Choices in Rich and Alayne’s life often don’t involve reason but in this case there really is one – niece Rebecca’s June wedding in Kentucky.  Most people would just hop on an airliner for the trip but our pair has the traveling gene hanging in the pants closet of their brain and this looks like an excuse for a road-trip – not attempted since they were twenty-something and never together.

With Millie J in the hands of a boat broker and our duo temporarily having no place to live and with all their personal possessions stacked in a five-foot by five-foot storage locker, the decision becomes which land vessel to purchase for the trip.  Now, Rich is a retired pilot which means above all else he is cheap.  Those 40-foot diesel motor homes you see rolling down the highway, they’re not being driven by Rich – nor the 30-foot ones – or even the 20-foot ones.  Matter of fact, why have a motor home at all when a normal passenger vehicle could serve just fine, get better mileage, and cost a lot less to purchase.

This is how an eleven-year-old, white, ex-government, seven-passenger Chevy Astro Van comes into the position of our fledgling road warriors.  When the license plate shows up including the letters Z P E along with its numerical moniker, Alayne immediately christens the wheeled vessel Zippy – and so it is.

With minor cabinet construction, the addition of 1-inch air and 2-inch foam mattresses, and a few camping accessories, everything is ready to roll – ready to begin Zippy’s Circle-the-Heartland Tour.

Any normal traveler can drive in a pretty straight line from Seattle to Lexington and back.  It takes our pair of superior navigators to first drive south through Oregon, then California, over to Nevada, back into California, before turning left back into Nevada then clipping northwestern Arizona, back north to Utah, then east to Colorado, south to New Mexico, before making a bee-line to a daughter in Illinois, and finally arriving at the wedding.  That’s just the first part of the trip – surely they will drive straight back.

No – they will head further east to Virginia, south to Georgia, north to Maryland, Pennsylvania, all the way to Nova Scotia, then west to Minnesota, the Canadian Rockies, and finally back to Seattle.  Will Millie be waiting or will she be sold with our duo looking for something new?

With the downsize in living space from a 35-foot sailboat to a 10-foot minivan, Rich wonders if they should continue the trend on their return by moving into a public telephone booth – how small can they go, only time will tell.

Each year Millie J’s journey begins by heading north.  Zippy, being an independent minded vehicle, thinks it fitting she start by traveling the opposite direction.  While Alayne has driven the coast road from Washington State, Rich has not gone the whole way and, since they both want to see the redwood forests on the California coast, driving Highway 101 is the obvious choice.

Rich spends the 1st of May performing his traditional May Day ritual - dreaming of woodland nymphs dancing around a Maypole dressed in long sheer gowns with flowered hair.  This year, his mental fantasy occurs at Alayne’s sister’s house in the western Washington woods and it is the trip’s official starting point.  A fitting

start for two reasons – first, it is always nice to have someone acknowledge your departure by wildly waving as you pull out of the driveway and second, because Wendy’s house is located in Grays Harbor County, named for the ship’s captain credited with being the first non-native to discover the mouth of the Columbia River in 1788 and, coincidently, Zippy’s entry point into Oregon.

Numbers are an amazing thing – they quantify comparisons and give context to statements.  When Zippy crosses the bridge connecting Washington and Oregon, the fact that its total length is over 4 miles, that its main span is the longest continuous-truss bridge in North America

(1,232 feet, nearly one foot for every mile of the Columbia’s length), or its main section rises nearly 200 feet above the water allowing ocean going freighters to pass beneath means nothing to this little van.  She only sees that it crosses water and that she has wheels not a hull – Zippy’s happy the bridge is there.

Aptly named for the nearest towns on each side, the Astoria-Megler Bridge is the final construction piece of Highway 101 connecting Olympia to Tijuana.  Looking out past the bridge from Astoria’s highest hill, it is hard to fathom that winter storms cause the shifting sandbar at the river’s mouth to be one of the most hazardous stretches of water in the world.

While trying to imagine winter weather on this lovely day, Zippy’s chauffeurs step back to get a better view and bump into one of town’s major landmarks.  The Astoria Column is a 125 foot tall concrete tower finished in 1926 to commemorate America’s westward expansion and mostly paid for by Vincent Astor, the great grandson of John Jacob Astor whose Pacific Fur Company settled Astoria as the first northwest US permanent settlement in 1811.

This sounds pretty plain until the concrete’s covering is inspected.  Twelve pictures depicting the area’s settlement spiral up the structure and are really quite lovely.  The original artist was an immigrant (aren’t we all) trained in the Italian Renaissance bas relief technique called sgraffito where a light colored layer of plaster is applied over a dark colored one.  Then, the drawing’s lines are incised into the light layer revealing the dark color beneath.

Attilo Pusterla did an excellent job adorning the column but was not schooled in techniques necessary to preserve plaster in the stormy Pacific Northwest.  By 1936 a repair was performed although even it was inadequate so a complete restoration was undertaken during the 1990’s.  The same expert who restored the Sphinx in Egypt and the Angkor Wat temple in Cambodia directed the successful fix of the column.

Atop its 164 steps, Zippy’s present-day explorers can look down on the location of Fort Clatsop, the 1805 winter home of the Lewis and Clark expedition (not to be confused with the duo of Lewis and Martin that formed later). 

By turning her head slightly, Alayne can also look down on a Coast Guard helicopter approaching the Astoria airport.

And, by nearly falling over the rail, she can peer down on the garden at the column’s base.

Many scholars divide the Oregon coast into three geologically and ecologically distinct areas.  Rich chooses to break it up into two – the part north of friend Diane’s house and the part south.  She lives in the little town of Netars and has the smallest dog in the whole-wide-world.  Daisy-dog insists we go to the neighboring town of Ocean Side to watch the para-gliders as they play in the onshore updrafts.

Like giant hawks they float above Daisy causing her to huddle close to Diane and rethink the wisdom of the outing.

The southern coastal division, known to Rich as AD (After Daisy) is a lovely mixture of forests and seascapes and all accessible to everyone.  Unlike its coastal neighbors, in 1913 Oregon’s Legislature declared the entire shoreline a state highway and shortly thereafter created 36 coastal parks – averaging one every 10 miles.  A little over 50 years later it re-codified the public’s free and uninterrupted use of the beaches.  Now there are over 80 parks and recreation areas of all types affording beautiful vistas from atop sea cliffs of haystack shaped rocks and sandy beaches strewn along the shore.

Watching the water from a roadside turnout, some data from a book Rich happens to be reading seems appropriate.  About 97% (that’s a lot) of all water on earth is salt water in the seas and over half of that sea water is in this Pacific Ocean (big ocean).  That means just 3% of earth’s water is fresh and almost all of that is frozen in ice sheets, mainly in Antarctica, some in the Arctic and Greenland, and tiny bits in other spots.  Now get this – only 0.036% of water is found in rivers, lakes, and reservoirs.  Just 0.001% exists in clouds.

For 30 years Rich has had dozens of winter flights to rain besieged coastal towns – he’s not sporting red hair and freckles but rather rust – and since the above numbers are true, he now believes that all of that 0.001% of earth’s water must follow just him around.

Though the south portion of Oregon tends to be much sunnier in the summer than the north, the whole coast averages about the same amount of winter rain – a little under ½ inch a day.

From the biggest ocean to the smallest harbor – Depoe Bay is just 50 feet wide and 150 yards long with two dog legs in the entrance. 

During winter storms, waves often crash over reefs to the immediate north and south of the entrance causing spray to fly onto the roadway’s bridge 42 feet above.

The small boats of the bay’s brave Coast Guard contingent nestle in their small boat garage.  When friend Kurt first saw this harbor, he had to stop and drive back to do a double-take – he was so amazed.

Just when Zippy thinks the cliffs and rocks have achieved the coastline’s upper-hand, along comes the Dunes National Recreation Area.  Millions of years in the making and probably costing billions of tax dollars, these 500 foot tall piles of sand comprise the largest expanse of coastal dunes in the US.

Stretching for 40 miles and surrounding 30 lakes and ponds, this area is an ATV rider’s paradise – evidenced by the thousands of 4-wheeler and dune-buggy users each year.  The result of rain, sun, and wind erosion, this area is credited by author Frank Herbert for the idea of his creation the Dune series of books.  Zippy rolls on in a non-rhythmical way hoping not to attract a sandworm. 

This ever-present Dune threat makes the Coasties who man the Umpqua River Bar Station seem especially brave since they could be swallowed at any moment by one of those giant wormy things.

To quote the eloquent Rocket J Squirrel, “And now for something completely different.” 

A subject near and dear to Zippy’s crew – public bathrooms.  After years of living on a boat, these two people know public bathrooms – what makes them acceptable and what makes them a pain in the…foot.

Clean rooms with doors on the stalls, toilet paper thicker than ½ micron, and showers that are fairly priced with actual hot water are a plus.  Unfortunately, in the boating world, finding all these attributes in one place is a rarity.  Zippy, after being on the road just a few days, scores a hat-trick at Harris Beach State Park – a great place.

The more mountainous south coast is evident on the descent to the park’s beach – it is not often you watch kite flying from above. 

The rock formations are dramatic, the colors varied, and the flowers pop out all over.

Finally, the Coast Guard puts on one final Oregon show for Zippy’s crew as a helicopter and small boat practice basket retrievals.  Watching these people train makes Rich feel safe – even on land.

Zippy knows there are many things that can make her feel small – listening to Carl Sagan talk about the billions and billions of stars in the universe is an example.  The size of the universe is an abstract concept the little van can’t really imagine.  (Driving to the other side is out of the question even for an Astro Van – for one thing, she would need new tires.)

Rarely does Zippy get a chance to actually see something unfathomable close-up and never anything like these California Coastal Redwoods.

These redwoods are the tallest trees on earth.  So stately, many are given individual names – Hyperion is 379-feet tall and not just tall, also massive.  Only exceeded in mass by a close relative (the Giant Sequoia), the Last Monarch has the most volume of all redwoods – 42,500 cubic feet.  These numbers begin to sound like Carl Sagan’s billions and lose their real impact on Zippy until she sees Alayne standing next to one – her crew member is dwarfed.

When Zippy looks straight up into the tree canopy, she gets vertigo.  Fortunately, she is steadied by her all-weather tires.

Like most natural resources, the Coastal Redwoods were once abundant – about 2 million acres – but by the mid 1960’s only 300,000 acres remained.  That is when Redwood National Park was created to help preserve the remaining trees. 

Today, the park is actually comprised of the national park and four state parks which cover a total 133,000 acres and are managed cooperatively.

The four state parks were created in the 1920’s and encompass many of the grandest groves of trees.  The Jedediah Smith Park – surprisingly, named for Jedediah Smith – is an example.  “Who was he,” Zippy asked.  “Jedediah was the first non-native to truly explore this area – way back in 1828,” said the Crescent City based kindly park ranger.  He also said it was fortunate that Zippy had no aspirations of growing into a motor-home because the road through Jedediah’s portion of the park is one-lane, unpaved, and serpentines through the trees – no RV’s.  This is the original stage-coach road from the 1800’s and is an uncongested route to some wonderful trails.

The Boy Scout Tree trail is 5 ½ miles through the most amazing vegetation.  With one tall tree after another, through tall ferns and other bushy stuff, it is easy to understand why the makers of the Star Wars movie, Return of the Jedi, used this area to film the Endor planet scenes.  (Zippy looks but does not see any Ewoks.) 

Each mature Coastal Redwood is between 500 and 700 years old with a few of them documented to be 2,000 years, making them the longest living organism on earth.

Beside the fact that Captain Rich apparently needs to hit every pot hole in the road, Zippy learns something else interesting while wandering in the woods.  During draughts, the tops of some redwoods die-back, but because their limbs have spent years accumulating dirt and debris (which

composts into soil) new tree tops sprout when rains return and grow into, what Zippy thinks of as, second-floor trees.  Some of the 120-inch average annual rainfall hits these above-ground root areas which is one mechanism used by the trees to get water to such great heights.  Of course the ground-level root systems suck water like all other trees but in addition, the above-ground needles extract moisture directly from the air.  The persistently thick summer coastal fog actually supplies one-third of the trees’ requirement.

Watching all these trees – knowing each one is drinking right in front of them – makes Zippy’s crew thirsty.  Fortunately, the Napa Valley is located just down the coast.  (If you’re going to drink, it may as well be good wine.)

The Napa Valley’s switch from producing many different crops to mainly wine grapes began in 1858 with the first commercial vineyard, followed shortly by Charles Krug’s first winery in 1866.  Krug’s, along with several other original wineries, are still in business – Chateau Montelena, Rutherford, and Beringer to name a few.

Because of its Mediterranean climate, geology, and geography, Napa is conducive to growing quality grapes, but like the valley itself, the industry has had its ups and downs.  Three major setbacks occurred late in the 1800’s and early in the 1900’s.  A root louse (not to be confused with a husband who’s a louse) known by the alias phylloxera, attacked the vines.  No sooner had healthy plants been re-established; the United States decided to experiment with alcohol prohibition.  Fortunately sacramental wine, like that produced by the monks of the Christian Brothers Winery, was exempted from the ban.  (Zippy does not have the statistics but imagines there was a large increase in the number of people attending Mass.)  The good news was prohibition ended.  The bad news was the Great Depression began and people had little money to buy wine.

What’s worse, the Federal Stimulus Package that got the economy moving again had no bailout of the wine industry.  They just did silly things like build the Hoover Dam, run electrical power lines throughout rural America, and build the Tennessee Valley Authority, whose dams protect millions of people from flooding.  (Never trust government to do what’s best for the drinking man.)

Fortunately for Zippy’s crew, the industry survived and grape sugars remembered how to ferment into alcohol.  Helped by the Paris Wine Tasting of 1976, where Napa Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon bested several famous French labels, the valley came to be seen as equal to Old World wine regions. 

Zippy is just happy to drive around and look at all the pretty vineyards.  She especially likes looking at the really old vines – they have an ancient aesthetic.

Alayne enjoys her first valley wine tasting on the beautiful grounds of the Beringer Estate.  Ten o’clock seems a little early but you have to begin sometime and with 450 wineries in the valley, an early start is necessary.  Besides, with Rich driving the coast road south through San Francisco traffic, a little extra fortification helps her ride the navigator seat.

Oregon has para-gliders in Ocean Side and wind-surfers in the Columbia River Gorge but at this beach north of Monterey, the two sports combine in kite-boarding.  Attaching your feet to a surf board and harnessing your torso to a kite powerful enough to lift you out of the water seems a little extreme, but Zippy thinks it looks like fun.

Several wind-surfers come to take a look – they think it looks like fun too.  Alayne thinks everyone is crazy and that Zippy would look silly in swim trunks.

All this aquatic revelry along the bay’s shoreline makes Rich anxious to show Alayne one of his all-time favorite places – the Monterey Bay Aquarium. 

With 35,000 animals, Zippy has a hard time keeping track of each one.  Laying on the floor to avoid vertigo while watching 3,000 golden anchovies swim the endless current of the overhead toroidal tank, is almost more than she can handle.

The aquarium uses the unique technique of pumping Monterey Bay water, at a rate of 2,000 gallons a minute, through its 100 tanks and then back into the bay.  This method, as well as installing a wave machine at the top of the tank, allows them to be the first to grow California Great Kelp indoors. 

Watching the schools of herring, as they ball themselves up for protection from other tank fish, is amazing. 

A 33-foot tall window holds back 330,000 gallons of water.  Divers enter the tank to polish the window clean.  The water is kept clear by filtration as it is pumped in from the bay.  When the aquarium is closed for the night, the filters are bypassed allowing raw plankton-rich bay water to enter giving the little aquarium critters something to eat.

While the kelp forest is amazing, Alayne comes to the aquarium’s biggest display - a 1.2-million gallon tank with the world’s largest single pane window.  A large number of the remaining 35,000 animals can be seen here, but the best is yet to come.

To Rich, the jellyfish tanks are the most beautiful.  The color of the background contrasts with the jellies and is awe inspiring. 

The display’s look is accomplished with a technology called Kreisel tanks which create a circular flow to support and suspend the jellies.  Rich still wonders if he should call a group of jellyfish a jam of jellies or a spread of jellies.

For Alayne, the recently opened seahorse display is the most captivating. 

Little and cute,

big and cute,

crazy-shaped and cute – let’s face it – they are cute.

The display’s tanks actually include 15 species of, not just seahorses, but sea-dragons, pipe-horses, and pipe-fish as well.

As if to suggest the animation artists who drew the movie Finding Nemo had spent time studying these tanks, the neurotic looking fish and the ever-cleaning shrimp make there appearance as well.

The aquarium’s stated mission is to inspire conservation of the oceans.  They certainly accomplish the inspiration part.

Rich flew airplanes for a living and one of the greatest characters he got to fly with was Pat from Mule Shoe, Texas, who is married to Toan from Viet Nam.  Since they spend summers in Reno, Nevada, Zippy agrees to take her crew for a visit before re-entering California for a desert experience.

To get there, Zippy drives high in the California Mountains where there are still 3-foot deep snow banks in the shaded woods.  Then she drops down into a 6,200-foot high valley to South Lake Tahoe.

It is a beautiful location for a town that unfortunately doesn’t seem to have much soul.  It is no longer incorporated – they didn’t pay their taxes to the state so their corporation was suspended 30-years ago.  It is geared toward tourists with T-shirt shops, restaurants, and what seems like a million rustic rental cabins – one right after the next.

However, sunset does make one of the lake’s boat houses look magical.

At the California – Nevada State line (and Zippy means at the exact borderline) a casino wall denotes the change in name from Tahoe to Stateline.  Even though the first thing Zippy sees are casinos, the Nevada side seems much more resident friendly – it looks like people really live here.

From Stateline it’s a zippy descent to 4,500-feet and the Biggest Little City in the World.  Reno was born supplying travelers in Conestoga wagons and then supplying miners at the Comstock Lode silver discovery.  It is still doing the same by supplying travelers Pat and Toan with a summer place to gamble and play golf.  The crew is treated to a delectable brunch and a day of reminiscences.  They are dear friends and Zippy enjoys sharing the sleep-over parking space with Pat’s full-size motor home.  Rich swears he hears the vehicles talking late into the night about trips made and still to come.

Blockbuster action movies have sequels – Travels with Zippy has California Part Two.  This second incursion into the Great Bear State ignores the coastal moisture and embraces the dust and heat east of the Sierra Mountains – the less populated side of California’s backbone.

Though it sounds ludicrous to begin an arid chapter at a lake, this particular lake is three times saltier than the oceans and is so full of alkali it leaves the surrounding shoreline void of any thick vegetation.  Mono Lake (pronounced moe – no and reminds Zippy of Swiss friends who sail a boat named Momo) is at least 760-thousand years old though evidence suggests it is the remnant of a larger lake that covered much of Nevada and Utah – making it one of the oldest lakes in North America.

While the term evidence suggests is a catch phrase often used without much actual evidence, in this case, an ancient shoreline mark is still present on the hills above Mono showing a previous lake depth of 900-feet.

The lake is also unique because it is endorheic.  While Zippy remembers high school and thinks that has something to do with the top of a Greek or Roman column, it just means the lake has no outlet.  The water from springs that feed it and the runoff water that collects there stay there until it evaporates.  All the salts and alkyds that enter with the water stay there also and since they don’t evaporate, they just become more concentrated.

To make Mono even more worthy of a stop, it has had volcanic activity as recently as 350-years ago (the two hills in the lake’s center are cones) and it has a collection of strange rock formations along the shore that resemble sand-castley looking things.  Called tufa towers by people in-the-know, they are created in a really interesting way.  Underwater springs, rich in calcium, mix with lake water containing a lot of carbonate

(remember all that runoff).  A chemical reaction occurs creating, not surprisingly, calcium carbonate – otherwise known as limestone.

As it rises from the spring, the limestone settles out of solution, falls to the lake’s bottom, and builds tufa towers – a centuries-long process to us but overnight to a rock.  All this building occurs below water.  (“Aha!” you say. “If it only happens below water, how come they are sitting there clearly above water?”) 

The City of Los Angeles diverted the lake’s water into it’s aqueduct in 1941.  Combined with the already normally high evaporation rate, the lake level fell to expose the now high-and-dry tufa towers.  By 1982 the lake had been reduced by one-third its size alarming a lot of lake loving people who did what good Americans always do – they sued, they won, and slowly the lake level is rising again.

Because Mono Lake contains about 280-million tons of dissolved salts, there are no native fish.  This suits the resident brine shrimp just fine.  Six-trillion of them hang out, eat lake algae, and think life is grand until 2-million waterfowl land and act like it’s a rest stop on some great migratory highway – yum, brine shrimp.

Surprisingly, all this talk about dissolved solids and brine shrimp is not making Zippy hungry but the forecast for wind and snow makes her want to find a home for the night.  After a couple of aborted attempts, she nestles among the scrub trees in a barren looking camp ground. 

Not until morning does she discover the campsite is next to a small lake facing the Sierra Nevada Mountains.  The snow is lovely but doesn’t fit the hot-dusty desert experience desired.  Perhaps a descent below 7,000-feet is necessary.

Lone Pine appears an unpretentious little town.  With a few businesses along the highway and a couple side residential streets, how could it be otherwise?  Yet, just outside of town is where over 500 movies and television shows have been filmed.  Is it a walled and gated complex with limited access? 

No, it is open land administered by the Bureau of Land Management and called the Alabama Hills.

The same rules apply for film director or visiting camper, leave it like you find it – pack it in, pack it out.  There are no facilities other than a few fire rings.  The official description of the system is dispersed camping.

If you have ever watched an old western, chances are part of it was filmed here.  The first feature was shot in 1920 – a Fatty Arbuckle silent film called The Round-up.  Captain Rich, because of a youth misspent sitting in front of the television, feels strangely at home here – kind of like returning to a childhood home town where everything is somewhat familiar

That dirt trail going between those rocks is where the bad guys jump onto the passing stagecoach and, surprisingly, the same place Hoss rescues Little Joe in a completely different series.

With these weirdly eroded, jumbled rocks in the foreground and the towering Sierra Nevada Range in the back, a partial list of films shot here attest to the area’s versatility: Gunga Din, Rawhide, The Gay Caballero,

How the West Was Won, High Sierra, Ironman, Gladiator, Tarzan, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Star Trek V and VII, Bonanza, and Maverick.

Even though Alayne did not misspend her youth, she still finds that the area holds her attention.  One of her hopes when starting this trip was to see the desert in bloom.  The Alabama Hills do not disappoint.  In a place this dry and desolate, the variety of flowers is amazing. 

Walks among the boulders reveal new colors every few steps.

Then there are the arches – dozens of them, some singles, some doubles, and even a strangely twisted mobius.

There are two main types of exposed rock in the area.  The weathered orange is volcanic in origin and is about 175-million years old. 

The potato shaped boulders are 90-million year old granite caused by spheroidal weathering which rounded the rocks’ nearly vertical joints.

These rock shapes contrast with the sharp ridges of the background Sierra Nevada’s which seems to suggest a different origin – but they are really all part of the same range.

The texture difference is explained by erosion patterns which have created a popular location for rock climbers.