Hitting the road

Well, not quite yet, but we're hoping to actually be in the car and on the road within the next few hours... on our way to Comic-Con!! This is also our big vacation of the year, so we're planning on having fun and seeing the sights on the way down to San Diego (plus visiting a few family members).

I was going to say that it's likely I won't be posting here as much while we're on the road, but honestly? I'll probably end up posting MORE than I usually do, if I follow my normal patterns. Maybe not as many comments in other people's LJs, though.

The plan is to make it to Ashland, OR tonight, which is only about a 7 hour drive away... so hopefully we'll be able to take some time do the tourist thing. Oooo! Maybe, if we're lucky, we'll get down to Gold Hill early enough to actually visit the Oregon Mystery Vortex! I know it's stupid, but I've always wanted to go... and we always seem to drive by there after they've closed.

Greetings from Ashland, OR!

I think we may have been a little overly optimistic in our plans to stay here tonight... I mean, we made it okay, rolling into the hotel parking lot at around 10:30. But I sort of wish we'd been able to stop at Grant's Pass, about an hour or so earlier. OTOH, I'm so very glad we made a reservation... I figured it would all be booked up around here and I was right, since the Shakespeare Festival is in full swing.

( The big problem is that we should never, ever depend on actually leaving the house when we plan to )

So, yeah, it was after 1:00 by the time we really got on the road... dodging over across I-90 to I-5 when we saw that there was stop-and-go traffic on 405, and still hitting an amazing amount of a roadwork pretty much all the way down the line.

We did stop off at the restaurant ladyforash manages in Springfield, OR... hoping she might be at work, but no luck. I started skimming my flist while we were waiting for our food and discovered that she's actually in Montana on her own roadtrip this weekend. Heh.

We had one exciting moment driving by a brushfire in the median, north of Vancouver... there was a ton of smoke, so Rackham had moved into the middle lane before hitting it (it was seriously thick at that point) and it turned out to be a good thing or we would have gotten more than a little singed... the flames were blowing over the entire inside lane! Yikes! As it was, we could feel the heat from the fire.

And then the funky thing... I noticed something odd just above the horizon, at one point, sort of hanging back behind the trees. For a bit there, I had no clue what it was... and then it hit me. With all the wildfires they've got going in California and Oregon, there's a ton of smoke just sitting around the atmosphere. And I was seeing the moon. Or rather, I was almost seeing the moon. It was an *extremely* dark orange-ish red... to the point where we were trying to figure out if it might just be a new moon. Nope. There was just so much smoke hanging around that it was almost completely obscuring the moon. It was both cool and creepy.

Tomorrow we're headed down to the my grandfather's place in Sacramento... hopefully with a stop at the Olive Pit along the way (mmmmm.... olives...) and I have no idea what sort of condition his wireless network is in. Hopefully we'll have access when we're there (or it won't take long to fix it so it's working again).