A veritable plethora of meanderings

Yesterday morning we gassed up the car in Bellingham WA and the fuel was a mere $2.92 a gallon. Here it runs around $1.05 (or more) for a &%$#$@ litre. Why is that? Furthermore, why is it in &^%$#@ litres to begin with? Oh, I know why, but that doesn't mean I have to like it. That's one of the reasons, among many others, why I like traveling in the US -- it's like a retro trip for me -- a retro trip to a certain sanity that used to punctuate my youth. Maybe it is no more sane in essence, but for me it is. Gallons and miles. That I can reason with and I don't have to convert. Ah -- just like the old days. Only problem is, the car's speedometer is in kph, not mph, so I still had to do some converting. I know why our system is so galling. It's all to do with the repulsive, evil and utterly unlamented (at least in the West) Pierre Trudeau. But again, that's another matter.

Anyway, we are home again, and that always fills me with mixed feelings. I mean, I love my home, and I love having had a fine vacation and being home safe-and-sound with nothing nasty or scary having intervened. But, at the same time, being home means being back to reality. Vacations are always an altered universe.

We spent our last days of any substance with a drive around shoreline of Upper Klamath Lake, and it was quite beautiful, as shown. And, we finally saw pelicans. White pelicans. And they are huge, and boast wingspans of up to 10 feet (or three metres for those who might be obsessive about metric). I'd been disappointed on the coast because we saw no brown pelicans -- other than the corpse of one that was being handily devoured by a group of cadaverous seagulls. So the white pelicans made up for that.

After leaving the Klamath area we headed through the mountains and out to the Interstate where we forged forth for the state capital of Salem. Salem is a very nice town. We stayed for two nights, and I could have easily welcomed more nights than that. At one point we took a wrong turn while we were in Salem and ended up driving past the state penitentiary. The same penitentiary that once housed one Randall McMurphy before he faked loopiness in hopes of getting into the state mental insitute, also nearby. The tale is, of course, all told in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, since Salem was once the home of that wonderful old beatnik and hugely talented writer, Ken Kesey. So, it struck me that Salem was a good place to spend a little time.

Anyway, it's a very nice town -- not too big and not too small, and it boasts one of the finest smaller art galleries of my experience. I wrote a few weeks ago about the abomination that is the Victoria Art Gallery, and how it cost us $12 a pop to see exhibits I wouldn't normally spend two bits on. The Salem Gallery's entry fee was -- free. Just for that day. It was homecoming weekend, so there were freebies all over town. Normally it costs $3 per person, and with that you get a multifaceted array of exceptional art. Most enjoyable for us -- an age thing I guess -- was two galleries devoted to Fillmore West music concerts from the late 1960s. This was psychedelia triumphant, and did you know you could actually go to hear the 'Dead' or 'Big Brother' for about $5 a ticket back then? I didn't.

We left Salem and drove north. We thought we would reach the border too late in the day for an easy crossing, so we stayed in Bellingham, a few miles south. It was just fine. Added to which, I was very familiar with the area since my aunt and uncle had a beach cottage a few miles from Bellingham when I was a kid, so I spent many summers in that 'hood. Again, just like going home.

The drive from Seattle north on that pentultimate day was actually quite nasty, with pelting rain and the Interstate absolutely cluttered with cars, and punctuated by the incident with the semi that threw a wheel off somewhere along the way and it bounced mightily among the cars which frantically braked in the rain. Amazingly, and blessedly, it hit no one. If it had, our journey home might have turned out quite horribly different.

So now, here I am, and I have to get some work done. Why, oh why don't I win the lottery?