To: OnTheRoad

From: Richard Dean <richdean@clark.net>

Subject: san fran

hello from san fran...

its a bad idea to hope:

>Although it does in fact rain quite a bit here, there's been sun for most of the trip
>and I hope for nice weather on the next day or so down I-5 into SF

i had to abandon my plans to drive along the coast from washington state to san fran... mainly because it was raining beyond belief. From an hour south of the Canadian border to just above the California border, there was this wave of water coming down from the sky and also back at me from the trucks passing me. I guess they don't have really hard rain in Sweden, cause the saab's wipers just don't go fast enough....

I-5 is not the most interesting of drives although from what people here tell me Crater Lake is a pretty amazing site. The constant rain forced me to finally stop in Grants Pass, about 30 miles from California. In the morning, the clouds were burning off on one side of the range and still there on the other. It's pretty awesome to drive at the same level as the clouds. I think the mountains out here have more abrupt changes in altitude than the east -- it certainly seems that way.

Rounding a corner after the border, you come upon Mount Shasta. I literally said "wow!" when I saw it... towering above the valley, snow covered already and just he very top peeking thru the cloud cover. The redwood forests inspire that kind of reaction too, but having never seen Shasta before, the view made thursday's drive in the rain worthwhile. Around another corner are some nice craggley mountains that have a name similar to that... but they're marred by this hideous resevoir beneath them. Dozens of powerboats were on their last cruises of the season, and the lake was down really low so you could see an ugly ring around the outside shoreline. All throughout the west are the reminders of the thirsty people in L.A. and San Fran and the farmers who have turned desert into farmland. PBS did a really neat series on this topic this past summer....

Driving down into SF, I saw a billboard for the Budweiser plant and the brewery tour, so having missed out on much of the tackiness of the I-5 drive, I stopped for the last tour of the day. Its right off I-80 in Fairfield (i think that's the town...) and as soon as you exit, there's the smell of brewing beer -- if i had retained more of my boise brewing knowledge, I could tell you what the smell is (boiling malt?? wort?), but its unmistakable and yummy (even the bud smell...). Anyway, inside they give you free beer (before and after the tour), including a surprisingly good Porter for Michelob and a Heffeweisen (sp?) also from Michelob. I had never seen these ones out east, but the tour guy said they were available everywhere. Ironically, you can't actually buy beer from the plant (federal law...), but i got good bud stuff. Even as the second smallest Anheuser-Busch plant in the country, they can still crank out tens of thousands of bottles a day. The did negelct to say that they stole the name and the slogan from a much finer brewery in the Czech republic, Budvar, which makes the real Budweiser that you can buy in Europe.

I plan to be headed back east next weekend sometime, so more cards and letters then... hope everyone is well and happy. Thanks to everyone who let me invade their space on the way out :-)

rich