It costs $55 to give yourself a tour of the Biltmore Estate (a house). Let me type that out in words so you don’t think that’s a sticky keyboard issue: fiffty-five dollars. I didn’t realize this before going in to buy my ticket.

Me: I’d like to see the house.

Woman: That’ll be $55.

Me: U.S.?

Woman: [pretends not to hear]

Let me bash the Biltmore Estate more before putting the price in context. Thanks.

• While its original owner was a Vanderbilt, his first name was not Cornelius.
• He was a grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt — all the money spent to build the place was inherited.
• His two older brothers inherited the family business — the guy who built this house didn’t even have a job.
• The house was lived in for thirty (30) years before it was opened to the public, at which point it was no longer lived in.
• It was opened to the public because the family couldn’t afford to keep the house.
• Therefore, it served as a house for 30 years and as a tourist building to be walked through for 80 years.
• Some of the rooms weren’t finished until long after the house became a tourist-building.
• In spite of this, everything in the house makes out as if (a) this Vanderbilt family was important and (b) their time in the house was significant.
• The estate employs 1,900 people. It’s a non-house house with a bunch of grass around it. 1,900 employees.
• Despite the $55 cost to enter the house, you’re not allowed to take photographs anywhere inside.
• Excluding driving time, parking time, and time spent walking from the parking lot to the immediate house area, I saw everything I needed to in about an hour.

It’s The Biggest “House” in the Country, which screams of unfamiliarity with restraint. The interior maybe isn’t as tacky as Marble House in Newport or Hearst Castle (although Wm. Randolph Hearst at least did some stuff to increase *his* inherited wealth) — but then, it’s the gaudy, expensive stuff in those houses that makes them worth seeing. This one just seemed like someone’s outsized ego that, once it came down to interior decoration, couldn’t be matched by his bank account.

Big house.

Relatively normal-sized garden.

So, just to help better illustrate how ridiculous $55 for this house is, here’s a comparison of the prices of various attractions I’ve visited on this trip (and a couple other popular sites I haven’t visited).

The most remarkable thing about the place, IMHO, was that it was fairly *packed* with people, despite my being there on a bad-weather weekday. Is there really nothing better to do in this part of the country? OH man.

Or, in short: bad value.

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A month and a half ago or so, it was requested that I share with all y’all how my rig’s outfitted for travel. Right after that, I shot this video. And now? Now I’ve bothered to post it. It’s from a while back and it’s kind of long (8.5 min.).

Ah, sweet memories of South Dakota. And by “Yellowstone”, I meant “Yosemite”. And the truck has never been that clean or organized in actual practice.

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(LMK if the video doesn’t work.)

That makes three-eighths (3/8ths) of the way there in terms of states. It’s not like I’m excited about blowing through states, just that it happens so I might as well enjoy it.

Daylight! Legible! Huzzah!

Someone on some other website told me I should visit Presque Isle in Erie if I happened to be driving through, so I did and I’d sort of like my 40 minutes back, although I took this photo of a lighthouse:

Bravely warning sandcrabs away from the 25-mph park road!

I’m sure real lighthouse people (they have those, right?) could explain why it makes sense to put lighthouses somewhere other than right next to the water, but it’d probably be a long and boring explanation, so — you know.

I’m also now saying that I’m in the “northeast” and no longer in the “northern states”. It’s a fine line. A fine line that I’ve drawn between Ohio and Pennsylvania. And it was weird starting out driving in Bengals AM radio country and then traveling through Browns and Steelers territory before ending up in Bills AM radio land. It’s also weird how much of AM radio is now on FM.

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And I had this dream last night where I was rafting down a river with members of my family and we got to a spot that looked like a waterfall, but everyone else said it wasn’t, but I was pretty sure it was so I jumped out of the raft and then they all continued and it turned out to be a 20-foot waterfall and I called 911 and couldn’t quite figure out where I was (I thought I was in Central California in a river near a national park other than Yosemite, Sequoia, or Kings Canyon, but I couldn’t think of what that park would be called and then someone helpfully suggested it was “Hehla Park”, which meant “holy” in some unknown language, but that person didn’t know what he was talking about, so I disregarded), but then it turned out that no one got (physically) hurt, so I hung up.

Since no one demanded it, I’m providing it.

Best West Coast Campgrounds

1. Island Campground, Rogue-Umpqua (Day 16) – Riverside campsite, no mosquitoes, decent privacy, the sound of rushing water putting you to sleep…
2. La Wiss Wiss Campground, Mt. Rainier (Days 24-25) – Riverside campsite (fine, you had to go down a trail), few mosquitoes, decent privacy, and the sound of rushing water to… A little less private than Island, quite a bit bigger, which is why it’s #2 instead of #1, despite the benefit of providing potable water.
3. Dalles Campground, Mt. Rainier (Day 23) – Mt. Rainier has good campgrounds. For that matter, so far, everywhere that isn’t California has good campgrounds.

Worst campgrounds: Odessa in Oregon (although I shouldn’t complain about a campground that costs $0, it was pretty divey and there was no concierge service); Plaskett Creek at Big Sur (*no* privacy, no apparent understanding of boundaries by the people staying there, relatively loud, pretty crowded, $25/night).

Best West Coast Geographic Features

1. Waterfalls.
2. Peaks.
3. Rivers.

Best West Coast Restaurant Food (I haven’t been trying to eat in great restaurants or anything, just — you know)

1. Mi Chalateca, Federal Way (Day 30)
2. That Peruvian place in San Francisco, San Francisco (Day 5)
3. Round Table Pizza, South Lake Tahoe (Day 11) – All you can eat for $5.99!

Best West Coast Mountain

1. Mt. Rainier
2. Mt. Shuksan
3. Mt. Thielsen

Best West Coast Waterfall

1. Tunnel Falls, Columbia Gorge (Day 19) – They should blast tunnels behind *every* waterfall. Plus it was very pretty.
2. Nevada Fallsf, Yosemite (Day 10) – Probably the most angry waterfall I’ve seen in my life.
3. Fall Creek Falls, Rogue-Umpqua Scenic Byway (Day 17) – Like I sort of said yesterday, it reminded me of a secret waterfall you’d find on Kauai, only it was in Oregon.

Meh. Good enough.

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I have the trip broken down into four or five parts (West Coast, Northern States, Northeast, South, and Southwest — it’s four if I combine the Northern States with the Northeast) and the West Coast is now finished, which means I figure I can do some evaluation. And if you’re joining the game already in progress, maybe this will help catch up. If you want to.

Nice intro. Oh well. Here goes:

Best West Coast Hikes > 10 mi.

1. Glen Alpine Trail to Aloha Lake, Lake Tahoe (Day 12, 14 mi.) – Had everything. Except waterfalls. And there were bugs. But still: ever mile there was something new to look at that you hadn’t seen before, plus plenty of places to throw your hiking pulls on the rocks and jump into a lake.
2. Half Dome Trail, Yosemite (Day 10, 18 mi.) – It wasn’t fun, but it was kind of an accomplishment and I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t dang pretty.
3. Eagle Creek Trail to Tunnel Falls, Columbia Gorge (Day 19, 12 mi.) – The hike itself was kind of dull, at least until you got close to the big falls, but the payoff was huge and there were many waterfalls.

Best West Coast Hikes < 10 mi.

1. Bumpass Hell Trail, Lassen Volcanic National Park (Day 14, 4 mi.) – Kind of cheating in that the hike I did went beyond Bumpass Hell and I’m really just talking about the trail to Bumpass Hell and not the one that continues past it. Whatever. Great views of Brokeoff Mtn. and various mountain scenery for the first and last mile, interesting views (and odors) of hell for the second and third.
2. Fall Creek Falls, Rogue-Umpqua Scenic Byway (Day 17, 2 mi.) – If you took your basic Hawaii waterfall hike (e.g., Manoa Falls on O’ahu), removed all the people, then put it in Oregon, it would be this hike — which I liked a lot better than the hike to Manoa Falls.
3. Lassen Peak, Lassen Volcanic National Park (Day 15, 5 mi.) – Another hike that’s no fun, but ultimately pretty and rewarding. It’s kind of a steep one (2,000 feet elevation in 2.5 mi.), but it’s pretty cool to be on top of something 10,000 feet high. Some pretty nice views, too.

Best West Coast Drives

1. Rogue-Umpqua Scenic Byway, Oregon (Days 16-17) – Some awesome river gorges, a couple of very noteworthy mountain peaks, and trails leading off to waterfalls every four or five miles along the way. Highly, highly recommended.
2. Mt. Rainier (Days 23-24) – The wildflowers were great, the rivers were great, the road borderline breathtaking. And I need a better thesaurus. And every time I hear the word “breathtaking”, I think of that one Seinfeld episode where the doctor calls Elaine “breathtaking”. It wasn’t really a top-flite joke or anything, I just remember it.
3. Big Sur (Days 2-3) – I still think it’s a drive pretty much wasted if you don’t have a date with you and I didn’t really manage my routing very effectively while I was there. But still: pretty coastline! and not nearly as crowded as the Oregon Coast. Or as foggy.

Best West Coast Photos (That I Took on This Trip) (BTW, if you click on the link of the photo title, you’ll get a bigger version of the photo.)

1. Mt. Thielsen, Rogue-Umpqua Byway (Day 16) – I love photos with roads or trails in them, sorry. And this mountain was very surprising to me. And I guess I also like how the photo conveys, you know, a *road trip* and all.
2. Stream Fording on the Hoh River Trail, Olympic National Park (Day 29) – I like the action in this photo — it kind of moves the eye around a little bit. Most of the photos I take just show nature, which gets all static and boring, but my nephew is neither static nor boring.
3. Tunnel Falls, Columbia Gorge (Day 19) – I like feel like big, impressive nature stuff can be interacted with, which I guess is why I think it’s so cool that they blasted a hole behind this waterfall so that I could walk through it. And I like the big white line on the left side of the photo.
4. Vernal Falls, Yosemite (Day 10) – Mostly I just like the dark red-brown stripes in the granite that run parallell to the waterfall itself. If I could marry those stripes, I’d do it, so help me. I also like that this photo got taken at 6 AM — I’m amazed any time I have evidence of having been awake before 10.
5. Grass Lake, Desolation Wilderness/Lake Tahoe (Day 12) – Reflection + red mountains + blue sky + contrail + where’s-Waldo waterfall = pure gold. IMHO.

Right, so that’s it. Feel free to argue with me, especially on the photos — it’ll only make my ego grow stronger. If I get to it, I’ll post another West Coast Best-Of thing. If not, you didn’t miss much (”best things I vomited”, for instance).

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For example:

• It was 55 degrees on the Skagit (vs. 103 at Yosemite).
• The Skagit is all glacial melt. Like, in the morning it part of a glacier and a couple hours later you’re rafting on it. So the water was going to be cold regardless of air temperature.
• On the Tuolumne I was worried about getting wet because it would increase the intensity of the sun on my skin. On the Skagit I was worried about getting wet because of hypothermia.
• The Skagit has three rapids. Like, *three*.
• No helmets!
• You don’t really have to paddle ever, or turn, or know what “high-side” means.
• The rafts don’t have toe-holds for the guys up front.
• The most dangerous risk on the Skagit is, truly, getting whacked with a paddle by the person next to you during a boat-to-boat water fight.
• The water on the Skagit is light green.
• The river banks are covered with trees.
• You really don’t *need* a water-proof case for your camera, so long as you got a dry pocket somewhere.
• Five-year-olds can go on it, no problem.
• Well, except for hypothermia, no problem.

Relevant photos:

Speaking of waterproof cases — I really should’ve taken my camera out of mine.

And the color palette is a little different on the Skagit.

More than enough manpower to get through *these* rough waters.

Rafts, forelorn.

I appreciated our guide telling us that, yes, he was also freezing cold. And I was a little disappointed there were no animatronic hippos on the ride.

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Never been to the Sol Duc part of Olympic National Park before. Now I have. Was pretty, the waterfall was unusual, and the weather was rainy.  I kind of prefer the spelling of droughth with the h at the end. Should’ve used it in the title.

We camped out by the rain forest. Started raining during the night some time — which you sort of expect in a rain forest, I guess. Drove out of there and tried — nearly failed — to get breakfast in Forks. We were, though, able to verify that the town’s economy is still mostly Twilight-based. If only the author had visited before writing the books. So lame.

The hike up to Sol Duc falls was only 0.9 miles from the trailhead, well within tourist range, even with the rain. But on the plus side, it was the first time all trip I got to break out my rain gear, which is really good at keeping rain out. Which you’d think would be true of all rain gear, but alas.

Highway 101 at 12:11:16 on August 10th.

Sol Duc Falls, with impressive triple-cascade action!

You know it’s a tourist when he’s carrying a golf umbrella onto the trail.

And then the loch ness monster came and ate our car.

I guess they’d had a long droughth up here. And it’s not that hard for me to look back at my 106-degree Yosemite photos and think about the two averaging out.

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Figured I should play self-locomotion-unable tourist for a day. No hiking, no rafting, no biking, no swimming, just riding the shuttle bus around the valley and taking the most typical photos I could find. For a day. For one very hot, very crowded day (it was basically like being in Mexico City, but with waterfalls).

Here ‘goes.

The blurry bear-on-road photo: check!

Long-distance shot of Upper Yosemite Falls: check!

Photo of bus-riding tourist in front of Yosemite Falls: check! (Check out the long hair — lousy hippie!)

Photo of other tourist(s) taking photos of Yosemite Falls: check!

Shot of the river, because there’s a river there: check!

Photo of El Capitan taken from the cleverly named “Valley View” turn-out: check!

Photo of tourist taken from the tunnel viewpoint: check! (Oh, sorry, “vista point”.)

Typical shot of Bridal Veil Falls, with oddly cropped co-tourists: check!

Photo that tries to capture everything in Yosemite Valley all at once, as taken from Glacier Point: check!

Photo of Half Dome by itself, as if to accentuate its perceived profundity: check!

105 degrees, wall-to-wall people. Yosemite is fantastically beautiful, no doubt, and the valley presents it all on a very large scale. But man, the crowds…! Vince and Tammy recommended the Hetch Hetchy area, Sri talked about Tuolumne Meadows — I’m guessing I’d head there instead of the valley if I’m ever in the area again.

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When I got to Shalini and Raj’s loft in San Francisco, it turned out they and some of their SF friends were planning on rafting in Yosemite at the same time I was planning on being there. Then they invited me on their rafting trip with them. This is the story of that trip.

Actually, more just another blog post with photos, not so much a story. Trying to find the meet-up place for where the trip was supposed to begin *might* be a story, and props to Shalini for keeping the faith that I would make it on time (or close enough), a faith based on the fact that she and Duncan and I had found each other in the middle Cologne with, well, no fall-back options or connectivity possibilities. And it was well-placed faith. But probably still not much of a story.

Anyway, Chander-Bhan and their gang apparently try to one-up themselves with the next-harder rafting trip every year. This is the third year they’ve done it, so the river was selected because it was Class V. I think the Buller River in New Zealand might have been Class V — the level of death-likelihood seemed similar.

There is no plot line to this post and no amount of random fact-regurgitation on my part is going to change that. May as well get on with photos. Please note that the photos are not of the good parts of the trip. During the good parts, you’re usually paddling, holding on, and getting a face full of water, any of which preclude good photography.

One of these kids is not like the others. Actually two aren’t. But on the plus side, I now know how to say “you have a head wound” in Punjabi, Gujarati, and Tamil.

Sri, Dennis, me — 60% of our rafting crew. I’m guessing Shaan’s swimming somewhere and our guide is smoking a joint in an air pocket under the raft. Image is slanty in order to imply something’s happening — like in a Bourne movie.

The wet lens probably conveys something accurately.

Lunch break. This happened just right after the wildest part of the river — which would’ve been a better photo, if only I wasn’t paddling, holding on, and getting a face full of water.

The bad part is that this isn’t Sri — my photo of him didn’t take until he splashed (apologies!). Cool shadow, though, IIDSSM.

Other random facts that don’t make this post a story:

• The run starts below the Hetch Hetchy reservoir and is only made possible by whoever it is releasing water out of the reservoir.
• The scariest part of the trip was the bus ride down the steep, one-lane dirt road to the put-in point.
• Despite being Class V, it didn’t seem all that daunting to me. OTOH, I suppose anything that you survive readily enough without cracking your head on anything seems un-daunting in retrospect.
• Still, rafting down the Skagit is going to be like the Jungle Cruise at Disneyland by comparison. Or maybe the Tuolumne was Jungle Cruise and Skagit will be It’s a Small World.
• Ours was the only boat without any accidental swimmers.
• But we did seem to get stuck on rocks a lot.
• I still wonder whether the accidental swimmers don’t get more out of the experience.
• I got a pretty good sunburn on my legs — next time, wear pants!

Fine with me.

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