road trip with Nadia

[nibot]

When I announced to Ken that I would be "disappearing for awhile," I could see the sudden panic in his eyes. A quick "but I'm coming back in 2.5 days!" relaxed the situation and I was able to secure, yes, time off of work, based on my sworn promise to be in today at a bright and early 8:00 in the morning — an occurrence that would be totally without precident. Ah, yes, the cause for this disappearance was the stated mission: to have an adventure. After just n weeks (for small n) of togetherness, Nadia (nawl) and I declared the need for an adventure before our tragic separation, and to me adventure virtually means road trip, and so that became the plan.

I had first thought of Lassen with all its nifty volcanism, you know, hot springs and steaming mud pits, all that good stuff; but then a quick web check showed the park under many meters of newfallen snow, and so the next Northward destination to hit the radar was Humboldt County. I'd heard much about Humboldt from Bryce and from Sarah and Allegra in my house, but had never ventured up to this mysterious region of our state. Perhaps it was about time...

So the morning was full of all sorts of last-minute tasks, some frantic computations at LBL, the retrieving of splorg.org out of the XCF office with the help of vadim, and lots of other little things I don't remember. Meanwhile, Nadia finished painting and moving her stuff to her new room, and then finally we stashed our stuff in the vanagon and were off, to Wilde, to Kaolin's house, to Safeway (the first stop of what became a ritualistic enterprise), and finally out on the highway and eventually up US-101.

By the time we got up to the big trees, it was already dusk. Nonetheless we were treated to the endless array of tree gimmicks, you know, the live-in trees, the drive-through trees, even the chimney trees, all the big tree shenanigins that count as tourist attractions in these parts. Over the Avenue of the Giants, and eventually we reached Arcata and eeked out the whereabouts of a certain guy named Bryce (bom), who quickly invited us into the hospitality of his apartment there (and whose dining room chair collapsed under me!). It was quite nice seeing Bryce again and looking at all his nifty things, and a little funny too since I hadn't seen him in so long; for some reason we're always at least 400 miles apart. That's one reason one must periodically go on these little trips by road or by plane.

We cooked yummy MSG-enhanced Safeway noodles. We gawked at Banana slugs. We slept happily on a futon.

P.S. check out nadia's writeup, complete with pictures.