Home again, home again

Dru and I drove down to Fort Bragg Thursday to my cousin's place, and visited with a vast array of fist cousins, first cousins once removed, second cousins, and assorted partners not (yet) associated by marriage. I spent the entire time offline, save for about 30 minutes spent downloading a usb driver so we could all look at the latest baby pictures.

We got back last night, just shy of midnight, and now Dru's off to training for his new job, and I'm at Harborview, covering for Coworker T, who has a new daughter, and trying to read up skip=550 and deleting some 200+ spams from my inbox.

Whee!

Jiggety-jog

Mapquest is tricksy, my precious. It lies, it does.

Fort Bragg, California, is a tiny little town along the north coast of California. If it has a claim to fame, it has to do with either logging or Russians, but I think the latter is another fort entirely. It is also not an eleven hour drive from Seattle. Not unless you're driving my cousin's Porche Boxter. But he came the other way, so we'll never know.

No, if you're driving Turnbull, who is a marvelous car of great gas mileage, though with a certain propensity to making my ass numb, the drive takes more like 13 to 16 hours. Which, ow. Dru and I talked quite a bit, I knitted on the way down (I screwed something up just before we left, so I napped on the way back instead) and occasionally scanned the radio stations for signs of non-country songs. There were a couple of classic rock stations that drove off the boredom of I-5, but the vast stretches of straight road through the central valley remind me of Kansas in more than simply geography.

It was odd, too - going down, we took 101 out of Grants Pass to the coast, and then 1 down to Fort Bragg. One would think that the twisty-windyness of the road would offset the directness of the route, but on the way back we took 20 to 5, and then north, and that added some three hours to the journey. All in all, the drive down was the better. The drive through the redwoods in the slanting light of the setting sun, and then once the sun had set and the not-quite-full moon had risen, winding along the coast, with the moon illuminating the beaches and rocks in faded grey, and the surf glowing against the dark background of sea. Beautiful.