Stearns Wharf Seagull
Santa Barbara, Phase 2
As Alcalde ambled his way southward at approximately the same speed as the California stagecoaches of yore, Lobo and I prepared the preparations for his arrival, which would kick off Phase 3 of the Santa Barbara excursion.
But I am getting ahead of the narrative.
Lobo and I purchased beer and foodstuffs at Trader José’s, then let the food sit in the hot car while Lobo ate lunch at the Habit in La Cumbre Plaza. I had already eaten at Shalhoob’s in the Public Market, where I also tried to buy a shirt. They were out of them, of course.
Lobo and I got to talking about Baskin-Robbins on Upper State, which led to a discussion of the Tee-Off restaurant, which led to a conversation with Evan and Suzanne, who recommended the Tee-Off, which led to our decision to go to the Tee-Off the following night, which led to us doing so.
I think I’d always assumed that the Tee-Off was some skeezy bar, but it’s a swanky prime rib restaurant that’s been there since 1956. Also a bar, hence the neon martini glass in the front. We had big old honkin’ 10-ounce prime ribs, and Lobo didn’t finish his. Weird. He’s definitely slipping in his dotage.
The next morning we were back in Ontare Plaza at the crack of earliness to procure Spudnuts and drive to Hendry’s beach, where we walked along the beach as the tide came in. We didn’t even make it to the point before we had to turn around. It was not well-timed, tide-wise.
After a busy morning of sitting around, we went downtown to reconstruct our Inter-Block Route from the Summer of ’76, and let me tell you, that was a white-knuckle thrill ride of of ambling and meandering. There are no longer any pass-throughs from Micheltorena or Sola, but from Arlington Ave. on we were unimpeded. We were even able to extend it past its previous terminus of Ortega and forge through all the way to Haley! Then we wandered back to the car.
Not only that, but we even found Yonder Place, although the door was locked.
We went home and sat around some more and eventually Alcalde showed up, and we begun Phase 3(a) of the Santa Barbara Excursion – the MesaMash.
NB: The official mascot of the MesaMash is Humphrey the Owl, who appears on the roof nightly to watch for mice or leezards or whatever it is that owls eat.
The Creek of Life
Santa Barbara, Phase 1
In Santa Barbara for the first time since 2011, I ubered to pick up my Turo car, then checked into the Oasis motel on State near Las Positas, the same place I stayed 12 years ago.
For dinner I walked to 3771 State Street, former home of Char West, to pay homage to the Creek of Life and have dinner at Taqueria la Única. Some have impugned the quality and prices of T la Ú, but I liked their tacos al pastor and think that maybe some people could try being a little less complainy sometimes.
The next day I drove out to Ellwood, took a picture of the Barnsdall-Rio Grande gas station (still in a state of sad decay), then hiked through the Ellwood Butterfly Preserve. The scent of the eucalyptus trees was an instant childhood flashback. The butterflies won’t show up for another month, but it was a pleasant walk, and without even trying I emerged from the woods at the end of Coronado Drive, where I lived from 1968-1970. My old house has been painted sometime in the last half century, but otherwise looks the same.
I spent most of the rest of the day downtown, wandering around and refreshing my memory on where things are, starting with the Courthouse Tower and working my way down State. State Street below Victoria is a combination of bustling and empty, the same problem it’s had for decades, only now they’ve made it pedestrian-only except for cross traffic.
I paid my respects to the late Santa Barbara News-Press and had a saison at Third Window Brewery. I was going to buy a shirt, but they didn’t have the kind I wanted. Third Window is on Haley Street, just a few blocks from Mac’s Grog ‘n’ Grog, where I called my mom from a pay phone when I was nine years old because I was too tired to ride my bike home, and I got in trouble because I wasn’t supposed to be down on Haley.
Down on Haley, Haley Street
— Nerf Herder, “Down on Haley”
Where the drugs are easy and the sex is cheap
You never know just who you’ll meet
On Haley!
The next day I met Lobo and Mrs. Lobo at the Santa Barbara Public Market, one of the nicer additions to the downtown area. It’s on the site of the former Vons/Safeway on Victoria and Chapala. Mrs. Lobo had a butternut squash taco, which is an actual thing that exists in this world. I had beef skewers from Three Monkeys.
After some confusion over what day it was and who was where when, it was determined that I should check out of Oasis a day early and move into Casa Mesa the next day, after Mrs. Lobo ditched Lobo for the second time in as many weeks. That left me with a few extra hours the next morning after checkout, so I took the tour at the Mission.
The Mission gift shop sells containers for holy water, so I bought a small one with St. Barbara on it. I was going to just fill it up at the water fountain outside, on the theory that water from the Mission water fountain would still be pretty holy, just by virtue of running through the Mission pipes, and anyway how much holiness do I really need? But the cashier asked me if I wanted it filled, and there was no extra charge, so I ended up with the full complement of holiness. For all I know, they just filled it at the water fountain anyway, but I’m no worse off, and it didn’t cost any extra. And the container is small enough to be within TSA limits.
These are the types of things you need to keep in mind if you want to be a savvy consumer of holy relics.
I had intended to go to the Presidio, and in fact I did go to the Presidio, but the cashier was talking to the British couple in front of me, and going on at great length about Santa Barbara history. After several minutes of this, I thought she was wrapping up, but she came up with a map she wanted to show them in another room, so I could see I was never going to get to buy a ticket and I left.
Subsequently I met Lobo in the BevMo parking lot and began Phase 2 of the Santa Barbara Excursion.
Vashon Island
Flying Saucers Over Spokane Valley!
Space Needle Climb
I was given to understand that there would be donuts.
There were no donuts. There were t-shirts and medals, but no donuts. They had donuts in previous years, but no mention of them this year.
Base 2 Space is an annual run up the Space Needle stairs to raise money for the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle. That’s a good charity, but my main motivation was running up the Space Needle. My belief is that you should generally go up things that can be gone up, at least if they’re interesting things. There’s another Seattle charity stair run that’s taller, but it’s just in a regular skyscraper. Base 2 Space is “Seattle’s Most Iconic Climb.”
I made it to the top, but there was some problem with the timekeeping. According to the follow-up email:
Our apologizes for the timing issues that arose during and after climb day. We have been working directly with the timing company to resolve these issues and ensure all times are accurate.
Despite their apologizes, I doubt if they can do anything about my time. What I think happened is that the chip reader didn’t register my time at the top until I’d been there for a while and happened to walk by it later. My official arrival time is 9:09 AM, but my first photo has a time stamp of 8:49 AM. So while my official time is 42:57, I think my real time was about 20 minutes. Which is still terrible. There were five runners over the age of 80 and four of them had better times than that. So I’m going to have to do it again next year, just to redeem myself.
And they’d better have donuts.
The Ogopogo
CFP and Spokanistan
After escaping from the Mounties, I holed up at CFP for a few days till the heat was off.
There were turkeys and congealed nachos and excessive pine cones and visits to both the Davenport Hotel and Camp Hope. There was an Iron Goat and a Flying Goat. There were beers and limojitos and panther cookies and Alcalde’s hobomobile and songs about Cataldo. But most of all, there were The Country Bears.
Then I went home.
Run for the Border
The reminder email had told me that if they didn’t have my test results by the next day, I would receive a phone call. They emphasized that it was important for me to answer this phone call. I left Calgary at 7:30 that morning with the phone propped up on the seat next to me, ready to respond to Canada’s call.
My first stop was Tim Hortons in Fort Macleod where I had a mediocre breakfast sandwich and a pretty good donut. Contrary to rumor, there was no poutine.
NB: Tim Hortons has no apostrophe. It did originally, but Quebec does not allow such non-French indignities as apostrophes, so it had to go. TH opted for standardizing their signs everywhere, rather than maintaining different names for Quebec and the rest of North America.
Not far from Fort Macleod is the main attraction of my Canada ramble: Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump. I’ve been wanting to go to HSI BJ since Dave Barry wrote about in 1989. Roadside America only rates it “Worth a Detour,” rather than “Major Fun,” but I think that has to be a mistake.
I had just parked and gotten out of my car when I received The Phone Call. It was a robocall. I had to use the numeric keypad to respond to questions. I decided to get back in my car to cut down on wind noise, but when I plugged the phone in, it activated the Bluetooth connection with the car, which disabled the numeric keypad. I tried to get the keypad back without hanging up while the recording pretended it was having trouble hearing me (“I’m sorry, I didn’t get that…”). I had just gotten the keypad back when it disconnected (“I’m sorry you’re having difficulty. Disconnecting now.”).
So much for that. Since it was a robocall, there was no way to call them back. Time for Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump! The welcome sign explains the name.
In the 1800s, according to legend, a young brave wanted to witness the plunge of buffalo as his people drove them to their deaths over the cliffs. Standing under the shelter of a ledge, he watched the great beasts fall past him. The hunt was unusually good that day. As the bodies mounted, he became trapped between the animals and the cliff. When his people came to do the butchering, they found him with his skull crushed under the weight of the buffalo carcasses. Thus, they named the place “Head-Smashed-In.”
The place had been in use for thousands of years at that point, so they certainly took their sweet time naming it.
HSI is really a lot more interesting than you might think. It’s an archaeological site with a multi-story museum detailing and explaining the finds. The cliff was used over a period of 6000 years, minus a gap of about 2000 years when it was abandoned. People were in the area and eating buffalo for that whole time, but no one knows why they stopped using the cliff, then started again 2000 years later.
The cliff itself just looks like a cliff, but it’s not hard to imagine thousands of buffalo plummeting over the edge onto some hapless doofus below.
I would have stayed longer, but I didn’t know how long I would have before the RCMP put out an APB on me, so I had Google Maps give me the fastest route to the border.
This turned out to mean going west from HSI on highway 785, which almost immediately turned into a gravel road that continued for the next 25 miles. So I raced for the border at about 30mph, fishtailing slightly in the gravel.
Eventually I got back to a regular highway and crossed back into BC, where I discovered the biggest truck in the world. Or what used to be the biggest truck in the world back in the ’70s. Now it’s just a very big truck. Worth a quick stop, even for those of us on the lam.
Every couple hours I got the Canadian robocall, which went to voice mail because I was driving and couldn’t answer it. I got to the Kingsgate/Eastport border crossing around 3 PM.
I handed the US border guard my Nexus card and she asked me the usual questions. Then there was a very long pause.
BG: “Have you ever been convicted or charged with a crime?”
Me: “Nooo.”
BG: “In your whole life?”
Me: “No.”
BG: “You have a common name. I’ll need to have you go inside. You can just pull your car around here.”
She gave my card to another border guard who told me to have a seat. After about five minutes on his computer he gave me my card back and said, “You’re good to go, sir. Thank you for your time.” No explanation, and I didn’t ask. I got in my car and disappeared into the Idaho panhandle.