Raven's Roads
Living an interesting life: the travels and musings
of motorcycling author Linda R. Moore

One of the most fascinating parts about Locke was the many alleys that slink between buildings. There must have been almost a dozen in the tiny main street. They mostly seem to lead to private gardens, so I didn’t actually go in, but I took some pictures. I like tunnels. :) (more…)

It started with a simple forum post on St.N: “Does anyone live in Lodi?” A few people raised their hands, and a date was set to meet for lunch in Locke. (more…)

We’re not sure what they were doing, but one of the rooms down from us had ejected all its furniture. Maybe they were going for the “outdoor living” style.

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Last week after putting a deposit on the RV we headed down 99 to Merced, where we thought we would be spending the night. We had stayed in Tracy, Stockton (two different motels), Fremont, Sunnyvale and Santa Clara by that stage, and wanted to do something different. However, when we got to Merced we didn’t like the look of the motel/area so we carried on south to Turlock, a town neither of us had ever heard of before. (more…)

There are some places you just never want your motorcycle to stop. Here is an example: on northbound 280, in the median, about one and a half feet from traffic hurtling towards San Francsico.

Does anybody notice anything a little bit odd about the rear of my motorcycle? You know, like the pieces missing? The tail light for example? And the licence plate? (more…)

20 July 2007

On the 20th of July, San Jose threw a party to celebrate its 130th anniversary (as you do). The venue was the historic Luis Maria Peralta adobe–the same one I’d visited on no less than four separate occasions before, each time unable to get in because it was closed. Right! I decided. I am going to see what’s in there. Don decided to tag along too. (more…)

27/28 August 2007

Normally, the only total eclipses I see are those that occur when a cat passes between me and my reading lamp. Unlike Mother Nature, these can typically be hurried along with a little shove.

However, when I heard that there’d be a total eclipse of the moon early on Tuesday morning, I asked Don if he’d be up for a camping trip. He usually is, so we got our kit together and set off down to Gilroy and the campground at Coyote Lake. We picked up the start of the commute–heavy traffic in heavy heat–but as soon as our exit came up we were out in open farmland which quickly segued into rolling hills and delicious twisty roads shaded by trees. Much better!

The campground is down a rather narrow lane with some steep switchbacks. There was nobody at the entrance station so we swooped around the large campground twice before settling on a space right beside what would have been the lake if they weren’t all drying out. Then we sat and chilled for a little while and began to set up the tent until an officious git nice ranger came and whined at us for not paying yet. Now, we’ve been camping at Santa Clara County campgrounds a dozen times over the last few years, and not once have we been hassled to pay before we set up tent. I guess he thought we were going to set up our tent, have a quicky, then leave.

I went off to pay. There was still nobody at the entrance station, but I used the machine. Since they didn’t provide pens and I didn’t have one I then had to loop around the campground yet again to borrow a pen from Don. I’m sure the approximately three other campers at the site were glad that the crazy bikers were done riding round the perimeter and finally settled with an entire quarter of the campground to themselves.

We settled in. Small creatures rustled. Lizards sunned themselves, one so tiny that it took refuge under my shoe. A pair of black-tailed deer sauntered out of the woodland and across the stretch of green that used to be a lake (or, more accurately, a reservoir). A large number of annoying buzzy creatures annoyingly buzzed us. Don put charcoal in the fire pit and warmed up a can of stew.

I sat, watched, relaxed as the setting sun painted the dried-out grass glow a mellow gold. The campground was deliciously quiet and peaceful and it was just fine to sit there, soaking up the quiet.

      

Then the moon rose, a great white disk that is almost impossible to photograph with my camera. I got one “good” shot. Good-bye sun, hello moon. We stayed outside until it became chilly, reading by the light of our Borg earpieces. Then we settled in, reading some more, but I was tired and passed out early. I had taken care to learn from past mistakes and positioned my inflatable mattress so that it was level and my head was uphill.

Learning from past experience, I had also brought my own pillow along. And what a difference that made. I slept for hours, waking up briefly to hear a coyote’s eerie song echoing across the valley, and then again not until the moon was directly overhead and starting to be eclipsed. I woke Don up and we went to watch.

An eclipsed moon is much like an eclipsed sun in the early stage, though you don’t risk going blind if you look at it directly. An ever-growing chunk is eaten away, turning it into a crescent. The sky grows darker and darker, but the crickets don’t stop their song. More and more stars are visible, and we saw the Milky Way. I lay back on my bike, watching as the heart of our galaxy became visible, a fuzzy band filled with millions of stars. Three meteorites blazed through the sky like silent rockets on the Fourth of July.

When the eclipse becomes total, the moon is still visible. Its color is red, catching whatever reflected light there is from the Earth. We stayed, watching, on the balmy night until we were too tired to continue. We slid on the rain fly, and twenty minutes before totality were once again fast asleep.

I awoke at eight, and it was already eighty degrees. Three hours later it was 120 degrees inside the tent. The day promised only raw, impossible heat and our site had little shade. We had done what we aimed to do: we had witnessed the moon’s darkness, and thus we went home.

I’m getting tired of moving home. I’ve been moving home for pretty much nine months now. I’ve been moving home for so long that people are starting to believe we won’t ever move out. I’m especially getting tired of traipsing over to the storage shed, a roughly 200 mile round trip in what, today, was over 100-degree heat.

But still…it’s possible to enjoy the ride.

Here are some of the pluses. The traffic around Tracy caused by roadworks is more or less gone. Gasoline was 20c/gallon cheaper there than at home. A shared burger from a chain I’d never tried before, Nation’s Giant, tasted good and didn’t leave me feeling as though I were about to explode. Since they sold pie, too, I snuck a slice of pumpkin pie into the cooler; Don was most chuffed when I brought it out a few hours later. Pumpkin pie is hard to come by in August.

We stashed our stuff and did what construction was required. Several hours and half a gallon of water later, we went home. On the way home we followed Santa in a pick-up truck; he looked as though he had heat stroke, or a hangover. Then we had an encounter with a giant chicken.

I came up with an innovative solution to doing physical labor in ridiculous heat. I slipped one of the ice pads from the cooler under my baseball cap for a while, then let Don do the same. It was wonderful, until we realized that the pad had burst. Blue goo oozed out. We therefore had sticky, blue goo hair all the way home, and I had something to giggle about.

Luckily, Chicken Woman didn’t notice.

11 August 2007

No matter how long you’ve lived in a place, if you keep your eyes open it can still find a way to surprise you. That’s the key to a thirty-minute adventure: going somewhere ordinary and watching until you start noticing the things that are so beautiful in their ordinariness. It could be the darting birds, the glimmer of light on rippling water…or even the crocodiles.

I needed to take a Photo Friday picture for the “wet” theme, and knew exactly what I wanted. There are several fountains down at the Sunnyvale Community Center, and one of them would be mine.

I parked up my bike, starting to relax as I got out into the fresh warm air. The first fountain is near the little theatre, and contains a sculpture dedicated to the passage of time. I like sculpture for its forms; I am sure the sculptor had his own ideas, but I like it because I can appreciate and feel the energy that went into its creation.

This fountain is also a veterans’ memorial and another nearby sculpture is called “Matrix.” I photographed it mostly because I like The Matrix. (I’m easily amused.)

Wandering on, I came to the lake with a handy-dandy sign stating that one complete lap was a third of a mile. While my body was screaming for exercise, I promised it that it really didn’t want to go jogging in motorcycle boots and a heavy jacket. I had my photographs by now, of course, so I found myself a nice bench where i could sit down to be still for a while. It’s easy to get into a contemplative state with the ripples of the water shimmering hypnotically in front of you and a gentle breeze blowing. Swallows dippeed their beaks into the water–were they taking sips of water? Catching flies? I have no idea, but their darting flight was fun to watch and a detail easily missed during a casual walk around the pool.

      

It was then that I saw the Wild Crocodiles of Sunnyvale.

They were floating around merrily, their glassy eyes glinting in the sun: Two motorized crocodile heads, bumbling around the lake.

They brightened up my day.

You know, the one where Lysander loves Hermia and vice versa, and Helena loves Demetrius but not vice versa, and Theseus has a fiancée who’s reluctant, and they end up prancing around with donkey-headed ponces in the forest?

I went to see A Midsummer Night’s Dream last night, a performance put on by SF Shakes. They’ve been around for twenty-five years and each summer they do a series of free performances in various towns. Their mission is to make Shakespeare accessible to all and among other things they run summer Shakespeare camps for kids and do performances in schools.

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