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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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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Driving for eight hours today, including about two hours on a road so curvy it must have been plotted out by an epileptic, wore me out. It was nearly 11 p.m. when my body and my mind stopped working together, rendering it quite difficult to drive. With no campgrounds around in our price range, I steered into the parking lot of a popular hotel. I took a deep, courageous breath, and marched in.
Katie waited in wonder until I came back to the car, beaming with victory.

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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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This morning I woke up with all intentions of doing something in Portland all day. Instead I stayed in the T@b and threw myself a pity party. Ooooh poor me I’m on a road trip and feeling sad. What is wrong with me?

Tired of my whining, Mark slyly slipped out and went to the Store-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named (STSNBN) to exchange our propane tank for the second time in TWO WEEKS! How can propane run out so quickly? I’ll tell you how: Winter. Really, it’s coming along quite nicely this year. Although Portland has been great when it comes to weather, the 70’s! Could you imagine? And they have trees here! Real trees! All we’ve been seeing for the past two or three weeks are pine trees. I thought surely by the time we reached a state with leafy trees, all the leaves would have fallen off the branches. But I was wrong and wow they’re orange and red and yellow! So Mark’s propane exchanging trip took over an hour because he had to wait over an hour for someone to simply unlock the cage, grab a propane tank and give it to Mark - He already paid! But for some reason the store just couldn’t function correctly in that hour leaving Mark with no choice but to “yell” at them. Sometimes I laugh when Mark yells at me because I think he’s joking, but sometimes his yelling can be scarier than how my mother yelled at me when I was younger. And I have a feeling Mark scared those people because he said all the managers had a meeting and then came out to apologize to him. And at the end of the story he added “And all the customer service people looked as though they were crying, must have been a tough day.”

So while Mark was making everyone in customer service cry at the STSNBN, I was laying in the grass, recovering from a run and was approached by our neighbor who lives in the sweet Airstream (can I mention Airstream on here since we are sponsored by T@B? T@@@BBB T@B. Okay, that should make up for it.) Maybe our neighbor, Alan, knew I was having a self-inflicted bad week, because he went on and on (in a good way) talking about how everything ‘just is’ - if it’s good, that’s because you are thinking of it in a positive way. And if it’s bad, that’s because you’re thinking of it in a negative way. And you’ve got to step back and think about whether you like the way you feel because of the way you’re reacting to things, etc. etc. Everything he said I’ve thought of before, but maybe he was just supposed to remind me about these things.

Mark came home an hour later as Alan was giving me an energy cleansing……………….

And that turned into Mark and me laying in our bed for an hour, earphones connected to our computers and ears of course, playing BRAIN POWER, a CD we copied to our iTunes that Alan loaned us. Maybe it was the sun shining on my already-tired-from-running forehead for the entire hour Alan and I spoke, or perhaps the vibrations produced by the deep beat that CD made, that caused me to fall asleep right away. I woke up ten minutes before the CD ended, freaked because it was now blasting a noise that sounded like an airplane taking off next to our T@B. My ears adjusted and I fell back asleep only to be woken up by extremely loud beginning notes of Led Zeppelin’s version of You Shook Me.

Then we ate some excellent Indian food and so much ice cream that my stomach muscles hurt from being stretched too far. Good night!

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Our pal Kate (aka Ms. Dawes) is teaching in a 5th grade class this year. They’re following our road trip on Wanderful and have their own blog, Wanderkids, where they’ll be posting their Wanderful related findings, projects, and questions for us to answer.

This is in response to their post from October 9, 2008.
Do you get homesick for your families ever?
Katie: I haven’t lived at home with my family for four years, so I don’t feel homesick, I just miss their personalities.  I’ve had a few dreams where I go back home to visit my dad.
Mark: I think about them often, but I’m glad to be on my own.

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