Long and dusty roads

Turns out Boise is a lot of fun!  It was also horribly hot.  We spent our first day there exploring- alleys covered in local artists' projects, live music in the main square after five, a basque quarter... where it turns out you can get two large sangrias for $4.  Anyone who's had the dubious honour of observing us in such a situation can fill in the blanks and anyone who hasn't doesn't need to start now.

Boise's got nice local ales- we had a few during our stay and also found local Huckleberry Wine.  C hardly got any of the wine though, because he was horribly ill by that point due to a severe case of foolishness.  More on that later.

One of the 'Boise' things to do is float down the river in a hired raft or big tube with a sealed base.  It's not too expensive and it was horribly hot, so we trotted down there happily on Thursday morning, having left behind everything we didn't want soaked, including C's shoes.  Turns out in order to hire one of the tubes you need photo ID and a credit card, not something we'd bothered to stuff into the little plastic bag of money in J's bra.

But you can BUY inner tubes there, in cash.  Only obviously it's twice as expensive.  But not if you have the frankly genius idea of just buying one tube and somehow fitting you both into it.

So this is how we came to be bobbing down the river for a couple of hours, sipping a homebrewed beer from a friend of our host, chilled in the river, scraping C's butt off rocks on several occasions, soaked to the skin and looking a bit shabby compared to the raft and paddles outfits everyone else had.  We only capsized once though and it was lots of fun :).

And having worked up an appetite we'd planned to get a burger later.  I had a nice bbq veggie burger.  Slowly.  It was good- J

But...

I wanted to visit the Midwest or generally non-coastal States for many reasons.  Primarily, people told me not to.  Also this;

which I'm pretty sure is not a direct quote.  Another reason was the snobby coasts always say nothing is happening out here, but as you can see they were wrong.  Another is to easily find the food we think of when we think of 'American';

This is at Big Jud's.  It's a 1lb burger, with 1lb of tater tots and a litre of soda (good ol' crime against nature and trading standards Mountain Dew in this case).  You have to eat it all within 30 minutes.  Why?  Because you can.  Then they put your photo on the wall as a cautionary tale to children.  There's a 2lb burger challenge, which if completed, gets you a bigger picture, a T-shirt, the burger for free and a place among the eating-disorded 'elite'.

Because let's be clear about this, these challenges are symptomatic of a seriously bizarre attitude to eating.  It's not fun.  You don't savour or even enjoy the food you're eating.  It's analogous (though not nearly as awesome) as the attitude of some of the broncho riders we met up in William's Lake at the Stampede, who weren't working with the horses as part of a team, the phrase they used was 'fighting a horse'.  This is fighting a burger.  There are issues with corporations telling us it's manly to eat certain food, but they aren't as relevant or upsetting as the general issue of a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose and idea of 'food'.  Food isn't about moral issues, with "tempting treats" and "good" or "bad" food, nor is food something to be conquered and 'defeated'.  Speed eating 3lbs of food is fighting not only the food but your own body and hormones when they say things like 'Stop...STOP!'  I would also make clear this isn't a problem of the central States, it's everywhere in the West, like the end of Easy Rider taking place in the South, (if you haven't seen it, do) it's a geographical coincidence I was here.

All this said: I am not often compared to Julius Caesar; he was a tactical genius who plucked out all his body hair with tweezers and precipitated the change of a decaying republic into a dictatorial empire.  I am none of these things (yet... I might get some body hair soon).  BUT...I veni-d, I vidi-d and I totally vici-d that burger.  Yes, I am being hypocritical right now, but I paid for it in feeling very ill. -C

We spent a nice evening with some of the Boise Couchsurfing crowd and set off early Friday morning for California.  Well, Winnemucca was the goal of the day (and if you've heard of Winnemucca, you either live there or have heard the Johnny Cash song 'I've been everywhere', there is no other good reason to have).  We got picked up by a really friendly rancher near the Idaho-Oregon border who took us quite a distance, explaining the history and locals of the area (the least densely populated county in the lower 48, apparently).  He showed us his farm, complete with Sweetcheeks the free-range yard pig (natch),

He kills rattlesnakes... 

   and a hike up a hill that gave us a beautiful view of the surrounding desert.

And then we hit the road again.  And that desert went on and on and on.  Hours of driving with nothing but sage brush.  Highly flammable sage brush- we passed half a million acres of blackened ground from a recent wildfire.  Nothing but scorched ground, ash and dust devils as far as you could see.  Tom Petty kept us good company until our next lift's cd player broke, and by then we were in Nevada and casinos had leapt out of the ground all around us.

Our lift was headed to California himself, stopping in Reno for the night- so we got a lot further than we'd thought.  Then we got to Reno and discovered that camping is prohibited ANYWHERE within city limits (with a tent.  Not an RV, of course), including in campsites (we also discovered that if we did shoot a man in Reno, we'd have been doing him a favour - C).  We'd have been a bit stuck but our lift thought this was as ridiculous as us and we just drove into the mountains (Donner Pass, with all its great camping heritage, famous for pioneer cannibalism, obviously a great choice)  for a while and camped in a quiet spot.

In the morning he brought us to Sacramento, over the pass.

There's not a huge amount here (and that's according to people we met from here), like a lot of official State Capitals.  But we had an explore of the Old West preserved bit of town, known as Old Sac (heh), and spent a day in parks reading and talking to a lot of street people.  It's scary to see how little of a safety net there is for people here.  Not that anywhere is great, certainly not what we're used to.  But talking to people about the laws and support here it really feels like it would be pretty easy to get stuck in a horrible situation.  For instance, if you've ever had a drugs conviction (ever.  That's everything from really vulnerable recovering addicts to people caught with weed when they were young) you don't get any form of social security.  Being in mind you do if you're just out of jail for murder, this seems a bit tough and also unconstructive.  We met a lot of people while we were sitting outside the library which was closed due to staff furloughs- this is where they give them compulsory unpaid leave because it's a form of cutbacks the unions apparently can't fight.  Somehow they still had the money to send 90 cars of riot cops against about half a dozen Occupiers last month.

In our lift's car we'd seen a very cheap coupon for a motel here, and yesterday when we learnt we couldn't meet up with nearby friends until Tuesday we decided to look it up online, and for about $20 each we are spending a couple of nights with a real bed and air conditioning and stuff.  The guy who owns the place is very nice.  He's loaned us his laptop and took a reduced deposit based on the money we had at the time.  It's nice to have some time to just relax but without being in someone else's house or hot sun.

To anyone who made it to the end of this one, well done!  Sorry, there's no prize.  But at least you don't feel sick from eating a pound of meat and far too many tater tots.

Portland

We spent the first few days in Portland with another very friendly and hospitable couch surfer, in the South East part of town.  There was enough entertainment for the first couple of days just wandering round parks and streets of weird shops and independent cafes.  Portland's got much more of a personality of it's own than Seattle, a feeling of being in a particular place.  Yes, it's very cool, and borderline smug in places.  But at least it's got something to be smug about, with an interesting history, some genuinely alternative places (such as the very cool library run from the office of Bitch Media, a magazine/collective that anyone with a passing interest in feminism should look up- and probably show to people who think they don't need to have an interest :p), and some really tasty beer.  More microbreweries per head than any other US city.

On Friday we spent a long time abusing the free internet and munching tasty food at the city's oldest worker-owned co-operative cafe, and then went to see this film at a very cool feminist community centre.  It's a very distressing film, even more so than The Invisible War, even for people with no personal experiences to be triggered- but it's distressing because it's very real, and is well worth watching if you can find it.

Our couch surf wasn't home after Friday, and we had no luck finding another one, so merrily set off wandering the streets of Portland with our rucksacks like little snails.  We were intending to find somewhere to camp as we've done before, but when wandering past city hall we discovered rows of tents and sleeping bags, some hand-drawn signs, the sound of an acoustic guitar, a handful of well-meaning but quite bonkers folk, and several who appeared sane but weren't wearing shoes.  Oh yes, we'd stumbled into an Occupy.

We shouldn't really mock, as we camped there the next four nights, after they enticed us with free food.  Not that most food in Portland isn't free, really (warning for those more easily ashamed relatives, you may not want to read the next bit :D).  'Food Carts' are a really big thing there: basically no one can afford shops, so there's a tradition of buying the little wheely burger van type things, and then setting them up in clusters all over the city.  And the food is pretty good, reasonably priced, varied, and from all over the world- Ethiopia to Argentina to Scotland to 'Big Ass Sandwiches' and everything in between.  We ate all these, plus falafel, curry, chinese... the list goes on.  And we got all of it from the bins in squares where  people sit to eat, and then routinely discard about half of their meal (once there was even vino tinto! - C).  This stuff is minutes not hours old and still has lots of the good bits left.  We ate far more than we could have afforded, and got to try a bit of everything.

Over the weekend we explored the market, and roamed around town a bit more (including the world's smallest official city park:

and the world's second largest beaten bronze statue (first is the Statue of Liberty), Portlandia:

Don't trust the 'reaching out to help you' hand, the other one has a 20 foot long trident in it.

)- but mostly spent our time at Powell's, the worlds largest independent used bookstore.  They have to give away maps at the door.  You can get lost in there really easily, but it'd be fine, you'd just live in the shelves and read as many as you could of the over 1,000,000 books they have in stock.  Sadly, with the rucksacks we weren't small enough to try and conceal ourselves and set up home there or you'd probably never have heard from us again.  They also run some really good authors and speakers events, and we stayed to see a talk on Monday night before hitching off on Tuesday morning.

Hitting the road again always makes you smile.  The longer the road the better, destination unimportant, spirits high, out of tune Frank Turner carolled loudly at seven thirty AM.  Can't help it.  And hitching is great, if you just take the side of the road time for what it is.  There's few moments quite as romantic and compelling as a car pulling into your dusty layby, with who-knows-who going who-knows-where inside.

Yeah, yeah, I know, hippy ramblings.  Sorry folks- J

Four rides brought us out to Boise, Idaho.  State of C's dreams. *Interjection* I am not often compared to Martin Luther King.  He was a black preacher from the South and an inspiring voice of a generation.  I am none of these things.  But I too have a dream. And unlike Dr King's, mine has come true for we are in Idaho! (Not that his shouldn't let me be clear, but it hasn't). - C

Our host here is a librarian and we had a great geeky chat about books once we arrived.  The drive here was amazing.  Suddenly the air is not only hot but dry, and the scenery changed to desert and then farmlands, hardly recognisable as the same country as West Oregon.

Full circles

Our Seattle explorations began with a bookshop, unsurprisingly.  Pike Place market is a big thing to go and see in the centre of town and there's lots of locally owned stalls and small shops, and one of these was a lovely used book store where we found weird novels and justified buying them because we've finished and passed on the same amount since we started our travels.

Sometimes you really remember a book by where you were when you read it.  Listening to Gormenghast audios on windswept Northumbrian moors may have scarred J for life.  But you never really realise until a bit later.  Wonder what reading Grapes of Wrath by roadsides in Alaska and Canada or Thucydides on Wreck Beach is going to have left us with associations of...

Near the market there is also the original Starbucks store.  And, no kidding, there's a queue around the block.  And it appears to be just to BUY COFFEE, not kick the CEO in the face, which we could understand.

That evening we went to see a very interesting film at a social centre near where we were staying.  It was about resistance amongst the Mohawk First Nation in Canada and is well worth watching if you're interested.  Especially to see how in Quebec, an area so politically fixated on sovereignity, how hard they kicked down on the First Nations originally from that area.

The next day we went out to an area called Ballard for a seafood festival.  Free samples and crabmeat ensued and by about 3pm J had managed to make herself a bit sick.  It was worth it for the gumbo and free fudge.  So, complaining loudly in J's case, we set off on a walk through Fremont.

In the 90s this was a very hip, arty, edgy, 'now' kind of place and kept calling itself the centre of the universe, or the people's republic of Fremont.  Sounds horrible, I hear you cry, but they very successfully made it worse!  Now it's commercial and feeding off when it USED to be hip, arty, edgy, and 'now'.  Wow.  Makes Camden look genuine.  There are various public art projects, including a genuine cold war missile made to look like a rocket.  It's ironic, apparently.  It's ok to be ironic about nuclear missiles now, without anything actually imaginative or thought-provoking being involved.

An artist from the neighbourhood rescued a statue of Lenin after the fall of the Soviet Union.  (Fox news was very upset).  They also have a troll under a bridge.  Guess which is Vlad.

My Dad actually did warn me about his type- J

 Food Not Bombs were giving away free food that evening so we decided we maybe weren't quite too full for Free and headed down.  There seems to be a lot of homeless people in Seattle, even more so than Vancouver, and the city council seem to be cutting back on shelters and leaving a lot of support work up to people like Food Not Bombs or NGOs.  A lot of people at the meal seemed to be homeless but not all and there was a good mix and people talking to each other.

Monday we had a lie in and cooked a meal, and then found the Seattle International Film Festival's Cinema, as a director we know and like has a new film, The Invisible War.  It's about sexual abuse and rape in the US Armed Forces.  Depressing watching but really, really good.

After one more night in Seattle where we had a few drinks and chatted with our host and his other guests, we headed off the next day to the start of Highway 101.  Seattle is only 3 hours from Portland on the Interstate, but Interstates are boring right?  Plus 101 required us to visit Aberdeen.  The title of this post was partly referring to that, and partly to coming back to where we flew to Alaska from.  All new territory south of here :).  Aberdeen, it turns out, is grey, cold, smells like fish and is full of unemployment and empty buildings.  So pretty much true to its heritage, except having a much greater claim to fame because Nirvana are from there.

In the end it took us fifteen hours (with lunch breaks) to wend our way down through the mists, across the imposing bridge that spans the Columbia river estuary and down to Portland.  The drive was very pretty though- we'll look forward to rejoining 101 later.  We managed to get to our host's place in Portland and today have been finding fun places to explore over the next few days.

Vancouver

Our hitch from Osoyoos went easily- perhaps a bit too easily given our luck over the next couple of days.  We got a lift along the gorgeous desert valley road to Keremeos at about 8 at night, and our lift showed us where we could stay in a picker's camp (which continues year after year despite the town's complaints).  The next day we got to Vancouver by about lunchtime and attempted to reach a couch surf or one of the contact numbers we had.  No luck was to be had, so we took a (slow, with all the bags) walk through the West End of Vancouver, sitting in a pretty park full of yuppies eating sushi and then walking along to beach wall to Stanley Park, which is 1000 acres of lovely forest.  We pitched our tent in the trees and spent a peaceful night squirreled away.  On sunday we still had all our things and between diving into the library or internet cafes to try and work out where we could stay we found a lovely vegetarian chinese restaurant.

Another park very kindly provided us with a bush to camp in, and on monday we explored the poor/moving into edgy area around Commercial Drive.  Lots of nice food nearer the north end and a cool bookshop.  Even cooler was the second place we stopped, Spartacus Books, full of interesting stuff, including lots of cheap deals, unusual for North America, and even having some computers we could use- which found us our Couch Surfing guardian angel!

So the next few days we stayed at a VERY nice house down in Richmond, where our mucky little paws felt very out of place.  Our host was so friendly though that it worked out fine, and we had a chilled day watching films and eating beans in maple syrup.  Which is apparently normal in Canada!

Tuesday evening we found a comedy club and ate 'Japadogs', hot dogs with Japanese style toppings.  The comedy had its good moments, and it was nice to have a mix of professional and amateur acts, but we didn't see anything amazing.  There was only one woman on stage all night, and some of the male acts seemed to think that talking about porn was just inherently funny.  It isn't.  Doesn't mean it can't be, but you have to actually be funny too, not just mildly sexist and then snigger.

Wednesday we explored Wreck Beach- clothing optional and relaxed attitude to people wandering round vending pot compulsory.  It's a fun place with a nice, chilled atmosphere, lots of a families and stuff.  But it's still pretty much just a beach, and unless you enjoy lying in the sun or paddling (why does no one ever SWIM properly near beaches?  Even I didn't, and I've swum in every lake since Penticton.  It's weird- J) anyway, lying in the sun and paddling on a beach full of naked hippies isn't actually much more interesting.


Our last day in Vancouver was a bit taken up with financial faff (all sorted thanks to the wonderful keeps walking) but we did get a nice walk around Stanley Park- in daylight this time!  Most of the trees there are more recently replanted after it was all logged in the 1800s, but some of them are old and huge.



Also, C had a bit of a run in with some squirrels.  They're pretty cute, and obviously get fed by tourists a lot so come pretty close (they're rats with good PR.  If any other rodent gets that close to you, people don't say 'Aww', but when it's got a brush strapped to it and does cute little human things with it's hands, it's apparently fine.  I can do cute little human things with my hands, but if I invade your personal space and attempted to steal your food/map/dignity right in front of you, I'd be arrested or assaulted.  In short, I don't like squirrels. - C)

In the evening, with everything sorted for leaving tomorrow, we met up with a very lovely friend of a friend who got us quite drunk.  Alcohol of all sorts is expensive in Canada and so a six pack of cheapest beer cost about eight pounds.  But you do get returns on empties (to encourage recycling) and through this we met a nice lady in the park who was collecting empties in part to help pay for vet bills for her dog that she'd had for 15 years and had recently passed away.  We ended up chatting until 2am.  It was really nice (as meeting lots of locals has been through hitching and couch surfing) and we had only been talking earlier that evening about a lot of people never talking to strangers, especially in larger cities.

Then we got a Greyhound to Seattle (enjoying a remarkably easy and rapid border crossing, though C did get asked when he was last arrested, apropos of nothing other than handing over his (Irish) passport).  Our Couch Surfing host took us to a couple of his favourite places in the local area last night and we are now off to explore some more for ourselves.

Broncos & Berries

This won't be a long one- library internet time again, and also a very patronising baptist is going to condescend to give us sausages soon.  More on that later.

So, we stopped by Prince George again and spent a lovely evening chilling with our host and friends, and then the next day hitched down the road to Williams Lake.  We were there on the weekend of the William's Lake Stampede, the biggest rodeo in BC which had been recommended to us by our trucker friend, and which J couldn't resist exploring.  The campsite there was cheap as well, so we set up camp there and were about to start looking around when we were greeted randomly by some very friendly and half-cut Wild Horse Racers (they attempt to saddle and then race wild horses.  No really.  No one's sure why.).  They plied us with booze and loads of interesting rodeo chat til the small hours, and the next day we saw them get hauled around the ring and bucked off to much cheering.

The next day was Sunday, and we bought our tickets which were pretty cheap for the whole afternoon.  J won't bore everyone here with thoughts on the horsey side of things- some of you have had that already and anyone interested will one day!  It will never be something either of us are really into, but it certainly was a spectacle.  Despite the show including bull riding (another sport there appears to be NO REASON FOR) no one actually got seriously hurt as far as we know (though one bull made a good effort to gore everything he came into contact with).  Except one person who broke their neck dancing on a table on the Saturday night.  How embarrasing.

After the show was over, we hitched south towards the Okanagan valley- the warmest part of Canada, full of orchards and vineyards and containing Canada's only desert, because we had be told it was pretty easy to get fruit picking work.

We didn't have much luck with this the first day.  We tried asking around a couple of towns, heading further south as we did so.  The scenery down here is AMAZING- well worth a visit anyway, and a lot of the towns are next to huge freshwater lakes, complete with beaches.  Lots of lovely swimming and paddling.

The area has had a very wet summer, which has delayed the cherry picking season by a couple of weeks.  We kept moving south, through Penticton and Oliver to Osoyoos, right on the U.S. border.  It is more importantly also in the shadow of Anarchist Mountain.

Anarchist Mountain! Who says anarchist achieve nothing?  It's even got a population of Red-winged Blackbirds living in the area.

While in town, we came across a poster offering free food and a shower for this week for seasonal workers.  Free food, thinks we, hmm, they're not gonna CHECK we're fruit pickers.  So we went along to the local Baptist Church, to find a festival atmosphere and about four hundred people chilling in the sun and waiting for food to be served by very smiley (some borderline creepy smiley, but most very nice) volunteers.  Here we got chatting to someone who introduced us to the farmer where he was working.  We've been camping in his orchard

and picking cherries for two days, and will do one more day before we head to Vancouver on Saturday.  The money isn't much (about 25 cents a pound (silly imperial weight)) but the farmers get only 60c, so it makes me wonder why cherries cost $4 a lb in the supermarket.  It's almost like the large supermarkets are fleecing everyone, including their customers and telling those customers bold-faced lies about what a deal they are getting in the process.  Also, we've heard from lots of people about how much cheaper the States is (some people go there for their groceries). Canada seems to have controlled growing supplies and distribution by government regulators.  Which would be dandy, but there is little to no controls on American imports (thanks to NAFTA).  So it seems it isn't just south of the U.S. border small farmers and industries are being driven to the wall by cheap subsidised imports from the U.S., while remain unable to gain access to the American market.   

So, off for now for another Baptist dinner.  It really is only the head pastor who is a smug git.  He even gave everyone Tim Horton's gift cards, not for them, he kept saying, but to give to townspeople to thank them for us being here. As though any "difficulties" in the relationship between the town and pickers (whom he keeps generalising as being all from Quebec and making hackle-raising remarks about) were the sole fault of those who have come to do the seasonal work.  However, most people are nice...