This is a reanimation of the Vicaribus blog as lived by Miro Kazakoff and Ehren Foss in 2004 and 2005. The photos may be spotty.

Chiiico.... Suave

Posted by ehren

Wednesday morning we drove back up near the hot springs, seeing no other way to turn around, and eventually got going away from Middletown to the east northeast on 29, which eventually joined with some other road, I don't have the map in front of me. It was lightly raining. Miro drove partway through the hills, then I took over, and once we dropped down into the Central Valley Miro drove again. I had 1,000 miles of practice on flat, straight roads before encountering any real challenges when learning to drive the bus, and I'm remembering how terrifying it was on the first few turns. At this point Miro can keep it in the lane fairly well, but if something requires attention like a blinker or an itch on his nose it's kind of a crapshoot trying to predict where the bus will go.

We rolled into Chico around 1 or 2. It's a quintessential college town, with upscale hip boutiques, plenty of coffeeshops per capita, and hordes of undergrads. We stopped primarily for internet, but owing to spectacular latency problems it didn't end up being very useful. Miro almost threw over a table in disgust, and I spent far too much time nursing two directories of images onto this site via FTP only to find that they landed on the server side corrupted (maybe I should try SCP?). Still, I got some work done, and satisfied my addiction to various sites including The Onion and Penny Arcade. I turned in three books at a used bookshop and picked up "Mutiny On The Bounty" (arrrr!!!), a Louis L'Amour novella (does it matter which one?), and um... a third book. Also.

In the evening I did a few hours of work in one of the coolest coffee shops yet visited (I consider myself an expert at this point). "The Naked Lounge" on 2nd St. They don't have internet so you just might get something done.

We were intending to head up to the Lassen Volcanic area today (Thursday), but decided against it for the following reasons:

1. The road through the park isn't open.
2. The snow line is at 6500 feet, and we have neither snow shoes nor crampons nor ice-axes for hiking to the 8000+ ft. peaks.
3. The rear tires are bald, for all intents and purposes.
4. It's due to rain solidly in Chico, which means it's due to snow solidly at the park.
5. A list of feature names from the park: Chaos Jumbles, Chaos Crags, Devastated Area, and Bumpass Hell.

It sounds fantastic (what is a "jumble"?), and the photos look beautiful, it's just that we believe we'd be risking death by attempting to drive the bus there, or hike, at this time of year. It would be the equivalent of taking an oil tanker river rafting.

Given this retreat, Miro is dead set on going to Crater Lake in Oregon, but it might have the same problems of trecherousness and late-season snow. For a set of boring yet complicated logistical reasons, we'll decide in Eureka whether or not Crater Lake is realizable. I should change the schedule to reflect the new path; also the route around Iowa in late July could change, but I really doubt anyone would try to visit us there.

So instead we drove back to I-5, bought a brand new (laminated!) atlas at a Travel America truckstop to replace our tattered old one which is on the verge of losing more states than Russia (ba-ZING!) and slept at a rest area just outside of Redding.

I wish I could upload pictures. Happy 5, 5, 05' everybody.