house is now called Shaw House and is still there to see in all its Gothic glory.

Dairy, and especially butter, would be the main industry of the town for quite some time, and a process of cutting and wrapping butter in paper for transport was pioneered in Ferndale. Once this process had been developed, butter was shipped down the Eel River and sent south to San Francisco and the town would grow. Butter brought wealth to the area and many fine homes and buildings were constructed in the Victorian style of the time, often called “Butterfat Palaces”. I’m thrilled that so many of these buildings have survived and dairy continues to be the main industry driving the local economy.

I spent a couple of days in Ferndale, taking these photos. I found the locals to be friendly and welcoming as one would expect in Northern California. I particularly enjoyed a conversation about the upcoming Humboldt County Fair one night in the Palace Saloon and also attending an Old Timers’ baseball game at the local ballfield. Breakfast at Joe’s Place was top notch and I loved being able to enjoy a glass of local wine above the bar in the Gazebo. Taking these photos was a joy, especially of the Gingerbread House, Gazebo, the Victorian Inn and the beautiful lamp posts around town. I hope you enjoy these photos of fabulous Ferndale, a town full of Victorian charm in the heart of Humboldt County…

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Snapshots: Mendocino, Small Town Charm on the NorCal Coast

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Snapshots: Mendocino, Small Town Charm on the NorCal Coast

Originally a Pomo Indian settlement, a lumber town was established on this site in 1852. The town was originally called Meiggsville, and then Big River before finally settling on Mendocino, named after Spanish navigator Antonio de Mendoza. Many of Mendocino’s early non-native settlers were from New England which is definitely evident in the architecture. In fact, several episodes of the TV show Murder, She Wrote were filmed here, and Mendocino stood in for the fictional town of Cabot Cove, Maine. Quite a few films were made here as well, perhaps the most memorable of which was James Dean’s 1955 classic East of Eden. Today, Mendocino is one of the most charming little towns along the California coast and attracts a wonderful mix of artists, tourists and small-town enthusiasts like myself. I thought it was cool that the town still has many of the original wooden water towers, built before the town had a central water supply. My favorite places to photograph were definitely the stunning old Masonic Hall with it’s beautiful statue called Time and the Maiden, the old Mendocino Beacon Building, the unique water towers and of course the gorgeous coastline. I hope you enjoy these photos from stunning Mendocino, California.

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Finally, Finally Back on the Road

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Finally, Finally Back on the Road

Hello Everyone!

It is so nice to be back writing in this space again after entirely too long. It has actually now been a couple of years since I was keeping up with this blog on a regular basis, but that is all about to change. I am back in California, back in my van Shadow Catcher, and back on the road. To all of you who have been sticking with me for a while, thank you from the bottom of my heart. To all of you who have subscribed to this page in the last couple of years (and probably forgot that you did), welcome! I’m glad you’re here and I hope you will stick around for a while. I usually put out this newsletter on Thursdays and offer an update on the week of travel behind me and plenty of photos of the places I have been. This week will be a little different as I want to update everyone on what’s been happening in my life these last couple of years, and it’s not really a cheery topic. I promise it will be lighter from next week on. But for this week, here we go…

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A Month in the Rockies

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A Month in the Rockies

It’s always wonderful to be writing in this space and especially to be sharing photos of the places I travel. The last time I wrote, I was just finishing the first tour of a two tour package in the Rocky Mountains. I just finished the second tour and have returned to San Francisco where I have a few days to rest and recover before starting a new trip in a few days. This has given me a chance to go through some photos and pick out some of my favorites from the last month.

It was a great couple of trips and a great couple of groups out there in the mountains. They stuck it out through some pretty cold weather (for June), and both groups saw a reasonable amount of snow. While the rest of the country was struggling through a massive heat wave, we were building bigger and bigger fires to try and stay warm. It’s also spring, so the wildflowers were starting to bloom and the newborn baby animals were frolicking around as well. We saw babies of all of the following animals this month: bears, moose, elk, fox, wolves, pronghorn and mule deer. My favorite was definitely the baby pronghorn which couldn’t have been more than a few days old and was jumping around on its unsteady legs. My heart just melted…

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August on the Road

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August on the Road

Hello Everyone! I apologize for how long it’s been since I last wrote, but it’s been a hectic and crazy month out here on the road. Until this past weekend, I had not had a day off in over a month and I’ve covered a lot of ground during that time. I guided four trips in a row which took a lot out of me, but I had great passengers with me and we saw some amazing and beautiful places. I have another solid month of guiding beginning in just a day or two, but I wanted to drop you all a quick ‘hello’ and share some of my favorite photos from this last month on the road.

I started with an old favorite – a six day hiking tour in Yosemite for Intrepid Travel. While I’ve done this trip several times including twice earlier this summer, it’s still nice to spend so much time on the trail and to show people one of my favorite National Parks. The waterfalls were still going strong for August and it was the first time I’d been able to get up to hike Cathedral Lakes in the high country this year. These hikes left everyone pretty tired, but I know every one of those passengers had a great and memorable trip and will remember Yosemite fondly for the rest of their lives.

After bringing that group back to San Francisco, I left the following day for Seattle where I started a six day trip to Portland via Olympic and Mount Rainier National Parks. It had been 20 years since I was last in Olympic and it was really nice to be back in this beautiful and often overlooked park. We did a whale watching tour, explored the Hoh Rainforest and walked by the Pacific Ocean looking out at the beautiful sea stacks of Second Beach. While I used to spend a lot of time at Mount Rainier, that’s another park I haven’t been to since before the pandemic. On our first day there we got some fantastic clear views of the mountain and I’m glad we took advantage of them because our second day was almost entirely shrouded in fog. We still had a nice hike and then headed on to Portland where we visited the International Rose Test Garden (it is the City of Roses after all) and then had a quiet dinner in the park before calling it a trip.

Half of that group stayed on with me for the next six days and a lovely Swedish couple joined us as well. That week brought us from Portland all the way back to San Francisco. We visited Multnomah Falls in the Columbia River Gorge, ate smoked salmon with a lovely couple who run an indigenous salmon business on the Warm Springs Reservation, Kayaked in a volcanic crater near Bend, Gazed out over Crater Lake National Park and cruised the California Coast feasting on some fresh oysters. We finished with a walk through Muir Woods and a lovely view of the Golden Gate Bridge.

I got a day to wind down and wind back up again and the very next day I picked up my last group of that run for a fast and furious 15 day tromp through some of America’s best National Parks. We started off with a few days in Yosemite and then had to duck around Death Valley due to the rains from Hurricane Hillary, staying in Tonopah instead. After a quick trip to Cathedral Gorge State Park, we went on to Zion and then had two great days at the North Rim of Grand Canyon. You may remember that the last (and only) time I was at the North Rim, I was recovering from Covid so I didn’t push myself too hard out there. This time I headed deep into the Canyon on the North Kaibab Trail and it was really nice to see the Canyon from a different angle. We headed from there to Monument Valley to spend some time with the Navajo and then had two great nights in Moab visiting Arches National Park and Dead Horse Point State Park. Then we were off to Salt Lake City to learn about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints from the Mormon missionaries at Temple Square. Finally we spent three days in the splendor of Yellowstone before winding up our journey in beautiful Bozeman, Montana.

It was a long but quiet ride back to San Francisco from there, but I did get a few days to catch up on some sleep and a few other things before turning north again to Seattle where I am writing to you from today. Tomorrow I will meet another group and we will be headed east from here to Glacier National Park, my favorite place in the whole world. Then we’ll have some nice days in Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons before winding up in Salt Lake City. I’ll get a day to myself there and then turn around and do the same trip in reverse bringing me back to Seattle in the first week of October. It’s going to be cold in the Rockies by then, but it should be quiet and beautiful as well and I’m really looking forward to it.

I don’t think I’m going to get much of a chance to do anything here on my blog over the next month, but I’ll check back in with you when these two trips are done in October. The summer sure flew by this year, but time flies when you’re having fun. I hope you’ve all had a great summer out there, wherever you are and that you’re looking forward to cooler days ahead. Thank you, as always, for reading and I hope you enjoy this little sampling of photos of some of the spectacular places I’ve been this summer.

-Mike

(Click the link to see my favorite photos from this month)

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These Weeks on the Road - June 25th - July 12th

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These Weeks on the Road - June 25th - July 12th

Hello Everyone! It’s been a busy two weeks in Yosemite National Park, but a really good two weeks as well. Since I last wrote, I ran back-to-back 6 day hiking tours in the park with only a day in between, but both groups were really good and I definitely enjoyed my time with them. The weather was actually pretty cool for the first week but heated up considerably for the second. Of course the 4th of July has also come and gone and I can think of few better places to celebrate America than in our beautiful National Park System. There were no fireworks in the park or in the entire county since it’s mostly very dry forest, but we made up for that with stunning views from the newly reopened Glacier Point Road. I’ve been back in San Francisco for a few days of relaxing and planning and now I’m off to L.A. to run a 10 day trip which will take us to Joshua Tree National Park, Lake Havasu, Grand Canyon, Vegas and Yosemite, dropping us back in S.F. at the end of the month.

I’m always quite fascinated that I can run the exact same tour back-to-back and it is an entirely different trip. Different groups with different abilities and interests coupled with openings and closings in the park and a holiday weekend thrown in to boot and these last two trips only loosely resembled one another. Both were great though and I’m really happy I had the opportunity to run them both especially since one was a last second switch in my schedule. I had tweaked my knee a little bit on my last trip to the desert and have been really careful with it on these hiking-focused trips but I’m happy that it is healing well and will hopefully be back to 100% soon.

We set out on the first of the two trips on June 25th. After a nice lunch at the Iron Door Saloon in Groveland (California’s oldest saloon), we had a nice hike in the Tuolomne Grove of Giant Sequoias just inside the park entrance. These beautiful trees are the largest things by volume that have ever lived on the face of the earth. They start out as a tiny seed inside an egg-sized pine cone and can live for over 3,000 years under the right conditions. They are immense and majestic and always a sight to see. From there we dropped down into Yosemite Valley, made a photo stop up at magnificent Tunnel View, hiked to the base of Bridal Veil Falls and then made our way out to our hotel in El Portal, just outside of the park for the night.

We were up early the next morning to hike the Mist Trail past beautiful Vernal and Nevada Falls. A relatively cool June has kept the snow from melting too fast in the mountains so all of the waterfalls in the park are still going strong which is great for both the park and the state of California. As the name implies, the Mist Trail can get quite misty and it definitely was while we were out there. The trail takes you up a number of granite steps and past Vernal Falls for incredible views and a sizable soaking. We spent some time drying out on the top of the falls and then most of the group continued up to the top of beautiful Nevada Falls for lunch. After a nice long break we took our time coming back down from the waterfalls and stopped for a well-earned ice cream break at the bottom.

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This Week on the Road - June 11th-23rd

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This Week on the Road - June 11th-23rd

Hello Everyone!

I hope your summer is starting out as great as mine is. The summer solstice is upon us and I’m trying to make the most of the long days. This week I’ve been guiding a trip for two wonderful ladies from San Francisco to Las Vegas via Yosemite, Death Valley, Zion, Bryce, Monument Valley and Grand Canyon. While I definitely prefer guiding a larger group, the three of us have clicked well and have been having a good time out here. We’ve had some windy days, but they’ve also been sunny and bright and of course these parks are truly magical places to spend time.

We left San Francisco early Monday morning and made a beeline for Yosemite. I was happy that route 120 was open again after being closed due to road damage on the final decent into the valley. That closure caused me to detour around to the 140 on my last two trips, which added about an hour to the drive and threw my regular route, landmarks and commentary out the window. It was nice to do things a little differently for a change, but I was happy to fall into my familiar groove on that drive this week. Unfortunately by the time we were dropping into the valley in the afternoon, it had clouded up and there was some rain falling. This should be quite normal for this time of year, but after 20 years of drought it doesn’t feel normal. El Capitan was in the clouds and Half Dome wasn’t even visible. Thankfully the waterfalls were going strong and we stopped at a couple of viewpoints to check them out. The rain slowed to a drizzle and we spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around the old Ahwaneeche village behind the visitor center and visiting Galen Clark’s grave in the old cemetery. Clark came to the valley in 1851 after being diagnosed with consumption (tuberculosis) and having been given just a few months to live. He fell in love with Yosemite and decided to dedicate the rest of his life to preserving it. That life was supposed to be short, so he dug his own grave and planted Giant Sequoia saplings around it. He ended up living another 54 years but was eventually buried in the grave he dug for himself. After I told that story and we paid our respects, we headed to our hotel out in El Portal for the night.

We returned to the valley on Tuesday morning under blue skies and sunshine. Linda wasn’t convinced her knee would hold up on long ascents or descents, so we stayed on the valley floor for the day. We went out to Mirror Lake in the morning which was as full as I’ve ever seen it (it turns into Mirror Meadow pretty early in the summer most years). Then we wandered back to the Ahwanee, Yosemite’s classic park lodge. We had lunch in the Great Room and a nice chat about the afternoon. From there we made our way out to Lower Yosemite Falls which is still raging pretty hard right now and putting out plenty of spray. It’s awesome to spend some time there and the ladies really enjoyed it. Then we headed back to Yosemite Village for a coffee and then back to our hotel for the night.

Wednesday was kind of a quiet day. We chose a late start and then made our way down to the Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoias. The shuttle is finally running again, cutting out the 4 mile roundtrip hike to the grove from the parking lot. We enjoyed our visit to the big trees and then spent some time in historic Wawona, checking out some of the cool old buildings from Yosemite’s past. In the afternoon we returned to the valley for a quick coffee and then made our way back to the hotel. I’d been eating salads for a few days so I decided to grab a pizza which was nice. My knee was giving me some trouble too so I was grateful to be able to ice it and rest for the night.

Since the Tioga Pass over the Sierras is still under many feet of snow and likely won’t open until August, I had to make the long drive around the mountains to get to Death Valley on Thursday. Not only is this route far less scenic, but it also adds 2-3 hours to the drive. It wasn’t a fun or beautiful drive except at the very beginning or the very end, but we got there. I haven’t been to Death Valley in years, and we were greeted with a cool 107° when we arrived…

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Two Weeks on the Road with Austin College

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Two Weeks on the Road with Austin College

Hello Everyone!

It’s been a great couple of weeks out here on the road. I spent two weeks guiding a tour for Austin College, a small university based in Sherman, Texas (far from Austin, Texas – the school is named for Texas hero Stephen Austin). The tour was for a class on environmental concerns in our National Parks, a topic quite near and dear to my heart. It consisted of 10 students and their professor and took us from the Sierra Nevada Mountains to the desert. I really enjoyed these young people and I got along really well with the professor, Dr. Baker, as well.

I met the group two weeks ago on a Tuesday night here in San Francisco. They invited me to join them for dinner at House of Nanking in Chinatown which is a pretty cool place to eat as a group and we all enjoyed quite a feast. It was interesting to hear what the students were studying and what their specific area of interest was for this particular class. Their topics ranged from birds to flash floods to water conservation and all of them were really important to our western parks.

We spent the next three nights in Yosemite, hiking and meeting with the rangers to discuss the park’s key issues. There was still a lot of water in the valley and it was great to see everything so wet and green. On our first full day we hiked up the Mist Trail to Vernal and Nevada Falls and there was a ton of water coming over those waterfalls. Everyone got absolutely soaked, but thankfully it was a sunny day and we dried out quickly. The last time I did that hike was last November when those waterfalls were barely a trickle and the trail was completely dry. The next day we went out and hiked to the Giant Sequoias in the Mariposa Grove in the south of the park and it’s always awesome to see these massive 2-3,000 year old giants. In our meetings with the rangers and staff, we discussed fire management and bear conservation and the conversation was quite interesting. Leaving the park we headed south and around the mountains and ended up in Barstow for the night. We did some serious grocery shopping and then enjoyed a nice dinner at Peggy Sue’s 1950s Diner just outside of town. That night we had our first group discussion and I really enjoyed hearing the student’s opinions about Yosemite and what they had seen and heard over the previous few days.

We left Barstow early the next day as we had a pretty long drive to Grand Canyon that day. We stopped in Seligman to get our kicks on Route 66 and then headed on to the South Rim…

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This Week on the Road - May 17th-23rd

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This Week on the Road - May 17th-23rd

Hello Everyone,

I am officially back to work and my first tour of the season is behind me. This is my 16th tour season and my second working for Incredible Adventures here in San Francisco. I had a great summer working for Incredible last year, one of the best I’ve had in my career in fact, and I’m looking forward to another great season to come. I will still be running tours for Exodus and Intrepid, two of the brands I have guided for many years now, and will continue to run short Incredible Adventures tours as well.

The start of the summer tour season is always exciting. It is full of possibilities and just thinking about the places I will visit and the people I will meet puts a smile on my face. I know it will be exhausting and things won’t always work out as planned or as hoped, but I also know I am up for the challenge. Over the winter I visited an old friend of mine, Brett, at his home in western Wales. Brett came on tour with me many years ago and he asked me while I was there if my guiding personality is the same as my real personality. I told him that the only way to be truly happy and successful in this job is to be yourself. The more you try and be like someone else or act in a way that isn’t reflective of your own personality, the more people will see through you and it will always backfire in the end. That being said, I also told him that while when I am guiding it is absolutely me that people are seeing, I also believe that it is the very best version of me that there is. It’s the version of me who is outgoing and confident and an absolute expert in my field. I think three steps ahead and change my plans based on each individual group I take out. There are a lot of unknowns in this game from traffic to the weather to the individual personalities and expectations of my passengers and being able to think on the fly and make things run smoothly is a real skill. Being a good guide doesn’t just happen overnight. Like any other profession it takes years to hone your skills, but it’s so worth the effort when you do. I’ve been turning people’s dreams into memories for the better part of two decades, and I’m thrilled that this is the skill I have to offer the world.

After I left you last week, I had one more day in the office which I will spare you the details of. I had to go grocery shopping to feed 12 hungry people for the weekend which is always a challenge. Thankfully I got all of that finished at a reasonable time and was able to take a nice long walk around downtown San Francisco and then tuck into a good book to refresh my knowledge of Yosemite and still get a good night’s sleep. I was up early on Friday as I had to get to the office, hook up my trailer to my van, load my coolers and get back downtown before 8am. I picked up my group on time and we headed out to Yosemite for the weekend.

Yosemite is pretty wild right now with all of the snow melting into the rivers and pouring over the edge of the cliffs and into the valley below. The waterfalls are crazy and there are even waterfalls flowing that I’ve never seen before. The river has overflowed its banks and the meadows have turned into lakes…

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This Week on the Road - May 10th-17th

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This Week on the Road - May 10th-17th

Hello Everyone! Well, it’s definitely been a weird and challenging week out here. Nothing went as planned, but everything has worked out okay, at least for now. I had already left Lake Tahoe when I wrote this post last week, but when the master cylinder went on my van I headed back to the lake and spent the week with friends while I waited for it to be fixed. I got it back on Monday and then had to make a beeline for the Bay Area to get to the office in time to start my season. And I did make it, so that’s a good thing, and I will take out my first trip of the year this Friday. It wasn’t the week I had hoped for, but sometimes that’s what happens out here on the road.

After I finished this post last week, I went and had a nice lunch at the Truckee Airport with an old guiding friend of mine, Mike. I met Mike when I first started my guiding job back in 2000 and we worked for the same company for many years. He currently owns Tahoe-Sierra Transport Company which shuttles clients around the Reno and Lake Tahoe areas. We had some interesting Mexican/Indian fusion tacos and caught up for a little over an hour and it was really nice to see him. I spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around Truckee and taking photos. It’s a really cool little town with some great old buildings and everyone seemed pretty friendly. In the evening I went to a place called RMU which is a bar in a nice old house on the edge of downtown. I enjoyed some live music and a couple of beers and chatted with some of the locals. Truckee doesn’t allow overnight parking in the winter, but since it was after April 30th, I stayed in one of the downtown lots overnight with no problems.

On Thursday morning I got up early and had a nice breakfast at a little family-owned coffee shop on the main drag. I took some more photos and then headed just outside of town to Donner Memorial State Park. This is the site where the Donner party spent the winter of 1846-47. I think most of us know this story, at least to some extent, because of the cannibalism that took place as the winter wore on, but I didn’t know much beyond that. It seems like they made some bad decisions along the way, none of which seemed particularly hard to understand in context. The Donners and several other families headed west in the spring of 1846, hoping to make it to California before the winter. Traveling with covered wagons along rough trails was slow going and they only averaged 2 miles an hour on their journey. At one point they decided to take a “shortcut” from the accepted route and this seems to have been their fatal mistake. They got to the valley where Reno is now and could have safely stayed there until spring, but chose to push forward and try and get through the mountains before the snows came. They were only a couple of weeks’ walk from their destination in the central valley and were desperate to start their new lives. The snows came early that winter and didn’t let up for months, stranding them just a week’s walk from safety in either direction. They dug in and did their best and rescue parties eventually came to get them out. It wasn’t until after the first groups had been rescued that they came to the decision to eat their dead comrades. 87 people walked into the mountains with the Donners that winter and only 48 came out alive. The whole story is obviously a sad one, but it is interesting to learn about.  

As I was leaving the park on my way up into the mountains, I stepped on the brakes and my foot went down to the floor with the ABS and Parking Brake lights coming on at the same time. Brakes are obviously not to be messed with, especially when I had mountains to cross. I immediately texted my friend Mike who I had met with the day before and he called his local mechanic shop and connected me with them. I headed over there and they said they could get to it the next day. Then I called my friend J.D. who I had been staying with in Tahoe City and he came up immediately and picked me up and brought me back to his place…

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This Week on the Road May 3rd-10th

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This Week on the Road May 3rd-10th

Hello Everyone! It’s been another great week out here on the road in California. I’ve spent most of the week in the Lake Tahoe Basin, visiting with friends and taking it easy in the lead-up to my impending tour season. It’s been cold up here and has snowed almost every day since I arrived, but it’s been beautiful and relaxing and a lot of fun to be here. I know that spring is quickly turning to summer just down the mountain from here, so I’m going to enjoy the cool weather while I can.

I left you last week in Gardnerville and when I finished this post I headed up through Carson City and on to Virginia City. Virginia City was ground zero for the Comstock Lode mining boom which took over 700 million dollars’ worth of gold and silver out of the surrounding hills. In its heyday it grew to a city of 25,000 people and had 36 schools and over a hundred saloons. Money from the mining going on in Virginia City helped build San Francisco into the city it became (and was until the fire of 1906) and hastened the separation of Nevada from the Utah Territory as its own state (The Silver State!). When the gold and silver played out, the town’s population dropped significantly  but after the TV show Bonanza debuted in 1959, interest in the town grew and tourism became its main industry. It’s one of the better “old west” towns that I’ve visited and maintains a lot of its frontier character. I enjoyed wandering up and down the main street through town and taking photos and stopped in for a beer at the Bucket of Blood Saloon. It turned out that the bartender there was from Washington D.C. and three of the patrons were from just outside the city and south of Annapolis. I chatted with them for a while and enjoyed their million dollar view from the huge picture window at the end of the bar. The sun was going down as I left, so I wandered down the street to the Red Dog Saloon which was doing an open mic night. While others were welcome to perform, it was really some of the locals jamming out on stage and they were really good. I stayed the night just down the hill and it was extremely quiet out there.

I woke up early on Thursday and took another stroll through town and got some more photos with the sun lighting the other side of the street. I stopped in and had a coffee at The Roasting House, which had a great view out towards the valley, and then headed back down the hill to Carson City. I stopped into Bob’s Shell downtown to get my emissions test done. They were surprised that I could use a Nevada emissions test to pass my DC inspection but I promised them it was true. There are a few benefits to coming from such a transient city. I decided to fax it in because that seemed more likely to reach its final destination than if I dropped it in the mail and FedEx was happy to help me make that happen. Once that was signed, sealed and delivered, I headed on out of town. It was snowing which was a shame because I wanted to make a stop in Genoa, Nevada’s oldest town, but it was just too wet out there so I kept moving. I headed up and over the Kingsbury Grade, which is the back way to South Lake Tahoe, and my preferred road up and over the mountains. It’s a pretty steep road, but it was cold up there so we did just fine on the climb. It was really snowing hard up at the top of the hill, but it lightened up as I came down the other side and was barely a flurry when I pulled up at my friends’ house just outside of town.

I walked in to find my friend, Rob, with a huge batch of lemon marmalade on the stove. Rob and I were roommates way back in 1999 and have been good friends ever since. Since he moved to California I get to see him more often than most of our friends from back home and it’s always good to catch up with him.

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