Who's The Turkey?

The first time I ever cooked a real meal for myself (not, say, eating a bowl of cereal or making a sandwich) was when I lived in New York in my early 20s and therefore in my very first apartment. Despite how small that apartment was, things were brilliantly laid out and so effectively it wasn’t small at all.  It still remains one of my favorite places I ever lived.

The man who was leasing the apartment (I had it as a sublease from him) had his own small advertising company and he wanted to expand to the Philadelphia market, so he temporarily moved there but maintained the lease on the New York apartment because it was rent controlled and therefore the rent would not go up until the lease was broken.  He was planning on coming back to the apartment to live once he was all set up in Philadelphia.  So I was able to get it for a “steal”, since I only had to pay him $10.00 more a month than he was paying for it.  I was quite happy with our arrangement.

He was a gourmet cook and had the kitchen fully stocked with every kind of kitchen item you would ever want, plus several very good cookbooks.  Since I am drawn to every book I see, I looked through his cookbooks with numerous delicious-looking recipes and very clear cooking instructions.  Since Thanksgiving was coming just around the corner, I decided as my very first major cooked meal to cook a complete Thanksgiving dinner for myself.  I was still new to New York, so the only person I knew at all was Jeannie Theresi (now a woman with TWO PhDs), who had been one of a gang of ten friends and partiers at Berkeley of which I was one of them.  At the time I was in New York, she was at the time was getting her masters degree at Columbia. She was going to be somewhere else on Thanksgiving, therefore, my personally made Thanksgiving feast would be for only me.

On Thanksgiving day, I walked the three and half blocks to Central Park West to watch in person the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade with all the big blown-up balloon floats, etc., very exciting and spectacular.  Previously, I had seen that only on TV and now I was there watching it for real!  I really learned watching the parade outside that wintery morning just how cold cold be!  I had always naively thought that cold wouldn’t so bad, you just had to bundle up, but no, this Californian learned that morning that one cannot really bundle up their feet!  My feet went from feeling they would shatter like ice to being numb, so walking back home was a real chore (how did the parade marchers manage to do it?).  Thank goodness my apartment had a working radiator, I was finally able to thaw out.  And then got to work on making my personal Thanksgiving dinner, with the turkey and all the various favorite dishes and wine and pie and ice-cream, the whole thing.  I had been impressed that Pathmark, my nearby grocery store, was selling small turkeys, somewhat larger than chickens.  I had only been aware of huge turkeys, such as we always had on Thanksgiving at home, and at other people’s houses if we had Thanksgiving somewhere else that year.  Having a small one was exactly what I wanted!

That dinner was a delicious success, with all the various dishes being ready at the same time, and from then on, I continued to cook for myself the whole time I lived in New York.  The grocery store, Pathmark, was only a block away, so it was easy enough to walk there almost every day.

Ever since then, I have more or less copied that tradition…not every year, and not every place I lived, but I always liked it when I did it and this year, I decided I would do it again after having not done it here in this apartment, thanks to every year going up to my sister's house at Clear Lake for family gatherings after our parents had both died (otherwise, our mother had the lock on Thanksgiving and Christmas unless we lived very far away, and even then we showed up when we could).  My sister doesn’t have that family gathering anymore (she had done it so well so many times that she deserves the vacations from it), so this year I figured I would cook my Thanksgiving dinner again.  I decided the menu and made a shopping list of all the required ingredients I needed to buy.  This menu was: a small turkey with mushroom and wild rice dressing, turkey giblet gravy, buttered lima beans, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, champagne, pumpkin pie, and vanilla ice cream.  Pretty basic, but very good.  I worried about getting a small turkey, I had never noticed that they had those at VONS, my current grocery store here in California.

Previously shopping at VONS, I happened to notice that they had a meat freezer that had in it some tiny turkeys (smaller than I would have wanted for Thanksgiving)…but looking at them closely, I saw that they were just frozen turkey breasts.  Well, that might be nice for normal dinners…I wasn’t thinking Thanksgiving at this point.

There is a checker at VONS I don’t like.  He is a young man, very full of himself and actually rather nasty, and while for a while I attempted to tolerate him since he always seems to have a less-full line (maybe other shoppers don’t like him either).  So that day I bought the frozen turkey breast.  I happened to choose his line and he began ringing up my purchases.  When he got to the turkey breast, he spun it around for a while on the counter and then looked at me and asked, "What is its price?"  I said, “ Hum?”  He said, “It doesn’t have a price on it, how much does it cost?”  I said, “I don’t know, don’t you know?”  He said, kind of sharply, “It isn’t marked.”  Well, I’m thinking that is his problem.  He looked at me like I was a buffoon because I didn’t know the price of the turkey breast.  But I don’t know price of ANYTHING,  I’m not like those women cutting the coupons from the thousand pages of newspaper that are stuffed in our mailboxes, surely the cost of this frozen chicken breast isn’t anything I would be balking at, “Oh that is too expensive".  So we had a kind of eye to eye standoff during which I realized that he wasn’t going to find somebody to go check the price.  Finally he said, “Is $10.50 okay?  If you find out it is different, bring your receipt and I will give you a refund.”  Totally inappropriate, because the only way that would really work would mean me putting all my groceries in the trunk of the car and then going back into the store to look at the frozen turkeys in that freezer.  And I realized that each one would be different anyway as they are priced by their weight (which I think VONS SHOULD have programmed into their system; after all, they weigh all the produce, don’t they?).  So I just agreed to that having no idea how valid that  pride was, just so I could get out of there.  But I didn't like the feeling of being cheated, maybe.  I just didn't know.

And the frozen turkey breast, which I cooked in my crockpot after one day of attempting to defrost it in the refrigerator, wasn’t all that satisfactory.  It was so dry I could hardly swallow it, and with it being only a turkey breast, it’s “dryness quotient” was at the max.  I vowed to never get one of those again.

I ended up having some friends inviting me to join them in going out for Thanksgiving dinner this Thanksgiving, which we did last year and I really enjoyed it.  So naturally I accepted that offer.

However, I still was mentally interested in that home-made Thanksgiving dinner for myself.  And if you wonder why I don’t ask my friends over for my feast, I certainly would, but the apartment is (still) not fit for social events, too much stuff all over the place that have no place to go (start by thinking of over a thousand books that are in boxes everywhere, and in my home library, which is one of the bedrooms, I installed eleven large bookshelves that have books overflowing from them, as well), so no people are invited to come into my apartment, there’s hardly even a place to sit.

Thanksgiving was definitely going to be celebrated out with my friends, but I am still going to cook for myself my full-on planned Thanksgiving dinner for myself, maybe a few days later.

I had to go to VANS today to buy some food anyway, and I saw that the store was packed and jammed with Thanksgiving dinner shoppers, so I got hooked into getting all the Thanksgiving stuff today.  I saw to my delight two whole shelf units devoted to all things Thanksgiving cooking—stuffing, cranberry sauce, gravy, various vegetables, pumpkin pie mix etc., most of it for the “easy” cooking and canned goods variety.  Mostly I cook things more from scratch, but I didn’t find cranberries, so I got canned cranberry sauce, and I settled on buying pumpkin in a can and a pre-made pie crust this time…but I will be making my own ice cream.  Everything else, the peas, mashed potatoes, wild rice and mushroom stuffing, and giblet gravy will be easily made.  I also bought some splits of champagne.

I was worried that VONS wouldn’t have a small turkey and for sure I wasn’t going to succumb to the too dry turkey breast.  Fortunately in the meat section they had a long row of immense turkeys, but I managed to find a smallish (10 pound) one in there, hooray, so I added that to my shopping cart.  Now I was totally happy, I had all that I needed.

I got in one of the long lines, almost every shopping cart was filled with Thanksgiving shopping.  The checker this time is a man I don’t quite know what to make of.  Spanish is his native language and with English he is minimally functional.  He’s kind of too loud when he talks, which maybe is an attempt to be more understood since his English is so bad, I don’t know.  You certainly can’t joke with him, I already learned that from previous experiences; he hasn’t the slightest idea what you are talking about so it can’t be funny.

The checker began efficiently checking each item and then stopping for a while to bag some of the groceries.  It was so busy, and yet there were no baggers helping any of the checkers.

And then, uh oh, he got to the turkey, which was the last item, and he said, “How much is the price?”  Not that again!  I said, “What, there is no price on there, there should be a price.”  But there wasn’t, so again, I was being demanded to tell him how much this turkey cost.  I said, “How do I know?  There are turkeys over there that go from this size up to gargantuan, every price is different, don’t you charge by the weight?  What does your scale say?”

He answer with something like, “The scale no havva price”, and I kind of shrugged my shoulders, and when he asked for yet another time how much the turkey cost, I had to say to him that that was VONS’ job, not mine, I hadn’t the slightest idea what this turkey cost or what any turkey cost and I had no frame of reference of what they should cost.  All of this was happening as all these other very crowded shopping baskets were piling up behind me.  I kept wondering why he didn’t quickly ask for somebody to run over to the freezer and figure out the price.  They always do that for some can of peas or whatever that for some reason has a missing price, why won’t they go do this for this turkey?

The guy says, “Let’s just make it ten and a half dollars, is that okay?”  That price again?  Is that the “price default” when a checker is too lazy to call for someone to go for a price check?  By then no number meant a thing to me.  As I said before, each turkey has a different price, and there they went from my turkey’s size all the way up to about four times that, I am not a horse trader or a bargainer (going to Tijuana to hassle over a leather case or a guitar is not my idea of fun).

Finally he realized that nobody was going to move until he got somebody to go run a price check, so finally he did that and this woman seemed to take forever to obtain that information.  So meanwhile, the checker looks at the crowded line of people and he apologizes to them all (very loudly), but it felt like the apology he was making was meant to be he was apologizing to them because of me holding all of them up.  

And if that wasn’t bad enough, he scanned the line of people and he saw a woman holding up a few things from the deli, (why don’t these people ever use the express line?), like two burritos and a drink or something, so he said to her, “You are on your lunch time, right,” and she said, “Yes, I am,” and glanced at me again to make his point, and then looked back at her and said “You shouldn’t have to be late back to work, just go through.”  Oh, now I see, I am responsible even for this woman being late going back from lunch.   She didn’t quite understand what he was indicating, but he motioned for her to come on through the line and go, to heck with even charging her, just take her food and go for free.

Finally the checking woman comes back with the turkey, hands it to the chccker and he looked at the price sticker she had put on it.  I said to him, “How much is it, anyway,” but he wouldn’t answer.  So I bent down to look at the price sticker, and he actually ripped it off and threw it away in the wastebasket.  I asked him again how much it cost, and he continued to ignore me.  I didn’t know what the actual cost was until I got home and looked at the receipt:  $19.98, basically $20.00.  So he had been giving me a deal (maybe) if I had taken his suggested price that was about half what it was supposed to be, like he was being generous, like he was being generous to the women he let just take the food out without paying for it, but I don’t think that I should have taken his offer of cheating VONS, especially since I really had no frame of reference as to what the price should be (assuming that even the $19.98 is even valid).  I think this man turned against me because I didn’t trust him, that I saw him as a guy possibly overcharging  me instead of cutting the rate in half.  Well, looking at it another way, he is a dishonest man…it doesn’t make him any less dishonest if the cheating was in my favor.  All he really had to do was get somebody to check the price at the very beginning, instead of attempt to get some number out of me.  Now the way it stands, I have added him to that other guy whose line I won’t go into anymore.  Too many more checkers like that whose line I have to avoid, I won’t be going into VONS any more.

Rats Under The Hood, or Bats In The Belfry?

One of the least trusted occupations is used car salesman, but an important variation on that is automobile mechanics.  The big question always is not only is your mechanic knowledgeable so that the work is done right, and charging you a fair price, but is he or she honest to the extent that you actually need the work you are told you need.  Unfortunately, most car owners are not very knowledgeable about their car and I certainly fit into that category.  It would be great if we could take an automobile repair course and have a garage with a rack in it and a good place to ecologically get rid of old oil and grease.  If we had the time and interest we could do our own car repairs.  But that is not practical or of interest for the vast majority of people, therefore we are mostly at the mercy of an automobile mechanic.

I really love my car, a 2012 Infiniti M37, which I bought used.  It had previously been owned by a person who leased it and followed all the maintenance schedules perfectly.  To me, it was essentially a brand new car with little mileage and selling at a good price--it was everything I wanted.
I, too, have religiously followed the maintenance schedule, alternating between having the car serviced at Infiniti of Valencia where I bought the car, and Infiniti of Van Nuys which is only a twenty-minute drive from where I live instead of Valencia, which s an hour's drive away.  I liked both dealerships fine and was "sharing the wealth", choosing to get routine services from either one of them, until one morning after I had driven all the way up there and had a confirmed appointment for servicing, Infinite of Valencia turned me away, saying that they had too many cars to service at that time, I would need to come back another day.  At this point, that hour-long drive to that dealership suddenly was an issue with me and decided to settle on going only to the near-by Infiniti of Van Nuys.

In mid-October, I was going on a road trip through Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, and Nevada.  My next car service was due a couple of weeks prior to this trip, so the timing was perfect for having the car serviced and checked out prior to this trip.  Everything was in great shape and the car was good to go for this great trip.

It was a really good trip and my car was a dream, performing perfectly in every way.  Autumn was a great season for a trip like this.  Previously when I was employed at Curtis School, trips were limited to the times I had off, which were two weeks of spring break, my three week summer vacation, and two weeks of Christmas break.

I got back at home on October 20th and got back into my normal routine.

November 1, I went to Whole Foods of Tarzana, parked in a section of their underground parking lot where you park facing the exit route instead of parking toward a wall.  So as I walked by my parked car to head to the store, I happened to see that due to the "light your way" delay that my headlights hadn't quite turned off yet and I could see that I had a front headlight out.  I wonder how long that that been like that, perhaps throughout my entire trip?  At any rate, I thought that was odd...I don't think I have ever had a headlight go out on a car; that's not a normal event.  And good thing, too, because replacement headlamps for that car cost about $200.00 (I later learned).

I made an appointment to have that headlamp replaced at Infiniti of Van Nuys at 7:00 AM on Monday, November 4.  I was the first customer there and when my service writer arrived, he took me into his office and we discussed the service that I needed...essentially what should have been a quick, in and out replacement of the bulb.  The serviced writer wrote up the order, adding on a free Express Service Multi-Point Inspection, something that always sounds good, but that I should have learned by now is actually an ominous thing and usually license for what amounts to armed robbery.   But it sounded good...after all, who doesn't want their car checked out to make sure that it continues to run in tiptop shape?  After all, as I said, I love that car and I want it to remain in great shape.

I was directed to sit down in the waiting room and help myself to the coffee machine with its various types of coffee choices, and the various sweet snacks.

After a while, the service writer came over to me and said that he wanted to take me into the workshop to show me something on my car.  Now that, of course, is even more ominous than the "free Express Service Multi-Point Inspection", and even worse, he said that the mechanic had said to him, "What you will see will blow your mind."

I really hadn't come in there that day to have my mind blown.

The mechanic had the hood up, of course, and everything seemingly laid bare.  Since these modern day luxury cars are basically all buttoned up and the engine compartment beautifully covered, usually all you see under the hood are the places to measure the amount of oil and check the level of the coolant.  I had never actually seen before whatever was deep inside there.

The mechanic directed my attention to an "animal dropping" down low in the engine compartment.  It was smooth and greenish and a bit smaller than what a dog might leave on your lawn.  I didn't really know what to make of that, but the mechanic said, "I think this was a raccoon that can gotten in here.  Or some other largish animal."  I thought, well that is cute, poor thing; it had made me think of a friend long ago telling me about how a cat had gotten injured under his car's hood--it had climbed in there to get out of the cold and when he started that car that morning, the cat's tail got pulled into the fan belt.  I was thinking that it was a good thing that when I started my car that no animal parts got pulled into the fan belt.

The mechanic then showed me what he thought were footprints, showing me that the animal had walked all over the place in there, and dirty dried discoloration on various pipes and tubes, and said, "Those are the evidence of several leaks.  It looks like that raccoon must have bit into various hoses, seeking out the water, or the antifreeze, which has a sweet taste and is deadly poison.  Your raccoon would not have lived very long.  Your radiator, too, has leaks, and will have to be replaced."  The whole radiator? I thought....that raccoon must have been voracious.  The mechanic said, "I will have to look all over to see what all damage it made, but I can tell you this, he sure did chew up this engine compartment."

What a shock all that was--I had never even heard of such a thing as this.  I figured that this must have happened when I was on my trip.  What picture came up in my mind was my car sitting there like a showplace right next to the entrance to the Mountain Lodge, the elegant hotel I was stayed in in the mountains above the gorgeous ski resort of Telluride (this was off-season, the ending few days of their summer season; snow would come in November), right close to the beginning of the Telluride Gondola that takes passengers down to the town of Telluride.  Normally with their required valet parking they took the cars around to a garage underneath the hotel, but mine they kept up there on top.  I now regret that; the car might have been safer in the garage below.  Of course, I am only guessing that the raccoon got in my car there, because that was the coldest and most forested of all the places I had parked the car on my trip.  Holbrook, Arizona had been all desert; Albuquerque and Santa Fe, New Mexico were more urban, and even the motel in the small town of Green River, Utah did not seem to be an area filled with lots of wild animals.  I certainly had never had anything like this happen to my car parked where I live in Tarzana...I hope not because I don't want to go through something like this again!

The service writer asked me to wait in the waiting room again and he would then present me with the work order after the mechanic finished his inspection.

When that time came, the service writer shoved under my nose a three-page work order and pointed out where I was to sign, indicating my approval for these repairs.  I glanced at the various things that the raccoon had damaged.  I saw something about power steering fluid and something else about the radiator and cooling leaks, even engine oil leaks.  I did happen to see an odd-ball entry, "4 wheel alignment", and I said to the service writer, "What could the raccoon have done to the wheels", to which the service writer responded, "Oh, that was just some other thing the mechanic noticed, the wheels were out of alignment.  Left like this, your tires would wear out much quicker."  Well, okay, okay, that seems reasonable.

What interested me the most was the grand total on the service order:  $4,730.67!  That raccoon had managed to do nearly $5,000 worth of damage to my car!  How horrible was this to have happen...and I was feeling especially poor, because I had also gotten a diagnosis from my dentist about a tooth of mine that will need to be extracted and replaced with an implant, a $6,784 cost.  So one day you are fine and happy, and then the next day you turn around and find out that you will be owing an unexpected $11,514.67, not good news when you are attempting to live off of your retirement funds.

I signed the damned work order and the service writer said it would take two days to do all the repairs, they would have a guy drive me home.

Once I was home, I decided to look up this thing about rodents going in under your hood, was this really a thing?  And according to several web sites, it definitely is a thing, and quite a damaging and expensive thing.  Rats are the most common villain, and they are especially a problem in rural areas where there are lots of rats.  They can really destroy things under the hood.  Some car manufacturers have been sued due to this, since they have moved over to using soy coated tubes, which cost less for car manufacturers, but are more vulnerable to rat damage.  Well, I certainly wouldn't want to regularly have to make $5,000 payments due to frequent rodent damage.

However I then learned reading bout this on-line that some automobile insurance policies, if you have comprehensive insurance, will cover rodent damage. Wow, here was a ray of hope!  I telephoned GEICO, my insurance company, and found out that my policy does cover rodent damage!  There is a $500 deductible, but I sure would be happy to have to pay only a tenth of my repair costs.  And the man on the phone also told me that making this claim would not raise my premium rates, as due to California insurance law, they cannot raise rates for damages that the ensured did not cause.  So everything about all this was turning into not being so bad after all!

The guy at GEICO said that normally they would send an insurance adjuster out to check the damages, but in this case, since the repairs were already in the process of being repaired, they would not require that, but that I would send to them the invoice and a proof of my payment and they would look at that.  I hope they weren't lying to me about "skipping the adjuster" piece.

As the end of the second day of the shop working on my car, I telephoned the service writer and asked if the car was ready yet.  He said that it was not finished yet, they they would need it for a third day, he hoped this was not an inconvenience.  If I wanted, they would loan me a car.  I figured that was more hassle than it was worth.  The only problem for me was that the next day I had both an appointment at the cardiologist and following that, a consultation at my dentist's office.  This meant that I would have to be walking to these appointments...but both places weren't that too far away and besides, I could use the exercise.  However, it did add to a certain inconvenience.

Also in that phone call with the service writer, I told him about how my automobile insurance would cover these repairs, so would he, or the mechanic, specially mark out on the final bill all the repairs that had come from the rodent damage.  I said that I had seen a repair item on the invoice that was not due to the rodent, and there maybe another item, so I don't want the insurance company to be confused, so please clearly mark that which came from rodent damage. He seemed to understand what I was asking.

Very late in the day I got a phone call from the service writer, telling me the car was ready, when would be a good time for me to have a car come pick me up.  I said that I was ready now, so he transferred me to somebody else, a woman, who told me the name of a woman who would come pick me up, and said the vehicle was going to be a black Prius and she quickly recited a license plate number. She asked me what my address was and I gave it to her.  Lately, when I am stressed, I mix up my home address number with my former work address number--both of them are burned in my brain but which one is which is sometimes mixed up when I recite it (getting old is a bitch).  When I went outside to wait for the ride to come, I began to worry that I might have given the wrong address.  Every time a car passed and it wasn't for me, I worried.  I also realized that I had no idea what a Prius looks like from the front, I have only seen them from the back.  So as it was getting later and later, I was getting more and more stressed.

Finally it was way past time for the driver to have arrived, so I pulled out my cell phone to call the service writer to ask him if the driver had trouble finding me, would they call him to verify the address?  However, I was unable to do that because his voicemail was full.  Then I noticed on my phone that I received texts from LYFT.  While it was an Infiniti of Van Nuys driver who drove me home on Monday, to pick me up this time, they had ordered a LYFT car for me without telling me that detail.  If I had known that, and known that I could communicate with the LYFT driver, I would have discovered that she was not able to find me and it was my fault...I had given her the numbers of my former work address, but the correct name of the street.  I could have then given her the correct number by text (along with a huge embarrassed apology), but since I hadn't even known that it was LYFT coming, that didn't happen.  So we had to start all over on this, but at least this time I gave the correct address.  This time it would be a male driver, and in some other color and make of car with such and such license number.

This time it was now very dark and I could hardly see the kind of cars that passed, and there was a constant stream of them since now was deep into commute time, which, of course, would also slow down the LYFT driver.  This waiting out there was making me more and more uncomfortable and angry over this whole thing.

Then I pulled out my cell phone and saw a message from the LYFT driver, telling me that was now here!  He was now here?  Where?  At this time, there was not a soul on the street, only me standing there on the curb where I had been standing for an hour by now.  Now I was full-on angry and called the LYFT driver's phone number and shouted, "Why are you telling me you are here when there is NOBODY anywhere near here?"  He responded, "Because I AM here!"  "WHERE ARE YOU?" I yelled.  He said,"I am in the parking lot where you told me to wait."  I said, "WHAT parking lot, I didn't tell anybody anything, I have been standing out here on the curb at the front of this apartment for over an hour."  I guess that then he decided to slowly drive down the street and I then heard a voice in the dark saying my first name, "Tom!  Tom!  Tom!" and when I peering into the dark, I could now see a car across the street from me with a man calling my name through his open car window.

I crossed the street, checked the license plate number, and then got into the car, sitting up front with him.  He said, to me, "I was just doing what I was told to do."  "Well, I don't understand why they told you to wait in a parking lot, the only parking that could be you could not get into, it is gated, and besides, I was waiting out here in the front where the address can be seen."  So he calmed down, as I did, and then for a while, the ride was totally silent, which felt weird.  So I started talking with him, telling him about my rodent damage, and ultimately I think we had a pretty good conversation on our way to the repair shop.

I went inside the service writer's office and we talked about the messed up LYFT ride and then we went over to the cashier for me to pay the bill.  I noticed that the bill did not have the raccoon damage repairs marked at all, as I had asked...which didn't surprise me.  I mentioned this to the service writer and asked him if he could do that for me. He said that only the mechanic would know which was which, but he was gone for the day.  I said that I could probably figure them out and mark the right ones myself once I was home.

However, when I got home, I realized that I could not make that determination, so the next morning, I called the service writer and said that it was imperative that I get the rodent repair charges clearly indicated.  He told me that the service writer was off that whole day, but they would both call me the next morning.

Next morning, I did get a call from both of them and I explained to the mechanic what I wanted.  And he said, "There was only one item, the headlamp."  I said, "What do you mean, 'only the headlamp', what about all this other stuff--the radiator leak and replacement at a cost of $1,905.44, you said that came from the rodent; what about the power steering fluid, what about the oil leak that required $973.13 worth of repairs?"  He said, "None of those other things were caused by rodent damage, only the headlamp; all the other repairs are things that needed to be done that were discovered during my inspection."

For a moment I was speechless.  The phone was completely silent as my brain churned inside my head.  I had approved a $4,730.67 repairs based on this rodent that presumably had "chewed up this engine compartment", only to find out that the only actual rodent damage was just this headlight?  That hardly would even be worth filing a claim with my insurance company that required I pay a $500 deductible.

Then I started shouting at them both, calling them crooks and liars and they sure did lose me as a customer, that I would have kept on having them keep my beautiful car in great shape even if it did cost more than an independent mechanic, but now I can't trust them at all, never again, and now i realize how they really work, once the warranty comes to an end, they realize that most of their customers stop going there and finding more affordable options elsewhere, so you make it a practice to cheat your customers one last time in a big way before you lose them for good.  Well, I haven't decided what I will do about this yet, a law suit maybe, certainly damaging reviews on Yelp, but during what surely will be the final few months of your employment at that place, I will give you some advice, and that is NEVER NEVER NEVER tell a customer that a repair is based on set of facts, such as in this case, "all this rodent damage", and then sneak in thousands of dollars of fraudulent other repairs that they WOULD NOT agree to having if they knew the complete truth.

The service writer was begging me to understand that all the other things needed to be done, they had taken me out there to see the damage, surely I understood.  I said that all of this was presented as being under the umbrella of the rodent damage, not "other things" that you "discovered" that I "needed".  "How could I possible have normally needed all these things?  I was already IN here one a month ago, having a complete good bill of health, and then now suddenly I needed a NEW RADIATOR (almost $2,000 cost), had a huge OIL LEAK in the engine (almost $1,000 in cost), needed a NEW BATTERY (almost $200) and then a bunch of other stuff, like a new POWER STEERING  KIT?"  I simply could not believe that all that was legitimate.   I have owned cars for the past 54 years, never once have I ever had a cascade of repairs happen like this.  This whole thing was an out and out scam, I can't see it as anything else.

We all hung up with the service writer still trying to convince me that all the repairs were legitimate, that my business was very precious to them and they didn't want to lose it, and they always meant to do the best for me.   And the trouble is that that may be correct, I just don't know!  The car is driving now like it is brand new...well, and sure, it ought to feel like that, they replaced so many components under the hood!  But one thing is clear and they can't get around that, and that is that everything I authorized was based on being told that some animal had gotten in under the hood and chewed everything up.  Before slipping a work order under my nose to sign, the service writer should have said, "Well, the mechanic has done a thorough investigation and it ends up that the only damage done by the rodent was the headlight.  Here, let me take you back out to the shop to show you all the other things on this list and why they are on there."  With all that stuff, they would have had to "sell" me on the need for those repairs.  Even now, a week later, I still can't believe it--new radiator, new battery, new power steering, big oil leak, all at once and suddenly?  Everything was in fine shape after the service I had there a month prior.  I just don't buy it.

I did a Yelp search on Infiniti of Van Nuys and it is a sad picture, let me tell you.  This is one of those Yelps where all the reviews are a mix of 5 stars and 1 star, mostly 1 stars.  I believe the 5 star reviews are from those customers who are still on the warranty, so they get to have luxury service and pay next to nothing.  Then the warranty ends, all of a sudden, all the reviews are 1 star and nothing but complaints.

There even was a review from a customer who said he brought it in with some problem and was told that he had rodent damage requiring $9,000 worth of repairs,  Instead of going along with that, he took his car to another shop that found the answer to his problem, told him he had no rodent damage, and the repair for his problem was only a few hundred dollars.  So in this guy's case, he didn't even have the claimed rodent damage!  This makes me wonder in my case if I even had the rodent damage my self, was the scam that thorough, to the extent of the mechanic putting the animal dropping in there himself?  Well, I won't go quite that far....

Interestingly, I looked up the Yelp reviews for Infiniti of Valencia, and they basically have nothing but five-star reviews.  Also, I searched an independent mechanic who specializes in Infiniti and found one that is in a convenient location and has nothing but five-star reviews for his shop, was well.  So apparently there are some good places to go for service of my Infiniti.

What drives me crazy about this whole thing was feeling that I was badly scammed, yet not really being able to be sure that I was.  I was done wrong by their making me think that everything that needed to be fixed was under the umbrella of the rodent damage and therefore I wasn't given a chance to separately evaluate the validity of the other repairs.  But as to maybe the other repairs were legitimate and I would have agreed to them if only I had been specifically shown their damage and given the chance to make an informed decision.  That makes me very sad; that what might actually have been good and thorough caring mechanics had their reputations besmirched due to an error in or failure of good communication.

SOLUTION FOR BURN-OUT: DISCOVERING YOUR TRUE REST

For those who have been following this blog, I apologize that I have not yet continued the entries about my trip to Yosemite and elsewhere in May.  I do plan to finish those, but had gotten bogged down by quite a bit of other tasks in my life and that that continued to increase in intensity, so I just couldn't make the time to sit down and work on that entry some more.  

Meanwhile, now that this is summer, I have several friends and relatives suffering from severe burn-out from the past year of work, and now they are facing valuable vacation time that they are really counting on for refreshing themselves.  But instead of expecting relief, they are instead piling even more stress on their hoped for vacation, which is burdened by the duty of having to carry away all this burn-out.  You know that it is bad when your vacation is adding to your burn-out instead of relieving it!

I had gone though this myself a decade ago, and learned what the solution is, tried it out (there was nothing to lose), and discovered that it worked extremely well for me.  I have been following that concept ever sense.

I decided that I would write about this solution for one of these people and send it to her.  Once I had done that, I figured that it might help other people, to, so I decided to post it here on my blog.

What you need is what is called TRUE REST.  I had actually gotten this concept from something called "The Michael System" (and many of its various permutations, of which you may find several).  The Michael System offers quite a lot of other valuable lessons and concepts, but here we are concerned only with this particular issue.

Everybody has three "centers", their intellectual center, their emotional center, and their moving center.  You know in your own life that sometimes you think, other times you are emotional, and other times you are in the midst of action.  Those are the three centers, Intellectual, Emotional, and Moving.  You can think of "being" in one of these centers at any giving time, which really refers to which of the three is taking most of the focus of your energy.  You aren’t in all three of them at the same time, but move around among them as you experience various events.  Almost all of us have our number one favorite center to be in, but will also move to the others, and a great deal of people have a center they really don’t like and aren’t in it very often.  What I just described are the basic centers, but you also have three higher centers, but those are for special moments, you couldn’t be into those very long without suffering a burn-out from that, because those are too intense.  Peak experiences are meant for peak moments, not for all the time.

So you only need to analyze the three basic centers and figure out your order of favorite to the least.  For example, me, I am most comfortable in my intellectual center, that means that my normal behavior when something happens is to think about it, to analyze it intellectually.  You might say that I am mostly in my mind.  Next for me is my emotional center, which means that I will access my feelings.  So after I think about something, I might then cry, or laugh, or get very angry, and so on.  But those things don’t happen first.  When I am emotional, you might think that I am then in my heart.

Regarding my least favorite center, the moving center, I actually even have a block to it.  Not everybody has blocks to one of their centers, and it’s not really a problem, although it would be healthier to have a smooth flow among all three.  This doesn’t mean that I NEVER go into my moving center, that would mean that I would never get anything done.  How it works with me (but other people might be different) is I have what I think of as “inertia”, which means that whatever state I am in, it is hard to get me to move out of it.  So mostly that means that I do a lot of procrastination, meaning, no moving, but a hell of a lot of spinning around through my intellect and emotions.  For example, my brain may think of a wonderful story to write.  I might even write it completely in my head (I do something like that almost every single morning when I am preparing breakfast.)  So I have MILLIONS of ideas.  Now, wouldn’t it be wonderful if I then moved into my moving center and then actually wrote the book or story or whatever?  What a huge success I might have been!  But no, I then slide into my emotion center, and then come the doubts, “nobody would want to read this”, “I really don’t know very much about the subject matter”, “I can’t think of how to solve this particular plot issue”, or then my aversion to my moving center chimes, “oh, it will take so LONG to write that,” “now that you already know the whole thing in you head, can you think of anything more BORING than just sitting down to write the whole damn thing out, it is so much more interesting to think of another story, instead.”

So, it takes a lot of energy to get me moving.  In your case, you may not have a block against any of the three centers, but manage to move freely among them as appropriate to what is going on with you at the time.  Still, though, there will be one of the three that you do like the least.

Back to me, there was another wrinkle as to how my block worked.  Like the definition of inertia, if I DID finally get moving, then I wouldn't want to STOP.  Inertia has to do which changing motion, from starting it, to increase it, to diminishing it, or to stopping it.  Is your "train" stopped at the station?  It takes a lot of energy to get it moving, or alternatively, are the brakes broken and the train is running away down a mountain, requiring a very great deal of energy to top it?

So there was a time when I was in my 20s, living in New York, and I wrote a novel that actually got an agent who got a publisher willing to consider publishing it, but first he wanted me to do a complete re-write.  Being very young, I took that to mean that was a rejection, which I now understand really wasn’t, or at least, not yet--a lot of very successful writers say that they aren't writers, they are re-writers, and I have met one writer who wrote a book that required extensive historical research in Russia, and her publisher made her re-write her book three complete times, each time requiring more extensive historical research back in Russia.  Ultimately that book of hers came out and it was wonderful.

How I wrote that in the first place was I sat at my desk (which was also my dining room table) with my typewriter that was set up in the bay window that I could from time to time glance outside onto the street four stories down below me, and not move from there for about 30 hours as I wrote and wrote and wrote. Then I would be tired, and find a stopping point, and would go to bed and sleep for eight hours.  And then I would repeat…30 or so hours of solid writing, and then sleeping for eight hours.  Somewhere in there I would eat, but eating wasn’t all that important to me at the time, as I was deeply into the writing (moving center inertia).  It got so that sometimes when I woke up from some of my sleeps, I couldn’t tell whether it was AM or PM, because in that neighborhood they had very bright streetlights on all night long, and very dim natural light all day long, dim because of the monstrously tall skyscrapers blocking out the sky.

Sometimes when I really did need a break, or had a plot issue that I needed to solve, I would get up, go outside, walk to the nearest subway station, take the subway down to Battery Park where I would get onto the Staten Island Ferry, and ride across the water, past the Statue of Liberty, up to the dock at Staten Island, but I would stay on the ferry, and then take it back, seeing the gorgeous view of the skyscraper of Manhattan, get off the ferry, take the subway back to where I lived, and walk the block back to my apartment.  What a glorious way to take a break, I never got tired of it, and it only cost me 60 cents, a quarter for the subway one way, multiplied by 2, and one dime for the Staten Island Ferry, where I only had to pay for one way, since I didn’t get off at Staten Island.  It is only now, all these years later, that I realized that those breaks that I just outlined were an example of my getting out of my intellectual center (writer) into my moving center (on the move from the Upper East Side to Staten Island and back again). I wasn't even really thinking, the plot issue solved itself, or whatever else needed to be done somehow got taken care of during those treks.

I wrote that whole novel in about a month.  Now it takes me over a week to write just one blog entry!

Apparently a "normal" writer, if there is such a thing, works every day for a certain amount of time, such as a page a day, or in Ernest Hemingway’s case, he would write during the morning in his special writing room, and then would go out for lunch and drinking and fishing and whatever else he wanted to do for the rest of the day.  I really liked the idea of that method and thought I could do that once I was retired (I sure couldn’t do a page a day while working like some writers can), but I managed to stick with that for only the first month or so.  Starting it was hard, and if I had other things that needed to be done, that would derail my efforts to just sit there all day and write (which I very often do with shorter things than a novel!).  

So anyway, that’s me, so you might want to see how you apply yourself to the the three centers.  Here is the trick. Most people think, ah, vacation, I’m burned out, I need to RELAX.  I found out that I could NOT relax.  Relaxing made me feel sick…and depressed…and dark…and alone.  Oh sure, I could relax for one day, or maybe two, certainly not a whole week.  YOUR TRUE REST is going into the center that you go into the least.  Let me reiterate that--True Rest isn't going into your favorite center, it is purposely going into the center you like the least.

Think about that for a moment, because it is different from what you would expect. And especially if you have a center that you are blocked from, which means that you rarely go into there, or you have this peculiar way of handling it like I to, that is actually a very underused center, and that means you are unbalanced.  Nothing wrong with that, that is how almost all of us are made, but sometime you are going to have give some serious attention to that often ignored center.  And what about your favorite center, IT is what has the BURN-OUT!  Doesn’t that make sense?  You’ve worked that poor center to death, whereas your least used one is sitting there craving your attention.  Thank goodness I figured out that for my vacations, I must do “moving” things.  Fly somewhere far away, walk all over the place, explore, ride motor scooters, go on zip-lines, snorkel and body-surf in the oceans, go dancing, go on long road trips.

For people who avoid their intellectual center, their True Rest might be to read a very detailed and complicated book, begin and continue with a new class, such as start the learn a foreign language (and then sticking with it), or learn how to fix a car engine, or spend the time finishing your dissertation.  You fill in the blank, what would you want to do in this underused center. 

For people whose least favorite center is the emotional one, maybe they should go to an opera festival, volunteer to read to terminal children in a hospital, help find missing cats.  A person who needs to get into their least-liked center will know what they should do once they understand the concept.  Pure relaxation, meaning just sitting around by a swimming pool with a drink in your hand just keeps you in your normal center unless your normal center is the moving center, in which case you need to give all that physical activity a rest and poolside doing nothing but getting a tan genuinely IS relaxing for a change!  In previous times when so many people had physical jobs, farmers, factory workers, that kind of vacation was a God-send and that probably was responsible for the bedrock idea of that kind of vacation being relaxing since it genuinely was the True Rest of most of the people.  People were moving way too much and really needed to give that a rest.  But as much as I THINK I love that, I do know that it drives me crazy.  I can lie in the sun for about fifteen minutes while on a vacation before I want to get up and go do something.   Funny for a person who is blocked from his moving center, but deep inside us, we really do know what is good for us!  

If any of this makes sense to you, please try it out.  I think you will like it.  With me being retired now, people think I ought to be more relaxed then ever, by instead, my mind fills me with irrational worries.  Good thing I have scheduled coming up an eight day backpacking trip in the wilderness.  The trail I am taking is rated a 7 out of 10 for difficulty.  That ought to do it, moving center, here I come!  For you, I hope your vacation will be your least favor center that is waiting for you.  If this works out for you, please leave me some comments telling me about it!

The Yosemite, Bay Area, Sacramento Trip, Day 1

April 8 through 13, 2019

1.  Introduction and First Day

The genesis of this whole trip was to go see the “Frazil Ice” phenomenon at Yosemite National Park. This thing that I now essentially categorize as a “hoax” (although I guess it isn’t really, but it may as well be) “operates” only in a couple of not-sure-really-when early spring months, but at least in one impressive video that I had seen touts it as being something you can easily go and see if only you will go to Yosemite in March or April which is a lightly-visited time at Yosemite.  

I have been to Yosemite countless times and only one of those times I did not go there in summer. I happened to go there one time with a girlfriend in the autumn before the snow season, and I admit that it was beautiful with autumn color and lots of falling leaves, but the storied waterfalls are at their lowest during that time so I was back to viewing summer as being the ideal time…but so do millions of other people, so there is that as a detriment to summer visits.

I also remember an earlier Yosemite, let’s say forty years ago, where things were pretty loose and free. You could come when you wanted, hike where you wanted, camp in the up-country where you wanted, and car camping (with RVs and the like) didn’t require reserving months ahead, and formal lodging wasn’t all that expensive (although the most “formal” lodging I ever used was with friends who didn’t want to camp, so we stayed in Curry Village—it is now called “Half Dome Village”--which is wooden-sided canvas family tent/cabins (we had five of us in one of them, which was extremely convenient) with community bathrooms and showers and a swimming pool and dining room. Oh, come to think of it, I also used Curry Village when some friends from Sweden came to see America and they stayed with me in California and I gave them the grand tour that included Yosemite. Curry Village was an easy and acceptable place to stay…anything that gets you into Yosemite Valley is good!

For this particular trip, though (the Frazil Ice trip), I was shocked to see what the prices were for the non-camping accommodations.  I don’t know, maybe how a price strikes me is dependent upon whatever mood I am in at the time (do I feel rich, do I feel poor), but there is a sort of price level that when I see it, I think no, I think I will find another option. This is what happened to me looking at the cost of inside-the-park accommodations this time, I decided to stay outside the park for the first time in my life.

Let me interrupt this narrative to take a moment here to talk about entrance routes into Yosemite National Park. On the east side of the park, there is only one route in (coming in from Lee Vining), but be forwarned that this route is closed during the heavy snow period which is, I don’t know (it varies), let’s say from September to the end of May, perhaps?  On the west side of the park, there are three routes into Yosemite, starting with Big Oak Flat Road off of Highway 120, which is the north entrance, the one you would use if you came in from the Bay Area and the rest of Northern California. This had been the main one I mostly used in my life, since most of my trips to Yosemite were generated from various places where I lived in Northern California.

The “middle road” is El Portal, coming off of highway 140, and presumably the convenient route for those visitors coming from Merced and thereabouts.  I’m guessing that this is the least travelled route, but does have the nice feature of paralleling the Merced River, which I think is pretty and nice to see. I have a special love for the two rivers that come from the Yosemite watershed, the Merced and the Tuolumne.  However, both of the other routes from the west will take you along the Merced river when you arrive in the valley, so I would say to reserve the middle road to use if you live in the Merced region or you have been into Yosemite enough times that you would like to try another route.

The “southern road” is Wawona, coming off of highway 41, the convenient route from Fresno and on south to Southern California.  

No matter where you come from, and especially if this is your first time to Yosemite, I strongly recommend that you take the southern-most route to gain entrance to the park.  If you are coming in from Southern California, this would be a no-brainer, that’s the route you would normally take anyway, but even if you are coming from San Francisco, take the time to go out of your way to take the southern route. To understand why I say to do that, look at this clip from Google Maps, below, which shows you these three different routes.  Note that on the bottom route there is the notation “Yosemite, Tunnel View”.  Notice that neither of the other two roads have that tunnel view.  They just flow along and spill down into Yosemite Valley.  Especially for your first time coming to Yosemite (in daylight), you must give yourself that phenomenal tunnel view.  It is so spectacular that I will not even post a photo of it here (which wouldn’t do it justice anyway)—I want you to experience it yourself with your naked eyes.  I’ve seen it several times now in my life, but I am not ashamed to say that the minute I saw it again this time, I burst into tears.  I think that if it makes youcry, it is worth seeing.  Well, maybe that is just me (outstandingly sensitive) and you are a stoic, but you still should give yourself that tunnel view.

Imagine this:  you are going through a very long and dark tunnel—signs ask you to turn on your headlights and you better do it immediately, because in an instant you will find yourself in utter pitch black dark (it is a long tunnel) and you do not want to be totally blinded speeding along this mountain road.  So, there’s the long tunnel with a tiny little sphere of light up ahead of you and finally you emerge from the darkness of the tunnel and BLAM right up ahead of you is The FACE OF YOSEMITE!  Oh boy, what a rush!

                                                                         Map Credit:  Google Maps

Of course everybody, including huge busses filled with people, will want to pull over to take in this view and take pictures of everybody in their party, and you will want to, too.  There is plenty of parking there for that purpose; definitely stop and take some pictures. I was happy to be asked by a group of six or seven people to take a photo of all of them, and it was cute to see six or seven little squares around all the faces across the width of their cell phone.  I took a couple of photos of them and they were all pleased with the results.  

Then one of the men very nicely offered to take a picture of me there, which I agreed to, although while they all looked really good, I felt kind of embarrassed to just be me alone standing there at the face of Yosemite.  He took too photos, but I looked so bad in the first one that I deleted it, and the second one was not worth seeing (other than “I was there!”), but I kept it, even thought I doubt I will post it anywhere.  By no means was this his fault, but the fault of the subject he was attempting to photograph.

If you can, avoid parking anywhere near a bus that may be unloading or loading…they will block you car in when you want to leave and it takes an eternity for them to get everybody off or on.  This happened to me this time, which is how I know to warn others.  Honestly, it is insane how many people those busses hold and how slow they are at getting off or on.

Okay, now back to me, looking for affordable accommodation outside of the park.  It seemed to me that the most convenient and best priced accommodations were all along highway 120, the northern entrance to the park. As I studied that area, I happened to see Hetch-Hetchy reservoir on the map.  Now this got me to thinking.  A couple of months ago, my sister Virginia wrote me a letter, telling me about a good friend of hers who always wanted to go camping and constantly asked Virginia to come along on one of her trips, but Virginia wasn’t all that hot on that idea.  What she said reminded me of something a female comedian had said, I wish I remember which one.  The commedian said, “Hmm, so many people say they want to go back to the land.  I don’t want to go back to the land, I want to go back to the hotel!”  That was pretty much Virginia’s idea, too!

I actually like both, both the land and the hotel.  But there is something you miss when you don’t actually go into the wilderness (ever) and I decided to write to Virginia about my own view of that special missing piece to “going back to the land”.  

It was way back in my mid-20s when I used to backpack quite a bit and there was a couple that I liked to go with who were very adventurous and also liked to really live it up in the wild.  The male of the couple was nearly an “ox”, very strong and could carry an astounding weight of things on his back that he was willing to share with others (such as me). He’d bring steaks to grilland glass bottles of champagne for the evenings.  No “freeze-dried, just add to boiling water” backpacking fare for him…or for anybody who went with him.  And both he and his wife loved to get off the trail totally and find their way over various mountain passes (pretty much restricted these days, but back then there weren’t millions of people tramping all over the wilderness, so one could “tread lightly”).  It was a trip to be way up there in the lone mountains discovering for ourselves unknown lakes and having to find our way back via our compasses and some kind of a sense of direction.  And we were well-fed and admirably “beveraged”!

One of those trips, I will never forget.  We had come down from a world of the naked granite of the majestic mountains that are the backdrop of southeastern Yosemite where snowmelt was dripping and rain had been splashing into an immense meadow where the grass was wet and the ground was squishy and spongy.  As we hiked along, there was more and more water under foot and then little rivulets of water, and then a full on river as we headed in the direction of the Nevada and Vernal waterfalls that we were going to be hiking down next to.  I realized that we had come from the region where that water began that became those two iconic waterfalls, it was like we had walked through the time of the birth and growth to maturity of these waterfalls.

I understand now that Yosemite is the watershed for two rivers, the Merced, that was the river that became the Nevada and Vernal waterfalls and then flowed all the way out of Yosemite heading west, and the Tuolumne that flows north and west into the northern reaches of the park where it ends up in the Hetch Hetchy dam, unless it manages to escape through the dam’s spillway where it will continue to run wild across the width of California and through several other reservoirs until it finally flows into the San Juaquin River, which will, itself finally take itself into San Francisco Bay and then under the Golden Gate Bridge out to sea.

As I wrote my sister, I had become intrigued by the story of these rivers, because I remembered that the water that we drank, bathed in, swam in in our pools, and watered the landscaping of our property, came from that Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, and still does.

So now as I was looking for lodging outside the park and finding what I wanted up along the northern entrance to the park, I realized that what I must do would be to go experience Hetch Hetchy (where I had never been before), and the more I thought out it, I realized that what I needed to do was make a video about this “journey of the river” from fields of mountain granite to inside our very own digestive tract. This video was meant to be in honorand appreciation of that.

I knew I had to do this in two passes.  The first pass, I could do after seeing the Frazil Ice.  Hetch-Hetchy was only half an hour’s drive from the motel I was looking at, and so was Yosemite Valley also half an hour from that motel.  So it made perfect sense to make a reservation for that hotel…even though it was not in the park, it was equidistant from the two things I wanted to do at Yosemite.

The second pass involved the area of Tioga Road and Tuolumne Meadows, which during the time of my first pass would be closed tight due to heavy snow in that entire region.  In fact, even now as I write this, that region is still closed and probably won’t open until sometime in June…it is hoped early June.  So it was impossible for me to both see the Frazil Ice (that had to be in March or April) and go to Tuolumne Meadows, which is only open in the summer. Thus, the two visits, the one I have had and the one coming up this summer.

The quickest route to the motel I wanted was highway 120, which is the northern-most route, even though I was coming in from Southern California.  But of course I wouldn’t skip the tunnel view road, so I decided to take the southern route into the park, find out more about the Frazil Ice from a park ranger, and then leave Yosemite Valley and take the road north out the park to my motel.

The efficient route from Los Angeles to Fresno, which is where you veer off toward the southern route to Yosemite, is highway 99.  For some reason, I had long dissed highway 99, and it seems that generally people do. For some reason, I-5 is considered the “better” road.  Well, I sure have driven I-5 enough for ten lifetimes.  But this time, I really liked much better highway 99.  I noticed that most of the way on that highway, there were three lanes in each direction, whereas I-5 is always strictly two.  Both routes are heavy with trucks and the trucks are supposed to drive a slower speed than cars may, so if you are driving in the far right lane of either highway, you are frequently caught up behind a slower moving truck.  This means that you have to pass them.  But if you stay over on the far left lane where the trucks seldom venture, you will find yourself just as periodically “hogging” the “fast lane” for those who don’t really care whatthe speed limit really is, they are going to go way beyond it.  And don’t fool yourself, if what you see makes you think either highway is empty of cops, guess again.  They appear from out of nowhere.  Maybe not right away, but it’s a long way north to whatever is probably your destination, so I find it more comfortable to just set my cruise control to the exact speed limit, which means that it bugs me to have it messed up by having to put on the brakes for a moment due to a slower vehicle up ahead of me, lose the easy momentum.

Having the three lanes on highway 99 alleviated a whole lot of that.  The trucks pretty much stayed in the far right lane, I, following the speed limit, was usually quite fine in the middle lane, and then the speeders would have free run in the left lane.  But on I-5, there was no way around it…one has to develop a “dance” of staying in the right lane but keeping an eye open on who is coming up in the left lane behind you.  You can go along smoothly until you get closer to a truck, at which time you veer over to the left line but soon enough that you won’t make an approaching car in the left lane have to shut off their cruise control.  It becomes an art of flowing in and out of these two lanes in such a way that neither you nor somebody coming up behind you in the left lane has to tap off their cruise control.  And lost of times you will miss it (and, in my case, I will have to speed way up past the speed limit in order to get away from the angry car behind me and past the slow trick or RV on the right).  Yeah, yeah, I know it is just a flick on the button on the steering wheel to turn the cruise control back on again, but I just dislike the loss of the smooth flow. Anyway, highway 99 was able to be much more relaxing due to their three lines versus I-5’s two.

After several hours, I approached Fresno and then ended up on a road, highway 41. Once I was outside of the city environs of Fresno, I was out in green pastures, and that is how it pretty much stayed all the way until the road became Wawona Road, where it was forest.

I was surprised by the beauty of what I was passing through on highway 41—so much green and delicious-looking pastures of happy cows.  That definitely hadn’t been my impression from the past, and I got to experience that same surprise of green beauty a couple of days later when I experienced it again even better, in the rolling lush green farmland from Chinese Camp to La Grange, but not as far as Waterford (based on the route I took).

I mentally divided the width of the state into five zones from the Nevada border on the east to the I-5 highway to the west.  Number 1, the eastern-most zone, is “lowland desert”, where moisture from the west is caught in the Sierra Nevada mountains in the next zone, number 2, which is high mountain land and very snowy in the winter and best for recreation (instead of living and working), such as skiing in the winter and camping and hiking in the summer.  Then comes zone 3, what I think of as “old Gold Rush towns” although not all of them were actually places where one could find gold.  Then comes zone 4, the one that surprised me, that I now saw as the wide open spaces of gorgeous green agricultural land.  Then comes zone 5, these sort of terrible larger towns or smaller cities, sort of agri/industrial that then crowd up onto I-5.  East of that I have not added to this “zone” concept, but it is all increasingly crowded and expensive urban areas that continue on west until you get to hills and mountains that separate the Bay Area, etc. from the ocean zone.

I honestly never really “considered” that lovely zone 4, how wonderful it looked, but then I realized that this was so beautiful, but generally “hidden” from me due to California’s “topsy-turvey” climate, which is rain in the winter, totally dryness in the summer, unlike the Eastern half of the United States where it rains in the summer and is dry (or snow) in the winter.

Most of the year, California is dry and dead and brown (unless irrigated) in all but the spring months due to this rain situation.  But this particular year, the rains has been heavier than normal and the drought that had been so disturbing for so long ended, I think, a couple of years ago without actually being formally acknowledged until now in hindsight. What a little rain can do is remarkable, and all of “zone 4” showed it in perfect display this year.  But it won’t always be like that, I am afraid.

As beautiful as the green pastures had been, the forest that I was now driving in was surprisingly “thrashed”.  I couldn’t really understand it, and still don’t.  What one would normally expect to be gorgeous forests looked instead like they had been decimated by fire, or abused by some sadistic logging companies, or maybe experimented on regarding some kind of attempt at forest management.  Or maybe this is just what happens to a normal forest during an extremely heavy snow season.  It’s just that this is something I had never ever seen before.  

I have attempted to explain it to others, but without them actually seeing it, it was hard for them to understand what I was talking about.  Below are two pictures I snapped from the car (there was no easy place to full over and take photos) and these don’t really do justice to the situation. I have some other ones to show later in the recitation (day two).

                                                                           Photo Credit:  Tom Osborne

                                                                             Photo Credit:  Tom Osborne

I asked the park ranger what had happened to the forest leading up to there, was this due to fire, or was it a new way of forest management, or what?  His answer was very vague; he said, “Nah, I think the forest should be pretty much recovered now, that fire was several years ago.”  Which really told me nothing, other than this damage could not be blamed on fire.  But this condition was right outside of Yosemite National Park, so I would expect a forest ranger to know about it, but once inside the park, I didn’t see any more of that destruction appearance.  I presumed that it did not have anything regarding how Yosemite manages its forests.  However, I saw much worse “devastation” the next day in the area of Hetch-Hetchy, also notinside the park.  So whatever it is all about, I guess it is going to remain a mystery for me for a while.

I also took the opportunity to ask him about the Frazil Ice and his response was, “What ice?”  How many people had I mentioned this to without one flicker of recognition?  And now the park ranger at the entrance gate to Yosemite also had no clue.  I had hoped they would have even a whole newspaper about it, like they used to have, news about the park and what things were going on, signing up for guided tours, singing by the campfire, religious services in the chapel, and special events.  But no, nothing, just a map of the valley.

From there it was forest forest forest until somewhere along the line, I began to see snow drifts on the side of the road.  I should interject right here that I was not happy to see that, because the road now was also steadily going down hill. Where there was snow could mean that there would ice on the road, and that is not something I wanted to encounter, especially when doing down curving roads.

I had gotten tire chains to have in my car trunk because the Yosemite website was adamant that there still may be snow and ice dangers on the road in this season and you were absolutely required to carry chains and to install them if told to.  I will tell you now that I never had to put the chains on, which I was happy about, but that still did not alleviate my concerns about patches of ice on the road.  This continued to be a problem for me the two days I was in the Yosemite area.

Earlier that morning, just before I left for this trip up to Yosemite, I decided to watch a video on how to handle driving on icy roads.  And what a frightening eye opener it was.  I couldn’t believe that people could actually live in a place where they had snow in the winter, which is the vast majority of the country.  No wonder it is so expensive to live along the California coast where you don’t have deal with that.

In the video, it was like bumper cars in an amusement park.  Trucks and cars slip/sliding all over the place, on freeways, on overpasses, and any manner of other roads.  They would be driving along normally and then suddenly, they would spin out of control and twirl around and crash into other cars which then continued the carnage with yet other cars.  Really? This is a normal way to live?

There were several pointers of how to seek to avoid all that.  One was to not drive faster than 45 miles per hour.  Be especially careful when going over any bridge or overpass. Do not brake suddenly, or at all if you possibly manage it.  The video gave the impression that if you could continue along at a steady rate that your tires could maintain their grip on the road, but any alleviation of that, especially if sudden, would wreck that helpful friction of tire and road and send you flying.  Whenever that happened, do NOT suddenly brake to stop the spin, but turn your steering wheel in the direction of the skid and the car would straighten out.  These rules didn’t seem too difficult to follow, but what about all those other bozos who would pay no attention to all of this, so even if you were doing the best you could to be careful, you still had dozens of other potential spinning tops all around you.  As far as I was concerned, the best solution was not to be on that kind of road at all.  But now on my way to Yosemite Valley, it was too late for that, I was now seeing snow and potential ice on the very road I was driving on.

“Spoiler”, snow and nice or no snow and ice, I did not actually have any problem.  I followed to the very digit the posted speed limit signs which were catered to the road conditions.  If the sign said 20, I drove 20.  Most of the other people ignored all those signs, just sped past me at 40 or even 50 miles per hour.  If there was clearly snow on the road, I drove steadily and made no sudden moves on my brakes.

It was actually pretty beautiful seeing the snow, even thought I considered it potentially treacherous.  It surprised me how much of it there was in several places, but after all, the entire Tuolumne Meadows and Tioga Road region of Yosemite was completely closed at that time due to heavy snow conditions, and even today in early May, is still closed and will be more nearly a month more from now.  So yeah, they have snow in Yosemite and the winter and spring visitor should be aware.

Then came the wonderful tunnel and the glorious first awesome view of Yosemite.  Then it was more forest, curving roads, and finally I landed down on the valley proper where all three westside entrance roads came together as one.  I saw the Merced River and not one sign of anything like Frazil Ice showed in that water. However, that phenomenon was supposed to be for early mornings only, and by now it was around 4:00 PM.  Also, apparently the Frazil Ice phenomenon was onlyin what is called Yosemite Creek, which is the water of the two waterfalls, Yosemite Falls and Upper Yosemite Falls. Something about how the water in those two falls suddenly freezes as they fall makes them into Frazil Ice when they enter the water of Yosemite Creek.

Having apparently no guidance from anybody, I decided to take the cross road that connected with the road that would take me up to where my hotel was, outside of the park.  I would be seeing no Frazil ice that late in the day anyway, and as the temperature was falling which would to lead to more ice on the road, I figured the best coarse was to now drive on up out of the park and check into my hotel, have a nice dinner in their restaurant, and then relax in the hotel for the rest of the evening.

Driving along that road heading toward Oak Flat Road, it was fun to see all the people parked along the Merced River, taking pictures of the waterfall that could be seen from that vantage point—I think that is Bridalveil Falls, which I also think is the waterfall you see when you first see Yosemite when you burst out of the tunnel.  Some people have some awesome photographic equipment and heavy duty tripods, taking their own “Ansel Adams” quality photos. Others taking selfies with their cell phones and others with more handy traveling cameras.  Everybody seemed excited, happy, in awe, and I know how they felt.

I got to the intersection of Oak Flat Road and Tioga Road, the road that goes up to Tuolumne Meadows but tightly closed.  I saw the blessed gas station also at the intersection.  There had been times in the past when I had been thankful that gas station was there! For decades, it seemed, that was the only gas station for very far around.  Even now, I am sure there are people who are thankful for its existence!

I had hoped that when I came to the exit booth from the park I could ask a park ranger from that side of the park what the deal was with the Frazil Ice, just how early would I need to be there to see it, did they have an organized tour, and so on.  But instead, the booth was now closed for the day and that was that.  Anybody entering the park at that time would be able to just drive through, but they would likely be caught when they left and could not present a receipt for their having paid.  I suppose a person could time their comings and goings to what they expected would be closed times for the various entrance gates, but gee whiz, don’t waste your time on stuff like that, just pay your fee and enjoy the park!

As usual, now, with the weather being even colder, heading down to freezing as the sun was setting, I drove as carefully as I had coming down into the park.  I think I was the only one doing that.  I saw lots of wonderful pull over and view spots on that route that I figured I would take advantage of for photographing the next day after I saw the Frazil ice.  I also saw quite a few huge busses, like I had seen up at the Tunnel viewspot.  I thought to myself, brave bus drivers to drive these huge rigs filled with people down these potentially iced up roads, but I guess they are professionals and really know what they are doing.  (I wonder, though, if I was just a bit too paranoid over this icy thing.)  Also, let’s be thankful for people who do things like that, and in this case, they are enabling lots of people to come and enjoy Yosemite who might not otherwise get to.

I felt relief when I reached the top of the road’s climb and now was on the smooth, flat portion of highway 120.  After a while, I arrived at my motel, the Buck Meadows Lodge:

                                                                             Photo Credit:  Tom Osborne

It was up here on a beautifully forested road.  Everything felt nice and cozy.  I went into what I thought would be the lobby to check in, but there was a sign on the door that said to go over to the motel next door to check in, the Yosemite Westgate Lodge, and much larger and nicer motel.  I realized that the Yosemite Westgate Lodge had bought out the Buck Meadows Lodge.  So I went over there to check in and then came back to get into my room.

                                                                         Photo Credit:  Tom Osborne

It was a nice, clean, cozy room with a heater that heated up nicely in about a second.  However, it didn’t take me too long to realize that it had only one tiny chair and no table at all.  Yes, I had free WiFi, but no desk to put my laptop on.  Okay, so I used it on my lap as I sat on the bed. The bed was extremely comfortable, but not having a decent table and chair was not.

Oh well, this was only for two nights anyway.  I walked over to their restaurant and got a booth.

The people in there were, as I expected, extremely friendly and very happy.  There was just something about the whole place, the quiet highway it was on, the wonderful forest, the fresh smell for the air, the kiss of the nearly freezing temperature, and this cozy motel, all just combined to feel like a truly wonderful place.

The restaurant menu had several dishes that appealed to me right away, including some vegan ones that sounded very appealing even though I am not a vegan.  I decided to have the short ribs that night (one of my main “go-to” dinners) and have the Panang Curry (a vegan dish) tomorrow.  The short ribs, fries, mixed vegetables, and soup filled me up just fine, so I didn’t even look at dessert.

After dinner, I went back to the warm, cozy room and listened to a couple of podcasts on my computer while lying in the bed and after that, I set the alarm for a very early wake-up and then turned off the light and promptly went right to sleep.

END OF DAY 1