I am so relieved to finally be at Asa's place in Berkeley. The last two days were pretty hectic. I guess my excessive sleeping finally caught up with me because I couldn't fall asleep on Wednesday night. As a result, I missed Anna's 7:30 yoga class. I was pretty slow moving, so I didn't actually leave Portland until 1:00. Here are some photos I took of Lisa and Dave's place before I left:
Monstro, the compost bin
Lisa and Dave's house with Ruby in the driveway
The garden - notice the wine barrels that Dave converted into a watering system for the garden
More garden
Even more gardenOne thing I forgot to mention that I learned about Oregon is that they have a hybrid blackberry, engineered by scientists at Oregon State University, that accounts for half of all blackberries harvested in the state. It's called a Marionberry. Ha! Hilarious. I tried some Marionberry yogurt and it was fantastic. Nothing at all like the former mayor of DC. Clearly there is no connection between the two. Of course later I tried a different brand of Marionberry yogurt and it was awful. It didn't smoke crack, lie, steal from taxpayers, or exploit innocent people, so it wasn't nearly as bad as Marion Barry, but still it was not good.
Shortly after I left, I was driving through Tigard, OR and remembered that there was a Sweet Tomatoes there. Sweet Tomatoes was one of my favorite places to eat in Houston and there isn't one within 1,000 miles of DC. They have the best salad bar in America. Better than the nicest Whole Foods'. I determine the quality of a salad bar based on four main criteria:
1) Quality of lettuce: romaine, baby greens, and/or arugula
2) If they have the toppings I like, namely: grape tomatoes, cucumber, thinly-sliced red onions, diced hard boiled egg, blue cheese, peas, beets, and croutons
3) Salad dressings: good low-fat options
4) Add-ons: pre-made salads, fruit, deserts
Sweet Tomatoes has all of the above. And their add-ons can't be beat. They have many pre-made salads, 6-10 different soups, a baked potato bar, pizza bread, pasta, freshly baked bread and muffins, a fruit bar, and an frozen yogurt bar. It took me forever to find the place because, once again, my GPS got me all turned around. Nevertheless, I was determined to find it. I had to stop and ask three different people for directions, but eventually I got there.
Unfortunately, I was totally disappointed. I was trying to figure out why I was so disappointed and I thought of a part in Spivet, where he talks about the "Trident of Nostalgia." Disclaimer: my recollection could be wildly inaccurate. It analyzed the basis for T.S.'s nostalgia for McDonalds. It had something to do with the sight of the golden arches, the smell of the fries, and the associated memories of his earlier childhood. Besides meeting all of the criteria by which I measure the quality of salad bars, I think the real reason I liked Sweet Tomatoes so much when I was in Houston was because of some of the memories it brought back. I was incredibly homesick in Houston, and there were many things about Sweet Tomatoes that reminded me of my early childhood and college - the happiest times in my life.
First of all, they have Creamy Cucumber salad dressing at Sweet Tomatoes, which is the kind of dressing my mom used when we lived in the little house on Old Chester Road, where I lived between the ages of 3 and 5 1/2. If you know my mom, you know that salads are pretty much all she eats, so I have a very vivid memory of that dressing. I hadn't seen it anywhere since we moved out of the little house until Sweet Tomatoes.
Also, it's buffet style, which reminded me of when I was little and my grandfather used to take me to Hot Shoppes or Sizzler for lunch on Saturdays after a long morning of garage sale hunting.
The dining hall in college was also a buffet, but moreover, the food selections were very similar to those at Sweet Tomatoes. Believe it or not, some of my fondest memories of college were in the dining hall, even when it was in the BAT (Big-Ass Tent).
I guess now Sweet Tomatoes just reminds me of Houston, and while my time in Houston was um ... challenging, I loved my school (the second, NOT the first), and I made a lot of great friends, many of whom I dragged to Sweet Tomatoes, so I think that's what perpetuated my overly-positive perception of it.
When I stopped for lunch, I was in the middle of listening to The Great Gatsby - it's one of my favorite books, but I hadn't read it since high school, so a rereading (or relistening to) was in order.
At some point in Southern Oregon, I decided I wanted to drive along the coast, so I attempted to make my way west. I thought I was following the directions on my GPS, but either I wasn't or it was confused, or maybe both. Regardless, I found myself on seemingly never-ending windy mountain roads somewhere in Southern Oregon and my GPS and phone both lost service. Two of the roads actually dead-ended at the edge of cliffs. It was very Coyote and Roadrunner. There were no street signs and it was too overcast to see the sun, so I couldn't even tell which way I was driving. I spent three hours on that mountain, during which time the only other vehicles I saw were two unattended trucks parked on the side of the road. Even if someone had been in them, I don't know that I would've stopped. Thank God I had enough gas. It was nothing short of a miracle that I got out of there.
On the up side, I finished listening to The Great Gatsby while on the mountain. What a great book. Black Boy was the first audio book I listened to on my trip and it was phenomenal. If you haven't read it, you need to ASAP. It was a tough book to follow. I tried Fear and Loathing but it annoyed me from the start. Then I started to listen to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. At first it was cool because the story started out in Minnesota, where I was when I started listening to it, and then moved into South Dakota and Montana, almost in sync with my own progress. Unfortunately I couldn't stand the book. The guy reading it sounded smug and condescending. It was hard to tell if it was him or the book. Most likely it was some combination of the two. I have little patience for overly simplistic self-righteous self-proclaimed prophets. Someone really needs to teach this guy "show, don't tell." About a third of the way through the book, I'd had enough.
By the time I got off the mountain it was 7:00 PM and I still had four hours of driving ahead of me. I had to call the Redwood National Park Hostel, where I'd made reservations for that night, to tell them that I wasn't going to be able to get there before 10:00, when check-in ended. The lady was really nice and said that she'd leave information for me outside the hostel and leave linens and a towel outside the door of my room.
When I finally arrived there a little before 11:00, I was ready for bed. I got in the door okay and found my room and my sheets. All of the other women in the room were already asleep and the only bed that remained was a top bunk next to the door that was missing a pillow. Luckily the pillow snatcher woke up a few minutes later and gave me back my pillow. This bed was a far cry from the cloud-plucked-from-heaven that I slept in at the Union League Club in Chicago and the woman sleeping on the bottom bunk snored like a chainsaw, so I didn't sleep very well.
I woke up at 7:00, but had to wait to shower until after 8:00, when the front desk reopened, so I could get a towel - they forgot to leave one outside my room. Then I had to wait for the shower because there was some sort of problem with the pipes and only one shower in the whole hostel had hot water.
I decided not to stay for the day because it was cold and rainy, so I got on the road around 9:30.
The trip from Redwood to Berkeley went much more smoothly than the day before. I did make the poor choice to stop at McDonalds for a medium mocha. I thought it would help keep me alert for the drive, which it did, but it also made me super jittery. A small would've been more than enough. A medium was just excessive.
I also started and finished another audio book, The Mouse and the Motorcycle, by Beverly Cleary. It was very cute.
Then I drove through a giant tree.
This is for my math teacher friends. You can have your students figure out the volume of the tree. Or at least you can have them figure out the volume if it were a perfect cylinder, which it's obviously not. Whatever. 
Later on the trip traffic got really slow and I saw that at the front of the slow-moving mass of cars was a police car swerving back and forth across the two lane highway. I really didn't know what to make of it. It was like that scene in Superbad when the two cops and McLovin get really drunk and do donuts with the police car in some parking lot.
Then I saw a Hispanic man randomly wandering down the median strip and the cops got out of their car and handcuffed him. It was totally bizarre. Here are photos:
I got to Berkeley around 4:00 PM, took a nap, and then met up with Asa at a party that one of his professors was hosting. It was fun. There was good food and I met a bunch of interesting people from Asa's program. I will write more later.
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