The Tourist

[jakebe]

I haven't been camping in years. Even while I was in Arkansas, which has a LOT of great natural spots to choose from. Not sure why that is, actually; with everything else to do outdoorsy stuff is usually the thing that ends up getting bumped lower to make r,oom for other things. It's easy to forget the singular pleasures of being within nature, and it's weird to think of the nearest forest outside of your city as some exotic locale with its own set of rules. But that's how I've come to think of it, I'm ashamed to say. If toob has anything to say about it, we'll be getting more familiar soon enough.

Last weekend we took theottsel and lazarusrat up to Gold Country. It's one of those great little gems of California that not a lot of people get to for whatever reason. It's out of the way, can be murderously hot during the summer, and it's a little expensive to stay there (the hotels we checked out were north of $100 per night, though that could be because it was such an event weekend). But it's worth it to go there for a day trip or even a weekend; there are tons of great little wineries with unique stock, awesome restaurants with great mountain food (and cheap drinks!), and all kinds of stuff to do if you're willing to drive a little to get there.

Thankfully Tube has connections, so we were able to stay at a local cabin, which we used as our base of operations for several day trips we had planned. We'd go to Yosemite and hike the Mist Trail, head down to Bodie to take the ghost-town tour, and then from there to Mono Lake, a surprisingly neat salt lake on the Nevada border. Then we'd visit the wineries littering Murphys, take advantage of their free tastings, and visit a couple of restaurants we really like. Somewhere in there, after getting back to the cabin and before passing out from exhaustion, we'd watch a movie or two. Tube's pick: the first three entries in the “Friday the 13th” series.

It started out with the required amount of disaster, so at least we got it out of the way early. The trees outside the cabin had become laden with ice at some point during the winter, knocking out the neutral cable that ran from the house to the pole. The wireless router had fried, and the power strip that protected the TV and assorted equipment took a terrific hit. We were lucky that the plugs hadn't melted into their sockets. But, us being city folk with no idea how cabin electricity works, we fooled around with the circuit breakers for a while. It took a few fluorescent lights filling the kitchen with smoke and quite a few scary way-too-dim/way-too-bright lights before we called the cabin's owners, and then PG+E. There's more to that story, but I don't want to step on anyone's totally-true account of how the rest went down.

To top it all off, the temperature swooned when the sun went down. The heat depended on the electric, so we could see our breaths inside the cabin before everything was sorted out. We got warm just in time to watch rain turn to sleet turn to snow, and when we got up the next morning we pretty much had to have a snowball fight. Did you know ottsels almost never see snow?

We tried going to Bodie first, but both passes we would have used to get there were closed. It took about five hours of driving for us to find that out. We drowned our sorrows at the local wineries, took home about ten bottles, and drank two while watching movies. “Friday the 13th”, I've determined, is really a poor man's “Halloween.” A lot of the cliches we've come to know about the 80s slasher films come from that whole franchise. The first movie, with its twist on who the killer is, is actually pretty neat, shocking for its brutality with its kills. The second movie was pretty cool, and iconic if only because it had Jason's first true appearance. The third is total crap, but unfortunately you kind of have to watch it if you want to know where Jason's hockey mask, ridiculous strength and savvy stalker's abilities come from. There are also some surprising tropes that I don't think anyone's touched; the lone survivor coming back from being off-screen for most of the movie to discover that most of her friends are dead, that scene where she finds them in the places that Jason's left for her, one by one. To be fair, it's a really terrifying scenario. But it loses its power when it becomes predictable.

Anyway, we went to Yosemite the next day. I'd never been to a national park before (at least, so I think), so I wasn't quite sure what to expect. What we got was a lot of driving and a LOT of walking. :) We went up the mist trail, which weaves in and out of the Merced River and sweeps around the Vernal and Nevada falls. The high altitude and steep slopes combined to nearly kill me, but once you get up there it's so worth it. There's a wonderful feeling, where you're looking at this beautiful world spread out before you, knowing that you had to work hard to get that view. It makes you feel accomplished and humble and grateful at the same time. I don't think I've ever had the feeling before where I come to appreciate the journey by reaching the destination. I usually quit, I think, before I get to where I need to be. ;)

The day after that we went to Bodie and Mono Lake; the passes had finally opened up for us to get there. It was a lot of driving, but totally worth it. I was surprised to find that I enjoyed Mono Lake a lot more than the spooky old ghost town, though that was really neat in its own right. I think Bodie would have been a lot more impressive if we were the only ones there. You don't really get the proper sense of isolation when there are all kinds of other people during the tourist thing. Lake Mono had a lot of people, but it's so huge that you can find a pocket of it all to yourself and just...appreciate it. I hung back to talk to Tube and he reminded me (in his own way) to just be there, and be silent, and be content. I had no idea how much I had been missing that until that moment.

Though I was in pain for most of the rest of the trip, it was a lesson I took with me. It really made me see things differently, and I ended up enjoying myself a lot more. The next day of wine tasting in Murphys probably helped with that, though.

So...there you have it. My travelogue. I don't have anything nifty like pictures or really neat anecdotes, but I'm just getting back into the swing of things with this journal, so give me a chance to get my wheels in gear again!