Woke up this morning hot as hell from the propane heat blasting through its vent under the bed.  My feet hang over the edge while I sleep, dangling outside of the blankets, where the fuming heat from the furnace catches with the fleece of the blanket and creates a sweaty tropical environment.  I reached over to raise the blind and let the sunlight pour in.  A disappointed sigh left my lips — so much of the morning had already passed.  Mister immediately sprang from his cozy little spot, using my bladder as a trampoline to get to the window.  “Ohhhhh, I have to pee!!”  I leaped out of bed and shivered the whole 200 yards to the campground bathroom.  “Ohhhhhh, it’s freezing!”  It happened that someone left the window open in the men’s room, creating an icy glaze over all the toilet seats and a fierce whirling wind whipping through the urinals.

Here in Panguitch, Utah, the temperatures are dipping by degrees every day.  It’s a drastic change of environment when considering that, just a few days ago, we were in San Diego touring a greenhouse in weather so warm that our tour guide opted to go shirtless.  Currently, the temperature is 14º, Fahrenheit.

We’re about 30 miles from Bryce Canyon, one of the most gorgeous eroding territories I’ve seen since the Badlands.  Yesterday, as we were driving around getting a feel for the National Park, a snow storm blasted through.  At an elevation of nearly 9000 feet, you have to be prepared for the worst.  We saw the clouds coming in from miles away, the big gray clouds with streaks beneath them that you can tell is snow falling in the distance.

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Wherever we stay the night in the T@B, camping enthusiasts of all shapes, sizes, and dispositions approach us to talk about life on the road.  For them, watching the aqua blue teardrop trailer glide into a dusty campground is on level with seeing a sultry supermodel strut down the aisle of the Home Depot, pushing a wheelbarrow filled with power tools, two-by-fours, lollipops, and coconut oil.  California, in particular, is home to especially contented campers.  “We’ve been California residents all our lives, RVing for 25 years around the state, and we still haven’t seen all there is to see just in California!” said Russ, a laid-back RVer we met in Yosemite.  It’s rare to come across a single state that has enough diverse terrain to put it on par with a whole country or even a continent.  California is the place that’s got it all:  Rugged shores, sandy beaches, mountains, deserts, prairies, metropolises, small towns, farms, lakes — almost everything you can imagine is here.  That explains why we’ve been California-ing for over a month now, despite the fact that we’re only allotted three and a half months to see the entire country.  We will be pulling out of here soon, though.  Either tonight or tomorrow morning we’ll say goodbye to our current location of San Diego and haul our butts to Utah.  By December 21, we’ll be in Florida — back on the East Coast — then back to New Jersey on Christmas Eve.

California, you’ve been good to us.  Hey, why don’t you come to New Jersey with us?  Bring the Pacific Ocean, everybody’s invited!

To give you a taste of California’s varying terrains, take a look at these gooey morsels.

The sunset in Yosemite National Park:

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This morning, on nytimes.com, I saw a link to an article which is being updated all day today, as the journalist liveblogs Thanksgiving. I thought liveblogging was corny before (mostly because I am picky about which internet/blogging trends I fall for), but now liveblogging has gone too far. To out corny them (because that’s what we’re about here at Wanderful, corny), I’m going to take it one step further and liveblog MY THANKSGIVING! But not like that, no - see, I always wanted to keep a list of all the things I am thankful for on Thanksgiving, but I usually forget or fall asleep for most of the afternoon. This year, whenever something comes to mind that I am thankful for, I’m going to liveblog it right here on Wanderful. Perhaps this isn’t really liveblogging - I think liveblogging is supposed to have something to do with following your own or someone else’s actions for a day. I don’t care, I’m liveblogging my thoughts, that’s what I’m liveblogging. Here we go:
I am thankful for…
9:13PM
Wine.

9:00PM
THE DINNER WE JUST ATE!
 

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Walking into a crowded bar on a Friday night can be an unpredictable experience. This particular bar was called The Chieftain, in the Mission District of San Francisco. It was an Irish pub, but the bouncer on this particular night was a plump, redheaded Brit. He cracked a joke as he asked to see our ID’s.
“Huh?”
He smiled and his lips moved again, giving voice to his musical British inflections; however, I couldn’t make out a single word. People were talking all around. Couples had to yell at each other across their tables just to be heard. Being somewhat hard of hearing and largely unfamiliar with non-James-Bond British accents, I had to pretend to understand his joke. Thinking quickly, I said “Hahaha!!” He let us in without incident.

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Let’s get us some equal rights, dammit.

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Read the first half HERE.

According to Penny, we still had three miles to go before we would reach the bottom of that hill. I was nervous for our own safety, but it was hard to concentrate so much on that when I was worrying about the fate of Wanda, stuck in the mud, cliffside - especially because we realized ten minutes after leaving the T@b, that we didn’t put her emergency brake up. After a minute of wondering how much of a chance she had of not rolling off the cliff, we realized she would be pretty safe because she was STUCK IN THE MUD.

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A long and detailed recount.

Mark, Mister and I left Fort Bragg and headed towards San Francisco, around 6pm on Sunday night. Mark drives most of the time during the day, and always when it’s dark out. Lately we’ve only been driving at night and always down some loopy road. As Mark guided the three of us in the jeep, with Wanda the T@b in tow, down and around a windy highway, my mind began to wander. I thought about what I should write about for Wanderful’s Monday morning post. The past two weeks have been pretty enjoyable, but all we’ve been doing is spending the time looking at the Pacific, picking up rocks and thinking about the Redwoods - nothing you guys want to hear about I’m sure. My thoughts shifted as we made a left on a road (as advised by Penny, our GPS) with a bright yellow caution sign that read “WARNING: Through Traffic Not Advised”. A sign anyone would have listened to….except for us.

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Three years ago our friend Brian went on a one month road trip across America. When he got back to New Jersey we invited him over to share his tales from the road, and that he did - He told us about a hundred stories that night and showed us even more photos. What I remember most from his stories:
-A photo of him jumping on what looked to be the edge of a cliff in the Grand Canyon
-A story where he attended a powwow with some weird hippie dude who ran a hostel he stayed at
-A photo of him holding a cougar cub as big as your average cat.
-And when he proclaimed “Portland is a cool city. It’s like a city made up of a bunch of rejects from other cities and they’re all just living and doing things and wahwahhaahahaa…” and he kept going on in his Brian language and using hand motions I don’t always understand.

Brian has a lot of time to go in his head and think and come back with well thought-out opinions on just about everything in life. Then he tells me “hey Katie, go see this movie, it is good.” and I go see it and hey, it’s good! So I trust Brian’s opinion most of the time and feel quite inspired by him after we hang out (which doesn’t happen often enough these days). So of course after hearing all about his road trip I realized that a road trip was probably the thing for me.

Brian’s definition of Portland sounded great! And on our long list of things to do and places to see, Portland was first on my list. As the road trip neared, I realized I was growing out of Montclair and maybe it was time to find a new place to live. So the search began: I would love to live in New York City but I refuse to live in the semi-affordable Brooklyn and I don’t believe I’ve got the money or balls to make it in Manhattan. Boston is too Boston (it’s the only way to describe it, go there and see for yourself), Chicago is cool and all but it’s too cold (actually it was really warm when we were there, I just hear about the cold), Cleveland is bleeeaaahhhghhhhh, Milwaukee is too drunk and iPhone droppy (well, for me it was), and Minneapolis is just too cool for us losers. Perhaps, I thought, I am one of those other-city rejects who would fit right in, in Portland, Oregon.

Hopes were high when we drove into the city almost two weeks ago.

“Holy crap Mark! Are those purple mountains….majesty??” So I looked up the lyrics and then tried to figure out where the purple mountains mentioned in the song are located. I still am not sure. These looked purple to me.

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Two long landlocked months are finally over…

Mister doesn’t care. He will always hate cold water. I tried to get him to come close to the wake but he resisted. Look at him dig his paws into the sand.

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Portland is a damn neat place, but I must report that it’s probably not the promised land. Portlanders may not agree with me. Take Alan, for instance. Alan is a big enthusiast of magnetic power; not to mention he’s a master of transcendence. Apparently the two are related: he has an “energy field” hovering above his bed, but I call it a gallon jug of water with a plant sticking out and some magnets attached. He happened to be our neighbor at the RV park. Alan has lived in Portland for years. He’s made a permanent home out of his Airstream RV (not as cool as our T@B, despite having more posters of firemen). Portland is his favorite place.
Since I was uncomfortable letting my conversation with Alan drift into subjects of the metaphysical otherworld — “Oh, you regularly leave your body so your spirit can fly over the city in your flying van looking for handsome hitchhikers, Alan? That’s so interesting…” — we spoke of the weather. “Say, it sure is cloudy out this morning, don’t you think, Alan?” This is how I found out that it is always cloudy in the morning in Portland, no matter what the weather will be like later in the day. Alan says that snow and ice are rarities in the winter — just bring a sweatshirt with you and you’ll be set year-round.
After a few minutes of skepticism I found Alan to be genuinely interesting and charming. I’m not sure I believe everything he says, but it’s fun stuff to think about. “There are spirits all around us,” Alan told us that afternoon. “Would you like to speak with them?” We were understandably curious.
“Okay. What do we do?”
“Stand with your eyes closed. Ask the spirits to move you in a direction for ‘yes’.”
We asked. Katie’s right knee moved slightly forward. I didn’t feel anything.
“Now ask them to move you in a direction for ‘no’.”
Katie’s right knee moved slightly forward. I didn’t feel anything.
“I moved in the same direction!” said Katie.
“The spirits have a sense of humor,” Alan smirked.

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