On our way to Bishop, we drove by old Bircham Flat Road, where my great great grandfather (I may have the wrong number of greats) used to bring cattle for their summer grazing:
I've never driven it; I wish I had.
Katie wanted to take some shots after that.
She took one of her bear:
and then her bear took some of her. Here's my favorite:
We had a really easy, beautiful drive to Bishop, stopping at Walker Burger, a really cool little hamburger place with a nice garden, half way along for ice cream. There was one other couple there, from Bishop, and they know my grandma Dorcas and my aunt Jeanne.
We're staying with Aunt Jeanne, and I'll take some pictures of her place, and of the pretty mountains here. Wednesday, we headed over to my grandma's place:
She and Katie fed the partridges in her yard. Katie scattered two big cans of seed, and then we waited and saw the birds come. There must have been a hundred of them. Dorcas says that some hunters have discovered her birds and sent their dogs into the bushes to scare them out. She had to call the cops when they were shooting towards her house. Here are the birds, in the distance under the bushes. The bell to the left was the old farmhouse bell from the Birchim ranch. Dorcas's house is on a piece of that old family land, which had been willed to one of the Indians who worked for my family. He sold it into lots, and eventually, she bought one of them. Most of the land is still open, and cows graze on the part where the old farmhouse stood. Also there are crabapple trees out there, along Birchim Lane. I'll go out and take some pictures to include.
Here's her little pond:
Katie fed the ducks there:
And Uncle Kenny gave Katie some pointers about rhythm. He had her picking his guitar to a beat. Boy did his guitar sound beautiful. It's a Martin, and gave off the prettiest sound I my have ever heard from a guitar.
We took Grandma out to lunch, and Katie wanted to use a cane, so Grandma took one too:
Here they are, playing with the lemon from Grandma's iced tea (look how huge the glass is--I was wired after drinking my quart):
On the way back to Jeanne's we briefly drove on Hwy 6. Here's the sign showing how far it is back to Massachusetts. When we were on Cape Cod, we drove out to the very eastern end of 6, to take a picture of the sign showing how far it is to Bishop, but there wasn't one. Maybe too many people were leaving for California, so they had to remove it.
Thursday, October 6 (Mark's birthday, as well as his sister's and her son's)
Mark turns 41 today. I got him a book (the Physics of Superheroes), a movie (Ray), and a CD (Neil Young's latest). He is very hard to buy for, and I hope he likes his gifts. We are currently in an internet cafe in Bishop, catching up on emails and stuff. It is a particularly nice place. I took a couple pictures of Katie and my cousin Dana here, and I'll upload those next time.
After this, we're going to Keough's hot spring pool. It'll be nice to swim.
Keough's is an old pool, built in 1919 over a hot spring south of Bishop. The water flows through a two-foot deep, hot pool, then is sprayed into the air to cool it, and drops into the big pool. It's kinda expensive to get in, and needs some TLC; I guess they're having a hard time making ends meet. More people should swim! Here are some pics:
Here's the big, not-as-warm pool:
Here's the fountain, which cools the water down:
The spray is really fine and feels nice but gets into your eyes if you keep them open. Here's Mark in the shallow end:
And here's Katie, getting into the hot pool. It's really long, but it's less than three feet deep all the way across. It's the temperature of a hot tub, and it's covered; the other pool is open overhead so you can see the mountains behind it.
After swimming, we went back to Jeanne's house, and Jeanne and Dana cooked a big birthday dinner for Mark.
Mark asked for apple pie, so Dana made a delicious one for him:
After dinner, we chatted with Jeanne until the wee hours, and finally went to bed. Incidentally, Katie slept with Aunt Jeanne every night we stayed there, and when I went to check and see how she was doing one night as I headed to bed, Katie was talking to Jeanne and they were telling stories back and forth. I bet Jeanne will sleep really well after we're gone--I think we keep her up a little! But we'll miss them very much. Jeanne and Dana and the whole Bishop crew are so fun to visit. Here is Jeanne, making a silly face as we say goodbye to her (we drove over to the post office, where she works, to say goodbye on our way out of town):
We also drove back out to say bye to Kenny and Dorcas. Here is Birchim Lane, out in Little Round Valley, north of Bishop:
As Birchim Lane winds around, it passes by the old site of the Birchim farmhouse. The family were ranchers back then. Here are some of the old cottonwoods that still survive:
Now the land belongs to Los Angeles Dept of Water and Power (LADWP), which bought up lots of higher land in the early 20th century in order to steal the water from this region and divert it all to the growing town of Los Angeles. There is still enough to keep some of the cottonwoods alive, and to feed some horses and a few cows out here, but nothing like the lushness it once was.
We left Bishop, heading to Sonora for Mark's, Chad's, Leigh Ann's, and Courtney's birthday party.
But we found out that the party had been cancelled, due to Chad getting into a lot of trouble at school (two suspensions in the past three weeks). It's his first times really getting into trouble at school, but he'd been getting in trouble at home recently too, so Leigh Ann, who was at the end of her rope with him, said No party. We all hope it works.
But we still get to visit. First we stopped at Mark's dad's place in town in Sonora, and saw Sam and Johnnie. Here's Johnnie, showing Katie a puppet she found for her:
And here's Kayla, showing Katie who different relatives are in the photo book:
Then we stopped by Mark's mom's place, and visited with Pat and Gordon. He is undergoing treatment for prostate cancer, but he wanted a picture with Katie on his lap, so he had her sit there long enough for a quick snap:
Katie was scared of their little dog, Heide, for about a minute, but soon they were playing:
We also visited Mark's dad's aunt Eva, who is 94 and still living on her own and doing really well. And we visited Leigh Ann and her family. Chad is taller than me now, at 13. He's the same height as his sister Courtney, who is 16 at the end of October. She's doing really well in school and starting to thinking about college. She loves to read and has read more books than Mark and I combined, I think.
We'll see the Castles again soon, when we return to Sonora for Christmas this year. Now it is time to head back to Sacramento, for our big move. We drove to Folsom and stayed with our good friends Mark and Karen Olson. Here is their pretty patio:
And here's Uncle Mark playing with Katie:
October 10: Moving Out Day
Today is the day I've been looking forward to and also dreading a little: today we moved out of our 30-foot storage unit, into the 26-foot U-Haul we rented for the move to Portland. We knew it would be tight, and I worried that not everything would fit. Here is the truck, after a couple hours of stacking (we started at about 10am):
We couldn't just move everything straight into the truck, because first some of it will go up into our apartment, and then some of it will go to a storage unit in Portland, since our apartment is smaller than our old house was. So we stacked stuff outside the truck, while we first tried to pack stuff we didn't need in our apartment:
It was a long process, and sometimes boring for Katie. But we found lots of toys for her, that she could play with. Here's a wide shot of our progress a few hours in:
And here's Mark, closer to the end, stacking stuff precariously at the end of the truck:
Thankfully, my girlfriend Emily wanted our bulky patio set and toddler bed, and they drove over in their pickup to get them, so we didn't have to fit those in. The last few pieces I thought we were going to have to just dump in a dumpster, there didn't seem to be any room for them. But somehow Mark figured out how to get them in, and by 8pm we were done, and pooped. We left the truck in Rocklin, slept at Mark and Karen's, and prepared for our drive north.
Tuesday, October 11: Driving to Oregon
(Forgive me for putting all this stuff in the Bishop entry; the map was getting too full of lines and dots to try to put it anyplace else)
Today we went to the bank and got all our stuff out of our safety deposit box, and stopped by the post office to change our address properly to Portland.
Then we drove over to the U-Haul we'd packed yesterday, and Katie and Mark climbed in. It was about 10:30 when we gassed up and left for Oregon, them in the truck, me in the car. We had walkie-talkies I'd gotten for Mark years ago for hiking, so we could talk to each other. We stopped for lunch in Chico, and then drove up to visit Mark's uncle, Junior, who lives just south of Redding. He has about ten acres, with horses and dogs, and he chatted with us about working in Yosemite (he managed the pack horses there before he retired) and about our move. We visited with him for an hour or so, then headed on.
We made it to the Oregon border around 7pm. We stopped for dinner, then kept heading north, and finally stopped for the night in Roseburg, about 180 miles south of Portland. We had gone about 420 miles, and were pooped. We stayed at a little Travelodge for the night.
Wednesday, October 12: Moving into our apartment
The Travelodge served free continental breakfast, so we had muffins and fruit and headed out by 8am. Today would be a long day: we needed to drive to Portland, drop Katie off with our friend Judy for a few hours, move our furniture and stuff into our apartment, drive down to our storage unit, and move the rest of the stuff in there. Hopefully neither of us would get hurt lifting stuff, and hopefully it wouldn't rain. We were both thankful that there would be a loading area and freight elevator we could use to unload our stuff at the apartment.
We got to Portland by 11am, had an early lunch and called to find out that another renter was using the loading area for the morning, so we had to wait till 1pm to start. No problem. We dropped Katie off with Judy, who had moved her dental appointment just to help us out, and who was sure we could finish in a few hours (as was Mark). I hoped they were right! We headed to the apartment, Mark in the truck and me in the car, and got a little surprise.
It turns out that the loading area is terribly small and at the top of a steep hill. Also it blocks the gate to the apartment's parking lot, so anyone using it has to move anytime a car needs to come or go, if they're blocking traffic. We would block traffic for sure, if we could even get up the hill backwards (it looks like lots of trucks had bottomed-out, and ours had a very long part behind its back wheels). After a lot of consideration, and Mark going so far as to manouver the truck to try to start backing up (the street was full of parked cars he'd have to avoid in the process), we both concluded that it was a bad idea to put that big truck up there. So that meant that we'd have to park it on the street and carry everything up that hill to the building, to the freight elevator. Ugh! I kept thinking: how were we going to do this in a few hours? Oh god, where are packs of football players or unemployed Mexicans when you need them?
Well, we were so busy all day that I never had the chance to take a single picture, although I wish I had, to show Mark pushing the apartment's big dolly up that hill, with our furniture on top. Somehow, somehow we didn't get hurt, although we did drop a few heavy pieces, including my great-grandmother's china cabinet, which had some decorative spokes that had been broken years ago, probably in a similar situation. Also, it did rain on us a little, but not hard. One embarrassing part (for me) was having so much of our stuff out on the sidewalk in front of the building all day, where people were walking by piles of it all the time. It was stuff that would have to go into storage, so when we were done moving all the apartment-bound stuff out of the truck, we'd have to then move this stuff back into the truck and haul it to our local storage unit. The apartment is just too small to hold our whole house's contents.
So it took us more than three hours. We had dropped off Katie at 12:30. Judy very graciously entertained Katie for six hours, taking her to the library and watching Cinderella at least twice. Then we picked Katie up and kept going. I remember going for my last trip at midnight (by then, I had a sore throat). Now the truck had been repacked with stuff bound for the storage unit, and only our car still had belongings bound for the apartment. We locked up the truck and the car, and hoped the truck wouldn't get a ticket overnight (we were parked in a one-hour zone), and collapsed into sleeping bags for the night. Here are a couple of shots of the inside of our apartment:
No one got hurt, and we were so happy and so lucky to be done. Often I thought, why do we have so much stuff?
October 13
The entire next day was spent moving stuff again. We had a 10 x 10 storage unit just south of Portland, which we'd rented two weeks ago and which contained boxes of stuff from our RV (you can click on our Portland entry to read about that). But we realized it wouldn't be big enough to fit everything we had brought up. So we rented a 10 x 15, the biggest they had available today. Also, we rented another U-Haul truck, this time a small one to move this storage unit's stuff back to the apartment (we didn't want to deal with the 26-footer anymore). With that little truck packed up, we started moving stuff into our 10 x 15 storage unit. My back was so sore from yesterday that I wasn't sure if I had the flu, and I was really tired. Mark was too, but he was just amazing at persevering.
Finally the 10 x 15 was full (but with some room for later--some stuff we moved up to the apartment will be brought down here if there isn't room for it) and we headed back with the small U-haul to bring our RV-belongings (everything we'd lived with and in for a year) to the apartment. Jeez. It's tiring just to write about it all. Again we were exhausted and collapsed into our sleeping bags. I think I got Mark to agree that for all future moves we would hire people to help us.
Friday, October 14
I woke up the next morning to this wonderful sight: the sun about to rise behind Mt. Hood, seen from our living room window:
This is the kind of thing we picked this apartment for. It made all the work seem worthwhile.
Today we got our driver's licenses and the plates for our car, from the DMV. Katie insisted on wearing her horse costume (from two years ago) all day long. Here she is, holding a stuffed monkey, in downtown Portland:
The DMV here is really easy to use, compared to the ones we've experienced in California. Also we bought some new sheets and pillows, and stuff, so we don't have to sleep in our sleeping bags anymore. We've started opening boxes (I've got the kitchen mostly done), and soon we'll move our furniture around.
Saturday, Oct. 15
Today we moved all the boxes from our living room into our bedrooms, then moved around the furniture in the livingroom till we got it the way we like it. It looks really good and there's only a couple pieces we'll have to put into storage (like our huge coffee table). Mark hopes to start working in a couple days, so we got his desk put together and tomorrow he might get his computer up and working. Monday the cable guy comes... things are moving right along. I bought a little pull-grocery-cart at the grocery store and attempted to put it together at the store (without tools), so naturally, one of its wheels fell off on the walk home, but Mark fixed it and so now I can shop for more than just a few things at a time.
Now is a good time to tell our plan for the rest of this site:
I feel like our road trip is now over, but I wanted folks who we have left in California to get a feeling for how our move went and what this place looks like. So I've written that up here. I plan to show some pictures of this place in a few days, when we've gotten more boxes unpacked, and then maybe to show some pictures of Portland, especially our neighborhood and places we think are pretty. Then the website will be finished. But we'll leave it up for awhile (at least a month), and ultimately, we'll save it onto CDs. Anyone who might want a copy can have one.
Our email addresses and cell phone numbers will remain the same for awhile, and here is our mailing address:
Mark, Kim & Katie Castle
901 SW King Avenue, Apt. 1012
Portland, OR 97205