Highway Hypnosis

The drive was pretty uneventful and un-blog worth, at least by more distinguished writers standards. I went into Zen meditation mode so the redundancy of the trip didn't bother me. The car was in Claire's name, and Enterprise would have required me to have a $250 hold put on my Visa/Check card, so I wasn't allowed to drive. The car didn't have a tape deck - just a CD player - so I couldn't use my iPod with the cassette adpapter. Instead I whipped out my laptop a couple times and burned some custom mixes.

Since I had watched some of Condi's testimony, and was bored to tears, before we left, I didn't really need to listen to the news.

The worst part of the drive in the past has always been driving by Harris Ranch and inhaling the stank of the millions of cows that wait out the rest of their short lives before being turned into tasty burgers. You can smell it from miles away, what is essenitally a bovine concentration camp, and sucked even worse when we'd drive up in the middle of summer in Claire's old car that had no ventilation, let alone air conditioning. On this trip, however, we went for broke and stopped off at the Harris Ranch Restaurant, a couple short miles downwind of the cows. Steak fresh enough that you could milk it. Good stuff.

And beyond watching the gas prices rise and fall along the freeway from $2.05 to $2.50 per gallon (sometimes varying this much within a hundred yards), not a damn thing of note. Claire tried to liven things up by getting truckers to blow their horns... and succeeded a few times.

Now sitting in Claire's Aunt Pat's living room with her dog Riley trying to figure out where I can find a phone line so I can post this thing. Alas, if I'm not responding to comments left here or elsewhere its due to minimal internet access for the next few days.

Tomorrow should be more entertaining. Visiting Claire's Grandpa, hitting up a couple wineries, and making a long anticipated visit to a place that had appeared in many of my nightmares and dreams long before I ever visited Northern California... Train Town.