Monday 14 August 2017

The road trip begins

Road trip: Day One. Miles travelled: 234.

We woke up in San Francisco this morning and instantly made our way down Market Street to the hire car place. After collecting the car (with surprisingly little fuss) we took ourselves to Safeway to buy snacks and things for lunch on the road. A man was being pushed around the shop in wheelchair. He was wearing a crash helmet and carrying a small broom whilst shouting "I'm a witch" at his carer.

A homeless man at the tills asked if he could have a dollar. I obliged. I wished I hadn't. He was spending it on beer. "God bless you." He said. "I'm not interested in God's blessing" I said, a little tersely.

The streets of the city were like an apocalyptic scene from 28 Weeks Later. Everywhere I looked, another person was rocking, shaking, shouting, running or wailing. Something absolutely has to be done to help these people.

We drove out of the city via the Bay Bridge and instantly found ourselves in another world. Temperatures soared by 20 degrees. The fields were bone dry, and primrose yellow. The sky was powder blue. It was like looking at a washed-out Swedish flag! Eagles sailed through the sky. Wind turbines spun against the horizon. This particular scrubland is lined with horrible urbanisations. I can't imagine how awful it must be to live there. Your children go out to play on miles and miles of dry stubby grass which resembles a freshly harvested field. "Remember not to play on the freeway, honey..."

Urbanisations became depressing towns with names like Delhi and Tracy, full of Drive Thru' Starbucks and huge Walmart stores. Everything is gigantic out here. Massive advertising hoardings advertise realtors called things like Cristal Philips. Their enormous white teeth glow like beacons across the countryside. The trucks are huge, the cars are huge, the motorways are huge. And yet the gardens are tiny! 

Some of the billboards are hysterical. A chair maker advertises himself with the slogan "come and check our stool samples." Other billboards inform us that "real Christians obey Jesus's teaching." Religion is everywhere in the States.

Trucks heaped with tomatoes fly along the freeways. They're not covered over. They're just piled up. Thousands of tomatoes, heading to Italian restaurants in San Francisco...

We came off the Freeway and enjoyed seeing little stalls by the roads selling avocados and strawberries. We also ran alongside one of those goods trains you think only happen in the movies. We wished we'd counted the carriages. There must have been two hundred. We imagined the frustration of waiting for that to pass by at a level crossing.

As we got higher, the scenery changed from tinderbox dry fields, to sweetcorn and apricot crops, to alpine trees. The colour of the earth changed as well. Smears of pink and red from heaven knows what processes of oxidisation cut through the brown earth. And then, suddenly, we were in an area of complete desolation, where some kind of catastrophic forest fire had plainly raged. The earth was charred. The ground was a mixture of black charcoal and pure white ashes. Fences had turned into twisted, melted piles of metal, and, as we went further into the area, we came across whole houses which had been engulfed by the inferno. Their owners had moved into trailers in the gardens. One of the burned houses had a for sale sign in cinders out front.

We passed through a town. Signs everywhere read, "thank you first responders, thank you fire fighters." We learned then that the fire had a name: "The Detwiler Fire." It happened in mid July and 70,000 acres of land burned.

We suddenly found ourselves in the Yosemite National Park. It is, in a word, stunning. White and light grey granite rock forms of increasing size look like elephants clinging to mountain tops. A clear, fresh river runs through the valley. People swim and paddle in the rapids.

You enter the park itself through a natural rock arch, and from that point in, the views become breathtaking.

First up is El Capitan, a stately old man of a mountain, which has thwarted rock climbers and abseilers for many years, but the main draw is the Half Dome, a mountain which is shaped like a loaf of bread which has had a run-in with a cheese grater. They considered it utterly unclimbable, but the summit was reached by an intrepid fella called George Anderson in 1875.

Waterfalls tumble down the mountains like wisps of smoke. There's a milky light. The shadows are blue. The trees are jade green. Cars dawdle along the single road which cuts through the valley. On a weekend day in the summer time there can be frustrating tail backs. I got into a bit of a panic as I felt the few precious hours we had there ebbing away into an air conditioned car.

We parked up after deciding to walk to the Yosemite Falls. At 740 metres, it's the tallest waterfall in the US and the 5th tallest in the world. It is fed entirely by melting snow, and, in the late summer, it entirely runs dry. Fortunately it was still putting on a show today.

The waterfall is divided into two: the upper falls and the lower falls. Both are accessible, but the upper falls take a couple of hours to reach, which was time we didn't have. On another day I would almost certainly have hiked up there as I'm told there are beautiful natural pools on the cliff edge.

That said, the shortish hike to the lower falls feels in no way a compromise. The paths run through lovely woodland. The squirrels in these parts are a subspecies. They have tortoiseshell markings and white necks. The bins are all bear-proof and mountain lions run about freely. Fortunately we didn't see any!

You can clamber off the path and up the rocks by the side of the stream which runs away from the falls. Signs encourage you not to go off the paths, with pictures of X-rays of people with broken skulls and things. But everyone does. The trouble with the Americans is that they're so litigious, they feel the need to put these silly posters up everywhere, but that means the posters entirely lose their impact!

The nearer you get to the falls, the more you feel their spray, and hear the roar of the water echoing on a nearby cliff. And suddenly the most magical view opens up. There's an ice-cold plunge pool at the base of the waterfall, and if you climb even higher, you're rewarded by the Half Dome which suddenly appears as a back drop. The later in the day it gets, the more the mountain seems to glow. Almost as though it's burning from within like something in a Sci Fi fantasy. It was, without question, the most stunning view I've ever witnessed. It made Nathan cry. The four of us sat and stared at it for an hour whilst a rock climber free-climbed his way up a nearby sheer rock face to the gasps of everyone watching.

As the evening drew in, the mountains turned purple and grey. All, of course, except for the Half Dome, which stayed lit up like a tart by direct sunlight a great deal later than any of his friends.

We drove back to our motel on a bat-infested road. As Nathan observed, it was like the opening of Scooby Doo. The motel has an open air pool. It was so lovely to do a few refreshing lengths before bed. Stretch out that car-battered back!

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