The Hamster and the Highway

The first time I went to the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City I got a personalized tour legendary Negro Leagues player, manager, ambassador, and general mensch Buck O’Neil. OK, that’s a bit of an overstatement. The tour was personalized but not for me. My friend Jeremy and I walked into the museum a few moments after Buck had started giving a tour to a Missouri Congressman. We siezed the opportunity and eavesdropped on Buck for the next half hour. (On a related note, if you haven’t read “The Soul of Baseball,” Joe Posnansky’s inspiring book about Buck O’Neil, you’re missing out. If you like baseball or American history or America or civil rights or optimism you will greatly enjoy this book.) Buck made that trip to the museum much more special that we had expected it to be.

Wednesday morning I was back at the museum, this time with The Hamster instead of Jeremy. Buck O’Neil is no longer with us, and I’m not nearly as knowledgeable a tour guide.

The problem with bringing Sam to museums in general is that I want him to learn but I don’t want to suck the fun out of it, and selfishly I like to be able to take my time and enjoy the exhibits myself. I’ve had trouble finding the right balance with him, but I’ve learned a few things that I employed today to make things much more enjoyable for us both.

1) Preparation is key. He didn’t appreciate the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame because he wasn’t familiar enough with the music or the musicians. Toward that end Wednesday’s accidental visit to the Brown V. Board of Ed historical site and our ensuing discussion about segregation were perfectly timed for Thursday’s museum.

2) I can’t make him read all the little typed descriptions and I can’t take the time to read them all myself, but I can walk slowly enough to read some of them and I can strategically point out a handful that I know he’ll find interesting.

3) Instead of steering him toward informative textual information or artifacts I steered him toward short films and interactive technological exhibits. He had no interest in reading about the formation of the Negro Leagues or in looking at old pictures of founders but he loved the brief James Earl Jones-narrated movie about how and why the leagues came to be and the man who spearheaded their creation. He thinks he’s being entertained, I think he’s being educated, everybody’s happy.

I dare say I’m getting reasonably good at this. I was impressed to see how many of the top Negro Leaguers Sam knew of and I was moved by his depth of understanding of the circumstances under which they played. Even without Buck there telling stories, the museum touched both of us. For a little while. After we’d been walking through the museum for about a half hour a poorly supervised day camp arrived, sending dozens of 6- and 7-year-olds running and screaming through the museum. Sam was clearly irritated by the camp kids and ended up speeding through the rest of the museum–even the museum’s centerpiece Field of Legends (life-size statues of the very best Negro Leagues players arranged in position on a slightly undersized baseball diamond).  Even without the wild campers it still would have been tough to top having Buck O’Neil as your tour guide, but Sam really enjoyed the museum and insisted that I not only buy him a souvenir but also bring a keepsake home for the family.

(Related note #2: The museum is privately funded and thus in perpetual financial hardship. If you made lots of money shorting the markets this past week, you could do worse than to send some of it their way.)

The first time I visited the Gateway Arch in St. Louis was also with my friend Jeremy, on the same trip that brought us to Kansas City. As impressive as the Arch was, we had no idea that there was a whole museum underneath it or that we could go up to the top on the inside, so we didn’t budget much time for it and weren’t able to do much besides gawk at the structure.

Wednesday afternoon I was back at the Arch, this time with The Hamster instead of Jeremy. This time I was determined to take Sam up inside it. He’s been excited about the Arch for weeks–early in the trip he listed Yellowstone Park, the redwoods, and the Arch as the remaining destinations he was most excited for. His fascination with the Arch, I found out only today, stemmed from his having done a little project about it in school this year. Like me six years ago, he had no idea we could go inside it until we got there. The difference was that this time I made sure we had time for it.

Like at the Willis Tower and the Empire State Building, there’s a series of lines to wait on and a short film about its design and construction. I really enjoy these little films–they give you just enough information and context without boring you with too much detail. (I had no idea the Arch was designed by Eero Saarinen, by the way). The line at the Arch moved much more slowly than those at the Willis Tower and the Space Needle, though, mainly because instead of large elevators going straight up everybody has to squeeze into tiny, egg-shaped gondolas that wiggle and squeak their way through a rapidly shrinking, not-quite-vertical chamber. Waiting in line was so boring that Sam was almost ready to bail, but the claustrophobic little pods we finally rode to the top somehow made the experience even cooler, as did the even tinier windows we looked out of when we finally got there.

Having completed his most anticipated stop of the trip, Sam said the Arch lived up to his expectations. And we were back on the ground with just enough time to grab a quick dinner and make it to our final stop of the day, which was my most anticipated stop of the trip.

The first time I went to Busch Stadium in St. Louis was with my friend Jeremy. Wednesday night I was back at the ballpark, this time with The Hamster instead of Jeremy …

You know what? This one is so exciting I’m going to stop here and give it its own post.

When you tell people you’re planning a cross-country road trip, the first question they invariably ask, “How far are you going?” If the conversation continues after you answer, “All the way across,” at some point they will ask whether you plan to see the largest ball of twine.

I’m not sure why the ball of twine is what everybody seems to naturally think of when they think of the kinds of things people do on a cross-country road trip. I think part of it is that there are lots of small towns or offbeat individuals around the country trying to bring themselves some attention and income by having the world’s largest whatever, and visiting such places just seems like the sort of silly thing you do on a road trip. And we’ve visited plenty of these silly places, like the Jolly Green Giant in Blue Earth, MN, the smiley face water tower in Ashley, IN, the Center of the Nation monument in Belle Fourche, SD, Corn Palace in Mitchell, SD, and the Gum Wall in Seattle, WA. And I suppose the ball of twine is generic enough to mock–you don’t really need to know where it is, you just need to assume that one exists.

The truth is that three exist. I know this because I, like everyone else, thought about the largest ball of twine when I was planning our road trip. So I looked it up to see how far out of our way it might be. Turns out there are three towns that claim to have the largest ball of twine. Two (one in Minnesota and one in Texas) both claim to have the largest ball of twine created by a single person. I don’t really care which of them is correct, because they are both significantly outside of our route. Besides, the third ball, which is in Cawker City, Kansas, is not only roughly on our route but much bigger than the other two and thus undisputedly the largest in the world. The distinction is that it was started by a single person but it’s grown with the help of many. In fact, Cawker City has an annual festival during which the whole town is invited to add twine to the ball. In short, there are some pretty big balls out there, but Cawker City has the biggest. (If you see that phrase on a T-shirt anytime soon, I’m totally suing.)

Wednesday was our Kansas day. We woke up in Colorado, just west of the Kansas border. By the end of the day we hoped to be in Missouri. Cawker City is pretty much smack in the middle, and was thus stop #1 for the day.

After losing an hour along the way by crossing time zones, we arrived at The Ball around 1 pm. The first thing you notice about the ball (besides it enormous size, of course) is that it lives in its own gazebo. The second thing you notice is that it also has its own mailbox. (The ball doesn’t actually receive mail–the oversized mailbox holds a guestbook.)

[Look at the people to the right of the ball in the photo to get an idea of its size.]

We’ve seen lots of exciting things on our strange little journey across this country. The world’s largest ball of twine is definitely not the most exciting of them. However, it’s the only one we got to help build. They didn’t let us carve more detail into Mount Rushmore or add I-beams to the Sears Tower or induct anyone into any of the Halls of Fame. But the best thing about the Cawker City ball of twine is that anyone is welcome to add twine to it. And if you call one of the two retired women who maintain the ball in advance they might even meet you at the ball with a spool of sisal twine that you can add, thus making the world’s largest ball of twine even larger. I called one of those women, Linda, on Wednesday morning and put the ball in her court, so to speak. (You like that one? I’ve got dozens more. It was a long drive.)

Our participation in the growing of the ball made our visit so much more fun. Feeling obliged to spend some tourism dollars in the town after they let us play with their ball, we walked around the main strip a bit. We were amused by the many paintings in nearby store windows, each of which is a copy of a famous masterpiece but with a ball of twine strategically added.

We were much less amused to see that most of these stores have gone out of business. Economically, the town just hasn’t been able to get the ball rolling. OK, OK, I’ll stop now.

Anyway, we continued east from Cawker, bound for Kansas City’s fantastic Negro Leagues Baseball Museum. As we got closer, though, it became evident that we would arrive only about 20 minutes before the museum closed. We decided to hold off until the morning to give the museum its proper due. Instead we spent a bit of time in Topeka, stretching our bizarre streak of consecutive capitol cities to five states. We made a quick stop at the capitol building but then noticed signs along the way for a national historical site about the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 civil rights decision in Brown v. Board of Ed. Sam had no idea what that was but I’m a bit of  Supreme Court junkie so I decided to swing by anyway. Turns out the site, which is basically a civil rights museum, is housed in the Monroe School, which was the school attended by the Brown kids.

We didn’t stay long but it was a big treat for me, and it gave me a chance to talk to Sam about the civil rights movement and racism in general. We’ve had some pretty nonsensical conversations over the past few weeks but some pretty heavy ones too, and this was a good one. Until we started making more ball jokes.

With so many hours in the car together over the past few days, Sam and I have had some pretty great conversations. My absolute favorite was Tuesday’s:

Sam: “This road trip was really a great idea.”

Me: “Yeah. It’s been super fun.”

Sam: “I know! And it’s going to get me lots of popularity points at school!”

By far the most interesting, though, was on Sunday when he was remembering the family trip we took to Denver a few years back. The reason this was so interesting is that we took no such trip. Neither of my kids had ever been to Colorado before Monday evening. The only time I had ever been in Colorado was a single day I spent in Denver with my friend Jeremy a few years ago (we toured Coors Field, then toured the Coors Brewery, then ran out of things named Coors to tour, then saw a Rockies game, then flew home).

I explained all of this to Sam but he insisted that I was remembering things wrong, or that maybe I didn’t come on this phantom Denver trip and it was just him, Sarah, and Abby. Not only was he absolutely sure he had been to Denver with his sister and at least one of his parents, but they/we all went to a Rockies game, too. After getting nowhere with him on this I dropped the subject, hoping that being in Denver would make him realize he had never been in Denver before.

I love Denver. (The city, not John Denver, whom I could take or leave.) It’s pretty, efficiently designed, well suburbed, and has a great downtown. It’s big enough to have a big-city feel but small enough not to feel overwhelming. There’s plenty of traffic but it moves–Denver drivers somehow manage a perfect balance of being in a big hurry and not afraid to ignore the speed limit yet not overly aggressive like the drivers in, say, New York or Boston. The weather is terrible nine months a year but is perfectly reasonable in the summer–hot but with very little humidity. And there’s a sense of fun, too. Example: The Denver Convention Center, a big, modern glass building that would look pretty serious if it weren’t for the hunormous blue bear peering in from the street.

I might seriously think about moving here if they had an ocean somewhere nearby.

And yet I’ve been dreading the Denver part of this trip for months. that’s because our time in Denver perfectly coincided with Tisha B’Av, an annual day of mourning for Jews worldwide that includes, among other unpleasantries, a 25-hour fast.

I tend to fast better than most, but even so I figured we would keep things low-key for the day. So instead of enjoying all that Denver has to offer, all we did was climb a 14,000-foot mountain and drive a few hundred miles.

I woke up Tuesday morning already horribly thirsty and unable to do anything about it. The Hamster, who is not yet old enough to be obligated to fast, decided he’d give it a try anyway, so we were both a little out of sorts and just hung around our hotel room, taking our sweet time getting dressed and packing up. By the time we left the motel it was 11 am. He caved and had some Reese’s Puffs.

Our first stop was Coors Field for a tour of the ballpark (the Rockies, like us, are currently on an extended road trip). Having taken this exact tour four years ago (without Sam), so I voted to skip it, but Sam insisted. Having little energy to argue or find alternatives, I relented and we went. Our tour guide was pretty boring but there’s a lot to like about Coors Field, even when you’re hungry and cranky. Despite having almost no history the team does a nice job of connecting the ballpark with the team and the city. The view of the Rocky Mountains beyond the outfield wall is extraordinary on a clear day, and the purple-colored level of seats that’s exactly a mile above sea level is a cute touch. I wouldn’t put Coors in my top 5 favorite ballparks, but it’s definitely in my top 10, so despite the redundancy it was nice to see it again. Plus I learned something new this time around: the grass has an underground heating system to help it green up during the cold Denver spring.

Sam, meanwhile, had a great time on the tour despite noticing that the visitors clubhouse is not as nice as the one in Cleveland.

Just to be obnoxious, I asked him how it compared to the last time we were there. He sheepishly admitted that maybe he had been wrong about going to Denver before.

Sadly, that was about all the downtown Denver I had energy for as my hunger grew, so we headed south to Colorado Springs, home of the U.S. Olympic Committee and, more important, Pike’s Peak.

[Side note: I have to hand it to the marketing folks in Colorado for the way they’ve managed to completely steal ownership of the Rocky Mountains from the rest of the West. Their baseball team is called the Rockies. Their national park is called Rocky Mountain National Park. The Rockies are on their license plates. When you think about the Rockies, you think about Colorado, and vice versa. It’s even in the song. Meanwhile, Sam and I could barely look anywhere in Montana or Wyoming or Idaho or Utah without seeing Rocky Mountains but you don’t hear a peep about it from those states. The Rockies stretch from New Mexico up into Canada. But if you listen to Denver (the city or John) you’d think the whole mountain range sits inside Colorado. Marketing genius.]

I’ve done a fair amount of research about Pike’s Peak. I’ve even written about the Unser family’s early dominance of the annual race to the top of the mountain. (That race is the second longest-running auto race in the country, behind only the Indy 500.) But to be quite honest I still don’t fully understand why the mountain holds such supposed importance in American history. But knowing it’s important even if I don’t understand why, and knowing that it’s pretty much the only “real” mountain (i.e., more than 12,000 feet high) that you can drive up, I figured it would be worthwhile. Plus we’d get to stay seated until we got out of our car at the summit, which is about all I had the energy for anyway.

The mountain was pretty cool. The road is so ridiculously steep and windy that they warn you at the base to turn off your A/C to keep your engine from overheating, and on the way down they tell you to drive in the lowest gear possible because otherwise you’ll literally wear out your brakes before you get to the bottom. And if you can handle the thin air at 14,110 (Sam got a bit of a headache), the views from the summit are extraordinary in ways not done justice by the following video.

Once down from the mountain it was on to Kansas. Well, toward Kansas, anyway. I was hoping to cross into Kansas and thus the central time zone in time to shorten my fast by an hour, but it didn’t quite work out. After I was finally able to wolf something down at a rest stop off of I-70 at 8:34 pm, we elected to crash for the night a few miles before the eastern end of Colorado. We need our rest–on Wednesday we’ll be making our most important stop of all.

We’ve been driving pretty much nonstop for the past two days. We were in California Sunday morning and by dinnertime Monday we were in Colorado. Eastern Colorado. In between we traversed Nevada, Utah, and Wyoming. That’s more than 1,100 miles and 17 hours of driving. Along the way we didn’t see very much, unless you count rest stop bathrooms, gas stations, capitol buildings, and weird statues. So instead of going into detail about our car conversations, many of which revolved around mocking South Dakota Senator John Thune (Think I’m making this up? Ask Sam when Senator Thune will be reelected), I figured I would share some random things we’ve noticed during the 6,700 miles we’ve spent on the road so far:

You know those “weigh stations” they have along major highways? I don’t know how many hundreds of them I’ve passed in my lifetime, but every single one of them has been closed when I passed by. Every one. Doesn’t matter what time of day or night I pass them. For years I wondered why they even exist if they’re never open. Then, in South Dakota a couple of weeks ago, we passed one that was open. Since then we’ve seen a bunch more that were closed but two others that were open. I still have no idea why they exist, though.

The worst motels have the best pillows. Not best in terms of quality, but best in terms of being comfortable to sleep on.

There’s a big pizzeria chain in the Midwest called Pizza Ranch. We’ve driven past dozens of them. I’ve never eaten at a Pizza Ranch, and I have no knowledge of the quality of the pizza there. But I do know that ranches in general are not known for their pizza. You have to wonder why anyone would name their restaurant by combining the type of food served and the very last place in the country you’d ever expect to find that food.

A bunch of plastic grocery bags for use as in-car garbage bags might be the smartest thing I packed. Baby wipes is probably #2.

When you look at a map of the country it’s hard to understand why many of the state borders are where they are. Some run along rivers, which makes sense. Some are just straight lines, which makes a different kind of sense. The rest seem pretty arbitrary. But when you actually go there, just looking around makes you think they got it right. It’s amazing how drastically the natural scenery changes almost as soon as you cross any state line. Farms give way to mountains, mountains give way to cities, cities give way to cattle ranches, cattle ranches give way to forests, forests give way to deserts, and I don’t even know how to describe the white, snowy-looking salt flats of Utah.

National Parks have lousy gift shops.

Everywhere in the country, you don’t have to drive more than two or three exits on the highway to find a cheap motel. And the further you get from the cities, the easier to find and cheaper they are. Everywhere, that is, except for Montana, Nevada, and Wyoming, where you have to be pretty close to a city of some kind to have any hope of finding a place to stay, because in between the cities there is nothing.

We’ve seen countless deer crossing signs, and we’ve also seen cow crossing signs, man-on-horseback crossing signs, elk crossing signs, bear crossing signs, and even a couple of bull crossing signs. We have seen no actual animals crossing the highway.

Mets fans are everywhere. Just wear a Mets shirt and they will find you.

Sam is fascinated by the ramps for runaway trucks on long downhill stretches of road. He originally thought that “Runaway Truck Ramp” meant that a truck ramp was on the loose.

As we entered California from the north we had to stop at an agricultural checkpoint to make sure we weren’t bringing in anything dangerous like, say, a banana. Seriously, California? You’re pretty much constantly battling wildfires, mudslides, earthquakes, heat waves, illegal immigration, race riots, and bankrupcy, and you’re worried that the lunch I packed might mess up your state? By the way, as we entered California from the west there was no such checkpoint. I guess the danger is confined to Oregonian produce.

It sure is easy to figure out which states allow the sale of fireworks and which don’t.

We’ve passed several flatbed trucks with “oversize load” signs. A couple were carrying enormous tires for tractors or monster trucks or whatever. One was carrying way too much lumber. The rest were carrying houses. We wondered what happens when you call the house-delivery company to place an order and they ask for your address.

In the really remote parts of the country, some of the exits on the Interstate have blue signs beneath them that say “no services.” This means that there is not a single gas station, bathroom, ATM, or McDonalds anywhere near here. Being from New York, I find that astounding. If there’s literally nothing there, then why is there an exit?

One of our great pleasures on the road is passing a car that’s even more overpacked than ours.

My favorite part of every day is when we’re in the car and Sam, for no reason at all, reaches over and tenderly pats me on the shoulder. My least favorite part of every day is visiting the gift shop.

Nevada and Utah are the only places in this country where nobody’s growing corn.

Before this trip, the last time I saw a latrine was at sleepaway camp. Suddenly they’re everywhere we go. It’s one thing to see them inside a National Park campground. It’s quite another to see them at a rest stop on an Interstate highway.

“Breakfast” means drastically different things at different motels.

One of my favorite TV shows when I was a little kid was 3-2-1 Contact, an educational show on PBS that featured three teenagers who explored a new scientific theme in each episode. Their exploits were hit or miss in terms of holding my interest, but I always sat through the whole show anyway just to see The Bloodhound Gang, the mini-show within the show, which featured young detectives solving mysteries. Still, occasionally the main part of the show would grab my attention. One of those times was an episode about wind currents in which one of the girls on the show learned how hot air balloons work and then rode in one. I don’t know if I was more amazed that people could fly simply by heating air or by the sight of a couple of people floating gently through the sky, but ever since the day I saw that episode I’ve desperately wanted to ride in a hot air balloon. If I were the type of person to have a bucket list, a hot air baloon ride would be somewhere near the top.

When I first started planning this trip it never occurred to me to try to fit in a hot air balloon ride, but then I started researching a pretty little lakeside town in the Idaho panhandle, called Coeur D’Alene, that we’d be passing through on our way from Helena to Seattle. On the Coeur D’Alene tourism website they mention hot air balloon rides. I started thinking about how fantastic it would be to ride in not just any old hot air balloon but one that’s floating above picturesque scenery like a lake surrounded by mountains.

The I figured out that we wouldn’t have time to stop in Coeur D’Alene for long enough to take a balloon ride. Lucky for me, Lake Tahoe also has balloon rides. Even better, Lake Tahoe also has a picturesque lake surrounded by mountains–some say the most beautiful lake and mountains in the country, if not the world.

Of course that became the plan for Lake Tahoe. We’d be getting to Lake Tahoe on a Thursday night and staying until Sunday morning before heading off to Salt Lake City, so Friday would be a perfect day for a balloon ride over the lake. I found the best balloon company to use. It was expensive, and the rides go out at sunrise to take advantage of lighter winds, so we’d have to wake up ridiculously early. But bucket list items don’t come along every day. I called them to make a reservation, only to be told they were already overbooked for Friday, with a long waiting list that they would never get through. If I had just called a few days earlier …

I was heartbroken. There had to be a way. I pleaded. No deal. The woman said they had availability for Sunday morning. Great! The only problems were that (1) we were supposed to leave the area to head to Salt Lake City Sunday morning, and (2) we had already changed plans slightly and would be staying in Carson City Saturday night, which is about an hour northwest of Lake Tahoe. That meant we’d have to wake up an hour before ridiculously early.

Screw Salt Lake City. And screw sleep. I made the reservation for Sunday morning.

We were all packed up and in the car by 5:30 am, well before sunrise, and headed to the Tahoe Keys Marina. Why the marina? Well, instead of launching the balloon from the ground and landing on the ground like every other balloon company in the world, these guys launch and land from a boat in the middle of the lake. So there we were, out on the lake as the sun rose above the mountains, watching our morning activity inflate.

A few months back there was an article in the New York Times Magazine about writer/director/producer J.J. Abrams in which there was much discussion of the great value Abrams places on continued mystery. A central anecdote involved a childhood trip to a magic shop:

He recalled getting something called a mystery box. On the outside it had a big question mark, and on the inside it had . . . what? Toys, presumably. Tricks, maybe. If you shook the box, you heard them rattling around. But their precise nature wasn’t known. That was the thrilling part, the part that held your imagination captive. You purchased a mystery box because you wanted to be surprised.

…

For Abrams’s TED talk, he actually brought his boyhood mystery box onstage. And the kicker was that some 35 years after getting it, he still hadn’t opened it, because once he did, its spell would be broken and its power surrendered. In its closed form, he told the audience: “It represents infinite possibility. It represents hope. It represents potential.”

J.J. Abrams would hate this road trip. In a sense this trip is about opening every mystery box we can find. And now it was time to open another one. Sleep still in our eyes, the Hamster and I climbed into the gondola (along with eight other passengers and the pilot). The crew unstrapped the gondola from the deck. The mystery box opened.

It was exactly what I’d hoped it would be. We just sort of … floated up into the air. We were on a boat, and then seconds later we were a thousand feet above a crystal blue lake, being gently blown by a breeze we didn’t even feel because we were moving along with it.

The views were extraordinary in every direction. Just for fun, the pilot took us down and briefly landed the gondola on the water, which was Sam’s favorite part. Mine was when he took us in low over a marsh and then floated us back over the treetops. I know this sounds ridiculous, but it was just like I remember them doing on 3-2-1 Contact.

The Hamster and I were also in complete awe of the science behind it all, repeatedly staring up at the flames every time they shot us higher into the sky and marveling at the pilot’s ability to steer only by lifting and lowering us into different wind currents.

We didn’t talk much; we were both too curious. We just looked out, or looked up, and took it all in.

By the time we were back on land we didn’t care that we had already been up for so many hours. We didn’t care that we were going to be spending the rest of the day driving 600 miles to Utah. Well, truthfully, we still weren’t thrilled about driving to Utah. But we were on such a high that it didn’t matter. It was a very different rush than we got from the dune buggy ride. There was no adrenaline at play here–just the knowledge that we had flown up into the air powered by nothing but hot air, that we had done something we never thought we’d do, that most people had never done, that we may never do again, and that was absolutely fantastic. That we had opened the mystery box and loved what we found inside. We were both still grinning when we got in the car.

When I first started loosely planning this crazy trip, Nevada was a real challenge. We weren’t going to have time to go as far south as Las Vegas and, well, I don’t care how family-friendly they say it is, it’s not really the best place to be taking a 9-year-old anyway. Reno is much better situated but much worse in terms of wholesome activities–it doesn’t even pretend to be family friendly. But it seemed wrong (and incredibly boring) to pass through an entire state without stopping.

The solution was Lake Tahoe. My mother had been telling me for years how beautiful Lake Tahoe is, and it looked to be in a reasonable spot for us geographically. OK, so most of the good parts are in California. Still, half the lake is in Nevada, so it counts.

Our plans for Lake Tahoe kept getting screwed up. For starters, I was planning to spend the whole weekend there but even the really divy motels (see previous post regarding Motel 6) had ridiculously expensive weekend rates, so we changed the plan to spend Friday at the lake but sleep in nearby Carson City, NV Friday and Saturday nights, which saved us a lot of money and gave our trip a little more Nevada cred). I also had big plans for what we’d be doing at the lake but those got scuttled, too (more on that in tomorrow’s post).

So we arrived in Lake Tahoe Thursday evening with no idea what we’d be doing there. Basically, in the summer the choices are whatever water sports you can think of, and in the winter the choices are skiing. Sam suggested renting a pedal boat. Sounded good to me. We slept late Friday morning but about half an hour after we left the motel we were already on the water, pedaling away.

We had some great views from our “boat,” including the one pictured above, as well as a wedding on the beach not far from our launch point. Sam, who wore a bathing suit, toyed with the idea of jumping into the water but didn’t have the nerve. Instead, he insisted that we spend some time on the beach after we returned the boat.

Sam loves everything about the beach: the sand, the water, the waves, everything. When we’re at home it’s all he wants to do every weekend. On our way to Cooperstown on Day 1 he asked if we’d be going to any beaches on the trip. The weather was too cold on the Oregon Coast, but Lake Tahoe was much warmer and he wasn’t going to miss the opportunity like Sarah had. “It’s nice to be back on a beach,” he said as soon as we set foot on the sand. He played in the sand, he played in the water, and he even played with the geese that waddled by looking for snacks.

I had to pry him away. Unfortunately I hadn’t put sunscreen on either of us because I figured we would only be out for 40 minutes or so on the pedal boat. Sam got a little pink on his back, which is already gone, but my shoulders got burned pretty well.

I thought the lake was pretty, but not any prettier than any other lake surrounded by mountains, and we’ve seen a few of those on this trip so far. It was also extremely crowded, but I guess that’s kind of my own fault for going to a popular resort area on a summer weekend. but either way I was starting to wonder why my Mom was so in love with the place when Sam asked if we were going to see the part that’s in the picture she has hanging in her apartment. That part of the lake is called Emerald Bay and is supposedly one of the most photographed spots in the world. I wasn’t sure where it was but we had plenty of time to go exploring. About half an hour later we found it, and I suddenly understood why my mother had been so impressed.

The most interesting parts of the day were still to come. On our way out of town we were scanning for a souvenir shop and noticed a sign that said “Gifts.” We parked and went inside, only to discover that half the store was a skate shop and the other half had a curtain blocking the entrance and a little sign saying you had to be 18 to enter. Not exactly the kinds of “gifts” we were looking for.

Once we crossed into Nevada the scenery changed instantly to towering, blinking casinos. Sam insisted we were in Las Vegas. I was starting to think that Las Vegas would have been more family friendly.

The following post is written by Sarah, who is guest-blogging for the day. Adam will be back in control Friday, if obeying the every whim of a 9-year-old boy counts as being in control.

Given I got all up in Adam’s business over the past week, the least I could do is give him the day off from blogging.

As most of our friends know, Adam and I have differences of opinions on how to vacation. I prefer the beach with a fruity, alcohol-infused drink peppered with some water sports, while Adam chooses locations with the most adventure. So for me sand = beach, while for Adam sand = the deserts of Namibia. So when I decided to join my boys for a week on the road trip, I knew I wasn’t getting my dream vacation, but at least I’d see the boys.

I picked the West Coast as my week to join because it had beaches in it. Not surprisingly, I never made it into a bathing suit or a lounge chair. I didn’t even end up having a sip of alcohol. As you read from Adam’s prior posts, we saw a ton of interesting things (see below for all my foursquare check-ins), and even got to get in on the action with things like the dune buggy rides. But for me, there may have been a bit too much action.

There were a couple of things I could have done better to brace myself for a different kind of vacation. First of all, I should have obeyed my own rules. When I hire new employees, I always advise them to listen first before taking action. And yet I crashed the boys’ party and started asserting control and finding more efficient ways to do things before listening. Considering they’d been doing this for almost three weeks, they probably have a pretty good system, and I should have just gone along with the program. Secondly, I should have rolled with the punches. No need to rehash the two speeding tickets in two days, my lost credit card, or the many hours I spent driving in the wrong direction around Cowlitz County, Washington. Needless to say, it wasn’t smooth sailing, but I didn’t react as well as I should have. We finally got into a much better groove once I handed the car keys back to Adam, and the past two days were really a ton of fun.

Despite the melee, as I sit here on the plane flying back home solo, I look back at the trip really positively. It is really amazing to see the boys together. Sam’s attitude was so incredibly positive that it was truly infectious. Adam and The Hamster are in a groove like I’ve never seen them before. They have private jokes, they have their own songs, and they’re just totally in sync whether it’s packing the car, reasoning with each other, or determining the agenda for the day. The Hamster has taken on more responsibilities, largely due to necessity, and he’s grown up a lot in the past few weeks, and I give Adam a ton of credit for that.

So while I’m really going to miss them for the next couple of weeks as they make their way home, I’m super happy knowing they’re having such an incredible experience together.  Looking forward to reading more about it right here … so Adam, you’re back up for tomorrow.

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Not much to report from Thursday. We dropped Sarah off at the Sacramento airport and then … well, we didn’t find much of interest in Sacramento. We spent about an hour in a pretty cool train museum (the biggest in the country, it claims), had an outstanding lunch at a kosher vegetarian mediterranean restaurant called Carmita, and then took a quick hour-and-40-minute drive to a Motel 6 in Lake Tahoe where we dropped our bags in our room and headed straight for the motel pool.

OK, I do have one thing to say. There’s a very good reason that Motel 6’s slogan is “We’ll leave the light on for you” and not, say, “We’ll leave some shampoo out for you” or “We’ll leave an alarm clock in your room for you” or “We’ll leave you a room that doesn’t smell terrible.” Because, you see, the lights-on thing is true. The others, well …

Anyway, the two most significant events of the day were: 1) the departure of Sarah, of course, and 2) the beginning of the return trip. Heading east from Sacramento to Lake Tahoe turned us in the direction of home, a bittersweet turn as every stop along the way now will bring us closer to our own beds and the people we love but will also bring the trip closer to its end. Perhaps most important, this development completely neuters my threats to turn around and take Sam home if he doesn’t behave.

Anyway, instead of boring you with the details of the trains and our lunch (seriously, it was delicious), I’m going to turn the mic over to a guest blogger: my lovely wife, who will be sharing her thoughts on the week she spent with us.

Her guest post will be up shortly.

I’m not gloating, exactly. I’m simply pointing out that, after Sarah got two speeding tickets in two days, I took back the wheel today, drove almost 450 miles through Oregon and northern California, and arrived safely at the motel du jour with nary a dirty look from the authorities. I even drove through a tree, but I’ll get to that later.

The first thing we did Wednesday, actually, was hire someone else to drive us around. Specifically, we went to the Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area, a stretch of about 40 miles of natural sand dunes along the central Oregon Coast (the largest such expanse on the continent). The three of us hopped in a dune buggy with our driver, Dustin, for what was basically a half-hour rollercoaster ride on sand. When we signed up we didn’t know quite what to expect and as we strapped ourselves in all three of us were a little worried we might have gotten ourselves in a little over our goggled heads. A few minutes later we pretty much felt like the curious neighbor kid at the end of “The Incredibles”:

I haven’t read the laws of physics in a while but I’m pretty sure they say that our dune buggy should have tipped over at several points throughout the ride. Sam said the ride was the most fun thing we’ve done on the entire trip. I think he’s right. If you have never ridden across massive sand dunes at 30 mph, make sure you jump at the chance when you get it. The brief video I took doesn’t really do the ride justice, but I’ll share it anyway.

The dunes marked an exciting milestone in our trip, too: about halfway through the ride, Dustin stopped the buggy on the beach and we all got out for a minute or two. Sam and I went right for the water. It was freezing cold, but touching the Pacific Ocean meant we had officially gone from coast to coast, from sea to shining sea.

In a day full of superlatives, we left the biggest sand dunes and headed to the oldest lighthouse: the Umpqua River Lighthouse, which was the first one in Oregon–sort of. See, the original one collapsed into the sea after sand eroded the land it was built on but after several years it was rebuilt in a slightly different spot and … well, it’s not the most exciting story and the guided tour went on way too long, but the lighthouse was still pretty and, unlike the ones we visited Tuesday, we got to go inside, all the way up inside the giant prisms at the very top.

Our final stop on the Oregon Coast called itself a wild safari. Unfortunately it was more of an abnormally well-stocked petting zoo. But Sam had a great time with the animals and I won a staring contest with a llama, so we counted it as a win.

After seeing the biggest, the oldest, and the smelliest, we entered California in search of the tallest: the giant redwoods. They weren’t hard to find. Our main destination was Avenue of the Giants, a windy strech of road that runs sort of parallelish to Highway 101 for 30 miles through a forest of some of the oldest and tallest trees on Earth. It was absolutely breathtaking. And I say that after spending almost all of last week in National Parks.

Sam and I had fun pointing out the big ones to each other. Needless to say we did a lot of pointing. As Sam said, “They’re all huge! And the ones that aren’t huge, are even more huge!” We also had fun posing in front of some of the “even more huge” ones.

Months ago, when I first told Sam about the redwoods, I told him there were some that were so big you could drive through them. Since then, every time California has been mentioned he talked about driving through a tree. As impressive as the forest was, I knew we had to drive through a tree or he’d consider it a disappointment. But after two days of pretty bad luck, nothing was going to derail our fun today. We came, we saw, we drove through a tree.

Incredibly, redwoods weren’t the only interesting sight as we wound our way through the forest. We passed two herds of grazing elk, and we got to add a life-sized Paul Bunyan and Babe to our collection of odd roadside statues.

It was a long day with a little too much driving–even half of our destinations revolved around driving–but it was fun start to finish. Which is especially good because Sarah flies back home Thursday and after all the trouble she had here she gets to leave on a positive note. It’s amazing how much fun you can pack into a single day when you don’t get delayed by, say, the police. Not that I’m gloating.

Beauty, they say, is in the eye of the beholder. I don’t think that’s accurate, though. Or, I should say, I don’t think that’s complete. Everything is in the eye of the beholder. Absolute truth doesn’t exist–truth depends on your vantage point.

Take Tuesday, for example. Some might say it was a great day with a few significant mishaps. Others might say it was a second straight disaster of a day. I’m not always the one in the family who focuses on the positive, but this time Sam and I both see things the first way. Sarah, well, it’s a bit more difficult for her to look on the bright side right now.

We woke up Tuesday morning in an Econo Lodge in southwestern Washington that was much heavier on the Econo than on the Lodge. The place was so bare-bones that the free breakfast didn’t even include cold cereal. It was the kind of place where you lock that extra sliding-loop lock at the top of the door as soon as you get into your room. The only problem was that our lock looked like this:

But for $54.99 plus tax we got two beds and a shower and we didn’t get even a little bit murdered, so we dipped into our reserves for breakfast and hit the road. (This time I packed up the car a bit differently so that Sam was in much less danger of avalanche in the back seat.)

Tuesday and Wednesday are our Oregon days. The plan: to see as much of Portland as we could squeeze into a few hours before heading west to the famed Oregon Coast, where we’d drive down scenic US 101 as it hugs the shoreline all the way to California.

What a cool city Portland is! We started in Beverly Cleary’s old nabe, where there’s a small sculpture garden in US Grant Park featuring Ramona, Henry Huggins, and Ribsy. Abby read the whole Ramona series and I know she’ll be sorry to have missed this. Sam never got into Ramona but nevertheless found a way to enjoy the statues.

Even better: just a few blocks away is the real Kilckitat Street.

It was a great way to start our day.

From there we headed to the hospital. Not because anyone was sick or injured, but because the massive OHSU (Oregon Health & Science University) complex is on top of a hill so high that they built an aerial tram to take people from ground level to the hospital. It’s a bit unusual to use a commute to the hospital as a sightseeing excursion, but for $12 total for the three of us we got a round trip up and down the mountain and panoramic views of the city and of Mt. Hood in the distance. And all in just a few minutes.

Our next stop was Pioneer Courthouse Square, a public square opposite a majestic downtown courthouse. The square functions similarly to Manhattan’s Bryant Park: free concerts at noon every day, food vendors around the outskirts, lots of room for people to sit and enjoy the weather, occasional movie screenings at night, and an odd statue or two.

The best part was the DoubleTree Cookie Caravan, which was parked on the courthouse side of the square and staffed with at least half a dozen folks who were handing out free cookies.

By the way, Downtown Portland is fantastic. The buildings are interesting, the streets are clean, the city is small and walkable, the traffic is reasonable, and although street parking is limited we were able to find a spot only two blocks from where we wanted to be. Downtown is also oddly quiet. Not empty (there were plenty of people bustling about) but quiet–no sirens blaring, no screaming vendors, no car horns, just a bunch of people going about their business without making very much noise. It’s something I’ve never experienced in any other city.

The city also boasts several public fountains that kids can splash in. We only had time for one, so I picked Teachers Fountain–more for the name than for the look, which was cute but not nearly as physically impressive as some of the others around town. These days it’s rare to have a major city with a public declaration of appreciation for teachers and the work we do, making it all the more enjoyable. Oblivious to the message, Sam took off his shoes and enjoyed the fountain even more than I did.

Then came lunchtime. Sam insisted on having one of those cup-o’-soup things in macaroni-and-cheese version. This about the most disgusting food possible for humans to consume. I could swear I heard a Geiger counter registering dangerous levels of radiation as ot water turned the hardened block of artificially orange ramen into a softened cup of artificially orange ramen and matching fake cheese sludge. Sam loved it, until he accidentally spilled a bunch of it onto his lap, the car, and his favorite stuffed pal, Blankie. As he screamed in pain we quickly yanked him out of the car, got his hot, wet shorts off, and grabbed some ice from the cooler to put on his legs. It was a while before he calmed down and we got the car cleaned up and dug out a clean pair of shorts for him. We were thankful that he wasn’t seriously hurt. We couldn’t say the same for Blankie, who was now bright orange on much of his head and body. he spent the rest of the day in the trunk.

Unfortunately that was about all the Portland we had time for. The coast beckoned. And it was incredible. Beautiful weather, beautiful scenery, and a few interesting stops to make.

We got a fascinating glass blowing demonstration in Lincoln City:

We stopped to gaze at several lighthouses, including the one at Hecta Head that claims to be the most photographed in the world:

We drove over cool bridges:

And just north of Florence, the Sea Lion Caves. America’s largest sea cave was a big stop on our itinerary not so much for the sea cave itself, which was OK, but for the Stellar sea lions that often visit. Sea lion attendance is never guaranteed but we got lucky and saw about 100 of them sunning themselves on the rocks just outside the cave:

At this point we were about halfway down the coast and just a few miles from our hotel in Florence. We were all looking forward to checking in, eating dinner, and getting to bed at a reasonable hour. And then, half a mile from our hotel, we saw a suddenly very familiar sight: a police car in the rearview mirror, lights flashing. Sarah’s second speeding ticket in as many days. Her mood suddenly turned south.

She was valiantly trying to recompose herself as we pulled into the hotel parking lot and she went inside to check us in. Sam and I made plans to cheer her up. It didn’t work. She got back in the car to announce that her credit card was missing. For the sake of expediency and discretion I’m just going to go ahead and say that the next hour or so was not a lot of fun for any of us.

Eventually her card turned up at a full-serve gas station we had stopped at hours earlier–Sarah had never noticed that the attendant had forgotten to give it back to her.

The good news continued when we found out that our hotel has a washer and dryer, which I promptly used to restore Blankie to full health.

We definitely had our challenges but all in all it was a great day. At least, that’s how Sam and I see it. Hopefully Sarah will see it that way soon, too. But even if her vantage point doesn’t change, her seat in the car definitely will.