Oh Lord, Stuck in Humboldt Again
I spent most of today in a small town called Garberville, waiting to hear whether I'd be able to continue down 101 and home. Apparently it's a little landslidey up here. Eventually a local radio station DJ informed me that I wouldn't be able to get home tonight. "You are where you're supposed to be," she reassured me.
They say every freeway-blocking landslide has a silver lining, and the upside here is that I had a truly astonishing breakfast. My standard order at roadside diners is the chicken fried steak; I figure that if it's not necessarily going to be good, it may as well be deep-fried. The Paradise Grill in Garberville has, far and away, the best chicken fried steak I've tasted outside of Texas. The eggs and home fries were also excellent. They were a little under-salted, but that's easily corrected and they were otherwise wonderful.
So I'm back in Eureka now, hunkered down in a Best Western on the south side of town. The only room they had left was a double queen bed with a fireplace. I had a vision of racing around town trying to beat the rest of the stymied tourists to the remaining rooms in town and ending up either sleeping in the Corolla or listening to someone else's television through the thin walls in some shanty inn, so I took it. I guess I'll make a clever pillow-Lore in the other bed to throw off the Nazgul.
More marijuana observations! Apparently my knowing snickers over the MJ WC at the brew pub were naive. Just in the limited time I've spend walking around out here I've run into three groups of people smoking pot in public, two of which were just standing out there on the sidewalk. I feel like a country boy coming to the city for the first time and saying "Golly, those ladies sure are dressed skimpy for a chilly night like this!"