Planes, Trains, and Automobiles

Last week I left off with a sleepless night in San Francisco. This week (sorry for being a day late, but it was my birthday and then I drove through a flood): picking up our home for the next three weeks and driving to Yosemite National Park.

My stepmom got up pretty early and I figured that meant it must just be time to get up. But then she told me she’s just going for a walk and that I can go back to sleep. Is there anything more magical than someone telling you to go back to sleep? Like when your mom comes into your room early on a winter morning to let you know there’s a delay or a snow day altogether—pure magic. Especially the morning after a very sleepless night. A little while later my dad did basically the same thing. Except he said he’d be back in about 20 minutes and then we should all go get breakfast. My stomach grumbled, “brrrreakfast…yrrrs prrrs,” so I dragged myself out of bed.

After breakfast we took the hotel’s free shuttle to the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) station. We stood around looking confusedly at a map until a fellow German speaking tourist came up and offered to help. Turns out he was headed in the same direction and knew at least sort of where to go. So we rode the train from Milbrae to 24^th street or something like that.

We rode the BART into San Francisco from our hotel in San Mateo.

We got off the train and onto a bus that took us to 3^rd street. Then we lugged all of our luggage for several blocks to Lost Campers. My parents kept offering to take my duffel bag for me (it has wheels, but it was pretty heavy). I just kept switching it from hand to hand and even pulled it with both while walking backwards for a while. I told them I’d let them know when I needed them to take over. And just when I thought I couldn’t go on pulling it any longer, we were there!

The owner, Nick, was really friendly. He told us about some other crazy Austrians, a pair of photographers, who got themselves stuck in Death Valley trying to take pictures by the sand dunes. If you get stuck in Death Valley, no one will come get you (well maybe AAA will, but I’m not sure). So these guys had to spend two days walking back to civilization. At least that’s the story this guy told us. I think people like to make things sound bigger and scarier than they actually are in order to scare off the inexperienced people who would end up in trouble simply because they wouldn’t know what to do. So we told him we’d be careful in Death Valley and my dad and I signed up as the drivers.

I got to ride shotgun and play navigator for a lot of our trip because I knew how to work the GPS. I programmed Yosemite National Park as our destination and we hit the road…sort of. We spent quite a bit of time failing to navigate the maze of hilly streets and got the GPS thoroughly confused. Eventually though we found our way and headed to the nearest Wal*Mart for food, water, and general camping supplies.

Once we were properly on the road we passed through farmland and endless orchards. Then there were hills covered in yellow grass, topped with old wind mills, and dotted with herds of cattle.

We stopped at a wings joint for lunch and my dad thoroughly enjoyed a basket of buffalo wings.

Upon Nick’s advice we spent our first night not in Yosemite, but the adjacent Stanislaus National Forest. It was Memorial Day weekend, so all the official campgrounds were full, but we found an area at an ATV trail head that had rudimentary campsites and a port-o-potty.

On the way to our first site we saw the first of several trees with shoes thrown up into its branches. We were fascinated. I’d seen a tree like this in a movie, and I figured maybe there was a real one somewhere, but I never thought I’d see one. I wish I’d brought an extra pair of shoes to throw up there.

Anyway, we set up our camp

Our camper van had a rooftop tent and a clever system for making a bed out of the inside of the car. There was also a little kitchen in the trunk!

and feasted on cold pizza and tomato salad dressed with leftover ranch from the wings joint. We agreed that I would sleep in the roof tent and my parents would share the bed that could be set up inside the car. It turned out to be a pretty comfortable sleeping arrangement, if a little cold for m those first few nights (that night we were at about 4,000-5,000 ft).

The next morning, we huddled in patches of sunlight filtering through the trees to stay warm through breakfast. Then we got back on the road toward Yosemite.

When we got close to Yosemite, we got stuck in a traffic jam. We puzzled over what caused it and hoped that it wasn’t because the park was so full. Eventually we said “screw it” and pulled off into Hetch Hetchy Valley for lunch. Hetch Hetchy was an area a lot like Yosemite Valley until it was flooded to create a reservoir in the 1910s. A lot of people protested this but it was done anyway. At least, that’s what my dad told us (a quick Google search verified it).

We made veggie sausages for lunch (camping hint: don’t bring foods that require refrigeration to save space and money that you’d otherwise use on ice for your cooler). We lazed around by the creek for a while. Then a family came by who had been swimming upstream. They told us about a really cool waterfall so we decided to go check it out. We headed for the woods but soon got the feeling that we must be on the wrong path. But we decided to check it out anyway. We found a big tree that had been cut down and spent a lot of time being amazed by it and saying how this tree alone was worth the unintentional detour. Little did we know then we’d be seeing true sylvan giants in just a few days.

Eventually we turned around and found the trail to the waterfall. It was a pleasant walk until we got to the waterfall itself, where a rudimentary trail continued up. A lot of people stayed near the bottom to take pictures. We climbed quite a ways along the side of the falls to get to a secluded area. We were pretty hot from the climb so we jumped into the frigid water. After that the sun disappeared pretty quickly so we headed back to the car.

That evening, we decided we’d earned a fancy restaurant dinner so we drove to the nearest one. My parents ordered steak and each tried some of my Reuben sandwich. Unfortunately, the campground we had our sights set on filled up in the meantime and we were forced to go on the hunt for a new place. The RV park nearby was far too expensive and demanded a three night minimum because of the holiday weekend (no idea how that makes a lick of sense).

Finally, we found a dirt road that led out a comfortable distance away from civilization. We pulled over on a turnout and decided that though we didn’t have a pretty view, this would do just fine. When you learn what you can do without, you end up saving yourself plenty of money.

Next week: Yosemite and beyond!

Family Supertramp (or the story of the roadtrip with my dad)

Before I launch into the multi-post story of my three-week road trip with my dad and stepmom, I have to give a little bit of background. I moved to Pennsylvania from Austria with my mom and stepdad when I was six years old. My dad (and the rest of our family) lives in Austria. We see each other more or less annually when I come visit for a few weeks in the summer. This trip was the longest span of time my dad and I have spent together since he and my mom broke up, and my memory doesn’t reach back that far.

My dad is in love with the desert. He regularly spends two weeks tramping around the Sinai Peninsula, sometimes alone, sometimes with family or a friend. It’s been his dream for a while now that we take a family trip—the whole family (my two stepsisters, my two stepbrothers, our baby half sister, my stepmom, my dad, and me). The prime seasons for visiting the Sinai desert are spring and fall, right in the middle of my semester. We spent probably two years trying to make a family trip happen, but getting such a large and far flung (well, I’m the only far flung one still, everyone else is back in Austria now) family together is basically a logistic impossibility.

One day while I was visiting in the summer, my dad said half jokingly that we should do a road trip in the American west instead. He did it in 1986 in a Volks Wagen bus. I’ve always wanted to see more of my adopted country.

Months later, I told my stepdad about this conversation (he’s always wanted to go RVing out west too). I told him I wasn’t sure how serious my dad was about this. He said I should ask him because it would be a great opportunity. So I emailed my dad. And from then on we emailed back and forth and thus our trip came to be.

We agreed to meet up in San Francisco on May 24, just a week after I finished school, and stay until June 14, with a few days in the city at the end. My dad rented a Dodge Caravan converted into a camper from Lost Campers and loosely plotted a route

This is a loose representation of our route.

through some national parks—we ended up visiting nine total. He left the planning of our San Francisco days to me, but I ended up being pretty busy. But the more spontaneous a trip, the more fun it can be. Right?

Words cannot express how nervous I was at the outset of my trek. First of all, I had just graduated from college and moved out of the apartment I’d shared with three of my closest friends for the last two years. None of that had hit me yet. I blame it on the fact that my sad old car denied me the cathartic drive home alone (I had dreams of blasting music and sobbing, clinging to the steering wheel like a security blanket). The Daewoo refused to start and I ended up riding home with the tow truck driver who was an excellent conversationalist (and a charlatan, but that’s a story for another post). That and everything I needed to do to get ready for my trip kept me thoroughly distracted from feeling anything other than stressed.

On top of this whole mess, I’m actually afraid of flying even though I do it all the time (another long and currently irrelevant story). Stress makes me anxious. Anxiety kicks my fears into high gear. My first flight was from Bradford to Cleveland, about an hour in the air, in a tiny propeller airplane (there was a special notice on my flight confirmation that it wasn’t a jet engine deal). I’d never flown in anything that small before. I was a mess but trying really hard to deny it. This is what I do: I repress things, and then something happens that breaks the dam. This morning over my breakfast, my mom told me what time we would be leaving for the airport. Almost an hour earlier than I expected. I still needed to shower. I still needed to finish packing. I still needed to print out my hotel reservation stuff. I still needed to plan San Francisco. I still needed to finish updating my CV and sending out job applications (so I’ve developed a procrastination problem…). I scarfed down the rest of my food and made it to the shower before the dam broke.I lathered up while my face leaked salty fluids and contorted itself into silent screams.

I tried to breathe deeply but my nasal passages where blocked by allergies. I tried thinking about happy things. I tried to feel excited instead of scared. Somehow I managed to stop the involuntary facial calisthenics. We made it to the airport just in time to get lunch before I had to go to security (this is a really, really tiny airport in rural PA).

Despite my horrible fears, my flights went really well and I landed in San Francisco safe and sound. But I was starving because they only offered small snacks for sale on the plane (that was a first for me). So the first thing I did at SFO was buy a ridiculously over priced BLT with avocado and a side of garlic fries. Suddenly I was incredibly worried that my luggage hadn’t made it safe and sound (my mom called me while I sat in Cleveland to let me know they searched my bag in Bradford). So I went and grabbed it off the conveyor belt. Now I felt the overwhelming need to pee. Probably should have done that before grabbing my giant duffle bag. But I managed. Finding no open seats, I sat against the wall by where I thought my parents would be coming out and devoured my sandwich.

Eventually a seat opened up and I decided to kill the time by seeing if I could access some wifi. In my state of emotional and travel exhaustion, it took me about an hour to figure out how to actually get to the internet from the initial SFO home page. At the same time, I was becoming increasingly concerned at the fact that my parents hadn’t arrived. When I finally figured out the internet, I checked my email and there was nothing. I didn’t know what that meant. I found their flight number and looked it up. I was very confused by the news that their flight had already arrived. Because my dad had expressed concern over how little time they had to catch their flight in Philadelphia, I was suddenly convinced that they’d missed it. I went to the information desk to ask how I could figure this out and he promptly informed me that I’d been waiting at the wrong terminal the whole time.

So I headed to their terminal and paged them on a courtesy phone. While a robotic female voice called out their names (is it weird that paging someone in a large public space was on my bucket list?), I called our hotel. I let it ring for ages and no one picked up. So I called again. This time a woman picked up and informed me that my dad was right there in the lobby. So I asked her to send the shuttle and my parents with it.

I hurried outside and waited in the cold (imagine my surprise that it was cold in California). It felt like I waited forever but I’m sure it wasn’t even five minutes. My dad jumped out of the shuttle while it was practically still moving and I ran into his arms, dragging my bag behind me. My stepmom captured the moment

My stepmom snapped a quick picture of me blubbering into my dad’s arms.

and then we got in the shuttle and headed to the hotel where my parents had already checked into our room (luckily they were able to even though I made the reservation). By then it was midnight and we were all starving so we ordered a pizza that we got at about 1 a.m.

We had plans for getting up bright and early to pick up our camper in the city (we stayed in San Mateo—cheaper and we got a free airport shuttle). So I showered and collapsed into bed. But of course I was much too worked up to sleep.

Next week: The real adventure begins.