I just had a great 3-day weekend.

My old car kicked the bucket about two and a half weeks ago, so I was hitching rides to work off of my ever-gracious roommate Dan (no, not that Dan). I was getting kind of stressed about getting a car, since it's kind of a catch-22 situation: in order to get a good car, you need to look at a number of cars, which involves driving around, which is precisely something that you can't do while you're looking to buy a car. But after a great deal of research, stress, and failed attempts, on Saturday afternoon I got a red 1996 VW Cabrio. It's a shiny red convertible with four black leather seats, and somehow plenty of space all around and in the trunk while taking up almost no room. The sticker price was $9000, but Vanessa and I talked them down to $5800! Sweet. We then decided to take celebratory road trip.

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It was already getting late after we finished all the paperwork, so we grabbed a bite to eat (I had a Cuban Pork Burrito -- the first burrito I've ever had with banana in it, but it was very good) and headed up through the city (where we parked V's car) and headed over the Golden Gate bridge with the top down. It was freezing but wow was it amazing to see the bridge's underside like that -- just looking straight up into it. V put it well: "other cars are so oppressed!"

We twisted and winded along route 1 for a bit, then we were almost out of gas and decided to cut on over to Petaluma to refuel. There, we were both feeling kind of sleepy, so we got ourselves a cheap motel, hung out in a local bar rather uneventfully, and crashed.

The next day was fabulously exciting: we woke up, got ourselves ready, drove north a bit, and stopped after an hour for some breakfasty things, like a cold drink. We ran into a Borders bookstore and grabbed a Let's Go: California Guide and two tasty smoothies. Putting the top down, we continued north on 101 until 128, at which point we decided it would be fabulous to go on route 1 during the day; so we headed west on 128. This was a beautiful drive, all winding through the mountains, and with wineries every few hundred feet. We stopped at a few, tasted, bought a bottle, and moved on. It was lots of fun and very classy. We had lunch at a burger joint near Boonsville: apparently there's a whole local dialect that was invented to make it difficult for outsiders to understand them, but nobody speaks it anymore: I guess secret handshakes only last so long. =)

We stopped in Mendocino for a bit to look around: it was an interesting mix of beautifully dilapadated houses (like in Vermont and Europe) and shiny BMW roadsters. The hotels were mostly full-up up to Mendocino, but it seemed that north of that bookings were pretty open: I guess most people don't take three day weekends that are that hardcore. =) In Mendocino, we filled up with gas at the first full-service-only gas station I'd been to in years. The attendant was a great guy: we talked for a while and he showed me what was what in my car (since I had just gotten it!). We drove off northbound along the coast and stopped a few times to walk on the beach, clamber up and down cliffs, and to watch the sun set. (at one point, the sun was behind a big cloud with two openings and the light was coming through red: "evil masked sunset!")

We winded and twisted and got all the way to the end of Route 1 (!), where it merges into 101. I hadn't known that 1 even ended - I'd always thought it went all the way to Canada!

We passed a drive-thru tree: it turns out that there are many. We skipped the Avenue of the Giants, since it was dark by then. We motored on by Garberville, stopping just for some tasty Hostess Apple Pie (and some not-so-tasty Tijuana Mama sausage: disgustingly reconstituted meat with Tabasco paste!). We kept on truckin' till Eureka with hardly a stop; we found a really cheap motel, but as we drove in we saw someone staring at us from behind curtains and the signs were all badly painted, so we got a little freaked out and we picked a slightly nicer place (although still cheap - go AAA!). We fell asleep right away, sans dinner.

We were now many hundreds of miles away from home on our last day and knew it would be a bit of a haul to get back; nonetheless, we spent a chunk of the morning looking around Eureka - spotting a paper mill's smokestack on the edge of the town, we went in for a closer look. Vanessa works for Fiber Futures and deals with pulping all day long, so this presented itself as a fabulous first opportunity to see a mill up and close. I didn't think we stood much of a chance of getting an impromptu tour (and neither, apparently, did the receptionist who greeted us), but Vanessa worked her magic and before I knew it we had on hardhats and goggles and were introduced to one of the plant's engineers. He sat us down for about an hour, one-on-two (they don't get many visitors!) to explain the pulping process used at the plant, which turns out to be the only one on the continent to use a Totally Chlorine Free (TCF) bleaching process! We then went for another two hours walking around various parts of the plant. Some parts smelled so bad I almost retched on the spot; pipes were openly spewing red and green solvents onto metal grates that were getting heavily discolored. The machinery was pretty fantastic, though: they produce hundreds of tons of pulp every day. There were dozens upon dozens of hundred-thousand gallon mixer tanks everywhere. Insanity. Our engineer opened up machines and let us feel pulp at various stages of processing. The coolest, in my opinion, was the cutter and baler: these absolutely huge sheets of paper come flying out of the end of this one machine and are cut into regular slats, stacked, enclosed in a thick sheet of paper, wire-wrapped into a bale, and then are stacked four bales high -- almost all of this is completely automatic and the machinery was just dizzying to watch. It turns out that the plant generates just about all of its own energy by burning the lignin (the sticky stuff that keeps trees together and that also yellows newspaper: they remove it) and using the heat to power turbines. Amazing. They also reuse nearly all of their chemicals.

After the paper mill tour, we drove to Humboldt to look at their sustainable house, which basically uses almost no water, almost no electricity, and has spiffy things like an excercise bike that powers a television (pedal for 10 minutes to watch a half-hour show). It all sounds a little silly until I look at my own house's power bill: last month it was over $600. Eep.

After seeing the sustainable house, we grabbed lunch in Eureka and then just drilled straight back home: four and a half hours before getting back to Vanessa's place I predicted our time of arrival as 10:10pm. We got in at 10:09pm with about 30 seconds to go. =)

So my car works, I love that it's a convertible and is safe, and I had a fabulous extended weekend. Hurrah!