Truckee: Road Trip to Truckee

This is the first post in the series about our visit to see our friends Kelley and Mark in Truckee, CA. Ann and I were up early on Saturday morning, ready for our adventure. We packed most of our gear the evening before, leaving only our last minute items and the perishables to pack in the morning. The perishables that I packed into a cooler were food items that I had pre-prepared so that we could have a relaxing time dining in, rather than having to worry about booking and getting to restaurants for meals. We had had enough of that in our prior trip to Walla Walla.

Early morning, we pulled onto Highway 97 just south of our house, looking forward to seeing a part of the country we had never seen before. We've never been down 97 south of its junction with OR 58 or into the northeast part of California or to Reno or to the Tahoe area. It would be all new for us.

Coming off the exit ramp onto the highway, we merged into a vast quantity of slow-moving bumper-to-bumper traffic and I thought to myself, "Rush hour?" But no, it was Saturday and where would all that traffic be heading? Certainly not to Sun River or La Pine. We were in terrible stop-and-go traffic for over an hour. And strangely enough, there were cars pulled over on the side of the road for miles and miles and miles. Most cars were parked on the west side of the highway facing east, some with people milling about their cars or posted up in chairs under blankets, all looking east.

While I was concentrating on the road and navigating past all the cars pulling off to the side, Ann noticed that lots of people had cameras on tripods. It then dawned on her that these were all folks who were intent on seeing the impending solar eclipse, something that I had heard mentioned a week or so before but which had slipped my mind. All this intense traffic was from people going to the desert south of us, one of the best places in the country to see the total ring-of-fire eclipse.

Sadly for the would-be viewers as the morning wore on, clouds looking like a roll of cotton batting unfurled all across the sky. The clouds only added to the eerie atmosphere. By 8:30, it seemed like twilight on a late summer's evening with long but weirdly faint shadows with a pinkish-orange cast to the light. By 9:00 in the morning, it was eerily dark, headlights required. Seeing this, you can certainly understand why ancient cultures might have thought eclipses to be some kind of evil omen. About 9:15, the clouds cleared just a tiny bit allowing Ann to snap the following photo. This photo and one brief glance each out the window would be our only view of the eclipse.

Solar Eclipse

As we headed further south, the day became increasingly brighter and ultimately by Klamath Falls on the California border, we left the clouds behind us. On the way south, we got great looks at Mt. Thielsen which we have seen previously from the top of Paulina Peak and new-to-us Mt. McLoughlin nestled behind Upper Klamath Lake. And as we came over a ridge north of Klamath Falls, we got our first view of Mt. Shasta at the southern end of the Cascades in northern California. I've seen Shasta before from the air when flying the West Coast, but this was my first time in seeing the 14-er from the ground. It's as impressive as Ranier is at the other end of the Cascades.

Mount Shasta

Coming down into the Klamath Basin on the Oregon and California border, we left the high desert scrub behind and entered a rich agricultural area, green and lush thanks to the irrigation rigs that were in every field. In contrast to the desert, all around were fields of grass, hay, alfalfa, wheat, and potatoes. Centered on Tulelake just south of the border in California, we saw the Cal-Ore potato packers, along with other less well known packers, and lots of potato barns, many of wood in unique styles that we have not seen in Oregon or Idaho.

Soon enough, we climbed up out of the basin and back into scrub, the Modoc National Forest looking much like Central Oregon with its juniper and rabbitbrush. As we climbed, this morphed into Ponderosa pine and bitterbrush, then pine and manzanita. At some point in this NF, the pine of the Sierra, the Jeffrey Pine, started appearing, but I cannot distinguish them from Ponderosas at 70mph.

All along the roadsides through the National Forest were open range, cattle, and cattle crossing signs warning of potential beef on the road. I've generally taken those signs with a grain of salt, until the moment we popped up over a rise and saw a Hereford bull, a big guy that I'd guess ran to 1500 pounds, standing in our lane staring our car down. He sure didn't want to move, so we veered over into the left lane to creep by him. He proceeded into the left lane right in front of the car, a stand-off of sorts.

Finally, he moved back into the right lane and proceeded to run while we darted past him on the left. The situation reminded me of the bull bison in Yellowstone who walked wherever they damn well pleased, cars be damned. But there's a world of difference between encountering a bison bull while creeping along at 30-35 and zooming up on a bull cow at 70!

Not Sure I Believe the Sign

OK, I'm a Believer

Just north of Susanville CA near the Nevada border, we were finally south enough for the season to go back in time by about a month as evidenced by rabbitbrush still in bloom. Until this point, we saw nothing at all blooming on the roadsides. And curiously enough coming off of the big hill north of Susanville, we came down a steep and twisty grade along a hillside containing the only deciduous trees we had seen other than aspens. Along this hill but nowhere else on our 7.5-hour drive were several smaller oak trees, lobed like a white oak. Curious. In the valley around Susanville, we would see the first real sagebrush of the trip.

Back in Time a Month Near Susanville CA

At Susanville, we had to decide whether to get gas there or in Reno. Internet to the rescue: prices in NV are way cheaper than CA as we expected, but prices in NV are way more expensive than in OR to the tune of about 80 cents per gallon. As we crossed into Nevada at Bordertown (a lot of brain cells were expended on that name, huh?), I recalled that this was Ann's first visit to Nevada and my first visit to the Reno area. Prior to this, I had driven to Vegas from both Flagstaff and LA, and have driven out into Death Valley NP in CA from Vegas via Pahrump. This would be my first visit to the Tahoe area.

At a gas station with relatively low prices a few miles west outside of Reno, I started pumping gas. While staring off into space waiting for the tank to fill, I tried to guess what the total price would be for a tankful. On my mental cocktail napkin, I figured roughly $100. When the pump started to slow in preparation for shutting off, I glanced at the dial to read $99.97, then $99.98, then $99.99, then after the click of the pump shutting off, $100.00. That was a truly lucky guess on my part and also the first time that I have ever put $100 of fuel into anything that was not a large truck.

Sticker Shock at Nevada Gas Prices
California is Far Worse

From the gas station northwest of Reno, it was probably another 45 minutes into Truckee, but we made it in less thanks to Ann driving. Maria Ann-dretti I call her. Damn the cops and full speed ahead! The road out to Truckee and the Sierra from Reno is I-80 which follows the beautiful and winding Truckee River (outflow from Lake Tahoe). We made for Mark and Kelley's condo which is just off of I-80 at CA 89, one of the two roads south to Lake Tahoe. I-80 continues west up to Donner Pass in the Sierra and thence into Sacramento and Oakland.

It was hugs all around for these good friends whom we have not seen face-to-face since about 2016, our busy lives going in different directions. While Mark made himself ready for work (bartender), Kelley opened a bottle of Veuve Clicquot to celebrate our arrival. We caught up out on their deck for just a few minutes before Mark had to head off to his restaurant.

Cheers!

After we finished our Champagne, Kelley led us not far away to a place where she had arranged for us to spend the night. She manages short term rental properties for a woman from the Bay Area and hooked us up with a rental. Tired after a long drive and really wanting to focus on catching up with Kelley, we had no plans to cook dinner or to go out. In anticipation of this, I made a terrine of pork garnished with porcini, bacon, and ham on Friday. While I was making it, Ann ran out to the store and picked up some cheese and crackers to go with it. Saturday night at our rental, we opened some wine, put out a platter of cheese and terrine, and sat around noshing and catching up with Kelley.

Terrine for the Road

Quick and Easy Dinner After a Long Drive

Ann and I were so beat after our long day battling eclipse traffic, bulls, and obscene gas prices that we begged off for bed pretty early. Kelley took a shuttle back to Mark's restaurant after mentioning that we might catch brunch somewhere in the morning before a short hike. Given that the next day, Sunday, was Mark's day off, I suggested I could make dinner for the two of them. But we set no plans in concrete, that being the unhurried theme of this trip: take each day as it came to us.