The Epic Move, Part 6: San Francisco to Home!

 Last day!  (Or, I suppose, the first day, depending on your point of view... So deep.)  It's only 5-6 hours from the San Francisco area to Arcata, which is why we felt completely comfortable taking some time out of our day to drive through a tree.

No really.  The trees are so big and so old that you can carve a hole the size of a car out of the middle of one, and it will still be alive

 [But it'll cost ya.]

We saw a lot of motorcyclists on the 101.  I don't understand.  It looks like a really uncomfortable way to travel.

 We rolled down the windows and touch the tree as we drove through.

  [Our turn!]

Then this, because it was World Breastfeeding Week. 

[So giant!]

Then this guy looked like he was going to hitch a ride.  But then he left.

[Norman loves dragonflies.]

Then we kept driving.  We finally arrive in our new town.

[The University]

We got into our new house (with a carfull of stuff).

Lucy made her own fun.

[That's a bowl, a fork, and some spaghetti. Can't you tell?]

A couple days later I finally had some pans unpacked and had taken a trip to the grocery store, so we had our first home-cooked meal (despite tablelessness).

[Real spaghetti!]

And now we're here.

Bread Loaf Pan Kludge -- Results!

Yesterday I showed you the not-enough-bread-loaf-pans solution, pre-baking.  Wellll.....

Here is the loaf of bread from the one normal loaf pan:

 [Mmm... Loafy...]

And here are the other three loaves:

They're shaped exactly like loaves of bread!  Hooray!  But as you may or may not be able to see, the sides were not so much actually done.  Still doughy, in fact.  (On all of them, even the one in its own pan.)

So I separated them and put them back in the oven.  They seem to have turned out fine (although we haven't actually sliced into one of these loaves yet). 

The lesson for next time is to bake the kludgy ones just long enough for them to set, then separate the pans.  I think that will help them cook a lot more evenly.  Recommended!

Bread Loaf Pan Kludge

("Kludge" being defined by urbandictionary.com as "a quick, messy but functional fix or workaround to a problem.")

I'm trying this tip from The Tightwad Gazette for when you don't own enough loaf pans.  Come back tomorrow to see how this works out...

(Bread recipe here. More time consuming than bread machine bread, but very tasty, and all whole wheat!)

The Epic Move, Part 5: Bakersfield to San Francisco

Goodness!  I hope none of you were holding your breath to find out how the move ended up!  I'm back a mere 3 weeks later to let you know about my favorite day of the trip.  The day we wound up in San Francisco.  I didn't realize until the day of that I was so excited to see it. 

Back story: The Christmas break of my senior year of college I started (and finished) all 58 episodes of the TV show The Monkees.  I don't know what possessed me, but once I started I couldn't stop.  Being, as it is, set in the mid-1960s and staring a group of 4 young men with no adult interference, it showcases quite a bit of the 1960s hippie counterculture (especially as the show progresses).  I was fascinated.  And then when school started back up, I had to pick a topic for my senior thesis for my linguistics degree.  After tossing around several ideas, I landed on the topic of 1960s American slang.  It was way too much fun to write, research included watching the Woodstock documentary, and I got an A.  Win!  (Final title: "Rappin' to the Fuzz: A Look at the Slang of 1960s Counterculture". Thanks, Arlo!)

But along the way -- reading, thinking, watching more Monkees -- all the changing I had been doing while I was in college seemed to come to a head.  Hippies, according to High School Me, were just a bunch of lazy, drugged-up, over-sexed reprobates who needed to grow up and get right with God.  A different picture emerged when I actually looked into it.  It starts back in the 1940s and 50s, and good heavens, if I had lived through the 50s and early 60s, I'd be fed up too.  These poor kids -- they knew something had to change, and in some sense, it didn't matter what it was.  They just couldn't keep doing things the way their parents were doing them.  (And now, as I've made it through two seasons of Mad Men, I'm appreciative of their efforts all over again!)  I feel for them.  They're not really my people, but I get it. 

Which brings us to San Francisco.  The Summer of Love.  Haight-Ashbury.  A pilgrimage 9 years in the making for me.  Overly dramatic?  Yes.  And exciting.  I also knew that the vibe in San Francisco should be similar to that thing I loved about Boulder, CO, and the thing I've come to love about our new town in Humboldt County.  "Everyone's different, man. Do your thing."  After a lifetime in Oklahoma, I need some of that.  (Especially since, as it turns out, my thing is not everyone else's thing.)

First up, we visited the most amazing playground -- the Koret Children's Quarter in Golden Gate Park.  I don't think I've ever seen children so free.  The only rule is that adults aren't allowed without a kid.  There's a giant spider-webby thing and a little pond and sand and a giant cement slide built into the side of a hill that you have to go down on a piece of cardboard.  It's beautiful.

Then we walked down Haight Street and saw this:

 

Crochet bomb!

Then we found what we came for:

 

Then we bought over-priced but super-tasty salads at Whole Foods:

 

Then we started driving to find the Golden Gate Bridge.

  

[My new favorite photo of me.]

  

[And the fog behaved perfectly for us and everything.]

I loved it.  We're going back in a couple weeks to see Hugh Laurie sing some blues songs (!!!! -- oh there will be a post. Holy crap I'm so excited.), and we hope to go back again for a proper vacation before the next 10 months are gone.

The Epic Move, Part 4: Arizona to Bakersfield

And then we kept driving. Again.

We came across this. Norman thinks it needs a ",Batman!" added to the bottom, while I thought it sounded like the name of a fat, corrupt Southern politician.

Then we got to California, which is very large.

And the Pacific Time Zone, which we had kinda already been in, because Arizona does not observe Daylight Saving Time.

We had to stop, get inspected, and wake up our toddler. ::grumble grumble:: Our apples were certified gypsy moth-free!

We stopped at one of the most tacky, crowded, chintzy tourist traps I've ever seen. It was a McDonalds made out of train cars that also had stalls selling cheap jewelry, stuffed animals, fudge, pretzels, lottery tickets, etc, etc. It was annoying. We came across this, which I thought was awesome! While I was looking and photographing, Lucy was standing directly behind me no matter which way I moved, peaking around, clinging for dear life to my shirt. I've never seen her so freaked out (except for when she sees Geoff Peterson). Norman noted that she does not do well with the Uncanny Valley.

When we rolled into Bakersfield, we made sure to find an In-n-Out burger. None of us had ever eaten at one, but of course we've heard all the marvelous things about it.

[She loves french fries.]

[Om nom.]

[One of the hidden Bible verses I'd heard so much about.]

The verdict:
Then we found our Super 8, did some laundry, tried to get the internet to work, and figured out what we wanted to do the next day in San Francisco!!

The Epic Move, Part 3: Albuquerque to the Grand Canyon

OK, to be honest, all the driving days are now starting to run together. So I'll just have to go off the extant documents -- the photos.

In New Mexico (I guess) we saw some really cool dust devils!


My arm seems a lot longer inside the car. (And I did a lot of twisting and reaching to accommodate backward-facing whiny child.)


The drive up to the Grand Canyon from Flagstaff looked like this, so we were a little afraid we'd get rained on when we got there.


But eventually it cleared up and looked like this! (BTW, it takes for. ever. to go through the gate and pay for a pass to get in. Do you know why? Because the stupid sign says they strongly prefer debit/credit cards, so the people in the booths have to swipe a card and get a signature for almost every car going through. When we got up to the window and paid with exact change, the attended thanked us profusely and said she was so tired of running cards. So somehow people are supposed to deduce that a sign that says "Credit/Debit Card Preferred" actually means "Exact Change Preferred" or perhaps "No Change Given". Duh, signwriters. Duh. In short, if you're going to visit, buy a pass in Tusayan and you can drive right through in the fast lane.)

["I want to push!"]

[A photo of people taking photos of the Grand Canyon. Because I'm meta like that.]

It's really, really hard to take a bad photo of the Grand Canyon. All my photos (from my cheap little point-and-shoot) turned out lovely.

[Bwaaahhh...]

[Thanks, Eastern European Tourist Man!]

That's right -- coins can kill! Not because when you throw them they'll hit someone on the bottom on the head. Not even because when you throw them they'll hit a California condor on the head. No, it's because of that one time when a condor got zinc poisoning. Yep.

We actually stayed the night in Williams, AZ, which is kind of a hole with expensive gas. All in all, a good day as I recall. The Grand Canyon is really big.

The Epic Move, Part 2: Norman to Albuquerque

Day One of driving also dawned bright and early. (Actually, you can just assume that all the days were bright and early from here on out.) We packed everything in the car (barely), and took one last look around before locking our keys inside the house. It felt weird to be without a house key, and therefore technically homeless.

We stopped off at Norman's family's house on the way out of OKC. I had to open my big mouth and say something about how accidentally loading their vacuum onto our moving truck and not noticing until the truck was gone could be the one thing that goes wrong on the trip! We said our good-byes, got in the car, and got about an hour and half outside OKC when Norman noticed that he couldn't find his phone. Upon calling his parents, we discovered that around the time I was jinxing us by talking about the vacuum, Norman's phone was jumping out of his pocket, into his parents' couch cushions. Yep. We decided to have them ship it to us so it would arrive the first full day we would be in Arcata. (Spoiler alert: Everything turned out fine.)

[Hello, Texas.]

[Somewhere in the middle of the Texas panhandle. Kinda nice, eh?]

[This sign made us laugh.]

[A fancy rest stop in Texas. We assembled and ate our lunch sandwiches inside because it was so hot outside. We looked like weirdos.]

This place is in Adrian, Texas, the self-proclaimed midpoint of Route 66. (That sounds more cynical than I intended. It's just that all the signs and businesses in the entire town seem to refer to this fact.)

[Fran seems to run a very tight ship.]

[And of course when we drove up, it was closed.]

The day ended at an America's Best Value Inn in Albuquerque. (We highly recommend this chain of motels, by the way. We stayed at 3 different ones along the way, and they were all cheap, clean, and safe.)

The Epic Move, Part 1: Load 'Em Up

I debated about this, but finally decided, yes, I should write a series of blog posts about my family's recent epic cross-country move, if only so that we have a record of it. A few short weeks ago we moved from Oklahoma to far northern California (job related, of course). We gave our stuff to a freight company and set out in our car: Husband (driver), me (navigator), Toddler (alternating between napper and whiner), and almost too much stuff to fit on the inside of the car. Five days, four nights. Epic.

Moving Day dawned bright, hot, and early. For those unaware, it's been over 100 degrees in central Oklahoma almost every day for the last 3 months. Yet even with the threat of ridiculous heat, we had 12 (TWELVE!) friends and family members come out to help us load stuff onto the semi. (Broadway Express -- recommended!) We had all the loading done in under 3 hours.

[This awesome kid is in middle school.]

[How many Oklahomans does it take to shrink wrap a dining table?]

[Good, sweaty work, guys!]

After everything was on the truck, the driver discovered that... it wouldn't start! I was uncharacteristically calm about this. Hey, it wasn't my truck! But as it turns out, we neglected to fill out some important paperwork (due to Broadway Express's lack of text wrapping in e-mails -- it's 2011, people!). A friend rescued us by running home to print off the forms. We got it all filled out, and then... the truck started! Thanks for stalling for us, truck!

Then there was some cleaning, then there was a Farewell, Braums! Party. (Braums Ice Cream and Dairy Stores, for those of you not in the know -- they have the best, freshest milk that's ever been pasteurized, really tasty ice cream, and fair-to-middlin' burgers and fries.)

[Can you tell she never gets ice cream?]

["My-ole!" as Lucy says.]

Then friends dispersed. Then more cleaning. Also buying bagels and ice for the road. That was a really long day. We slept on an air mattress and entertained Lucy with the laptop + Netflix Instant. As I recall, we went to bed at a fairly decent hour, although I had real trouble sleeping, between the PVC fumes from the (new) air mattress and the bleach fumes from cleaning the bathroom. (I am an HSP, after all!) But no matter -- tomorrow begins the driving!

[The air mattress, before quite everything was loaded onto the truck.]