An independent Independence Day July 1. - 14., 2002 took place independently of crowds, and independently tested our dependence on our Wagon.

	Californian Frogtown has bronze plaques embedded in sidewalks just like in Hollywood, but slimy amphibians are the stars here.

	Ancient coach at Columbia, CA one of the exhibits of historical downtown in this gold mining center is this well vented means of transportation

We spend the Independence Day in Europe last year, and so this year was my first opportunity to celebrate the occasion. Most people party in parades, at feasts and fireworks. Yet you know by now how little we favor crowded scenes; what more, my esteemed employer had figured that no one would be working on Friday anyway, and declared the whole day off -- it could not turn out in any way but with us celebrating our independence by independently riding off into a wilderness.

We wanted to stop for a dinner in "Frogtown" - Angels Camp, whose annual races in frog jumping were made famous by Mark Twain's story "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County". Alas, though sidewalks were plastered with plaques bearing names of frog stars, decent food was nowhere to be found. Also in a historic town of Columbia only a few miles farther, it was quiet like before a thunderstorm. We obeyed a sign saying "Horse Drawn Vehicles Only" and parked outside the western-style downtown, amazingly devoid of tourists. The only buzz was caused by Beautification Committee, who were distributing flags and banners, discussing last arrangements for tomorrow's celebrations next to a highly polished fire engine. Fortunately for us, Lickskillet Cafe was open and thus we were not to not perish by starvation there.

	Clark Fork, Stanislaus NF For scale, this waterfall picture also contains yours truly -- in the upper left corner

	Up is the easy direction Hippo climbing up a real rock

Later that night, we casually drove through smoke dragging around Pinecrest Lake. Since last year we know that the forest hides a huge official campground, at such times full of enthusiasts eager to consume "naturally" barbecued sausages, a source of the thick air. Therefore, we headed straight for our familiar spot on a hill on the windward side of the lake. Our options were simple this year -- all fires were banned (unless we wished to get ourselves smoked in some officially safeguarded place), so we brought only a few "cold" pieces for breakfast. We enjoyed the morning after, immersed in quiet, uncivilized nature. Animals here don't fear people much, and sometimes venture closer to have a look. A tiny bird kept tweeting inquiringly and hopped on branches lower and lower, right into Sid's reach. Sure he had seen a bear before, but never a bald one!!!

Stanislaus National Forest covers a giant area. Last time, we only nibbled on a little bit, and so this year our choice went for Clark Fork. Following up a creek, we drove to a road's dead end, where the Wilderness begins (that is, a place where nobody patrols and you cannot really count on being rescued, and if at all, then expect to pay for it). There, Sid - completely voluntarily - chose his own fate, read: his first rock to climb. It took us a while to fiddle with top ropes so that they'd comfortably hold a Hippo, then we rappelled through a corner and tried to climb back up. I'd rate it a nice Five (5.8 on a US scale). I wondered what a "live" rock would do with Sid who's only used to hard, bolted holds in a gym. Going down turned out much more taxing on his mind; Sid's squeaking reminded me of my beginner's horrors of sticking out my butt into the void and relying on a piece of line. Going upwards is amazingly easier and Sid, too, worked it out in a grand style.

	I won't jump into this!!! We only dared to cool our feet and our heads with this icy water.

	Sonora Pass a picturesque landscape of Sierra Nevada

After such an effort, we felt like cooling off in a local creek. Yes, it was cold enough -- even to such extent that our ideas of taking a bath resulted in washing our feet - and heads. Sid kept showing off, threatened to throw me into a pool, but in the end the only thing he managed was hurting his back. Suits him right, now he knows that not only arguments of his wife have some weight.

Yet on a second day at Stanislaus, we did not feel at ease, for something urged us to move on. We wanted somewhere "up on a hill"; since we prefer extremes, and all seasonal roads are open now in the middle of summer, we picked the highest one in California. It actually gets above 11,000 feet elevation (~3.5 km). It's specialty is a view over Bishop area to a large part of Sierra Nevada mountain range, and also ancient pines (Pinus langaeva) at "Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest".

The whole landscape feels very rough. Altitude and desert climate don't favor almost any vegetation, the mountains are almost bare to a bone -- mostly some brown sheet rock, sometimes replaced by a white mountain - a whole hill made of pure limestone. Majority of people suffice themselves with a lookout at the end of a paved road -- not so my Hippo. We had to endure clattering over several miles of a dirt road, up to a locked gate of a research station. We had to walk to a nearest cliff to see the valley below. Unfortunately due to a hot weather, haze filled the air and the most interesting part of the viewpoint was the desert itself. When I glimpsed an orange flash under my feet and a closer look revealed only a boring, gray grasshopper, I though that just I contracted an advanced stage of "altitude sickness" with hallucinations (my head was indeed quite spinning). But Sid also noticed it in a while and explained the phenomenon thus: the locust was reinforcing its jumping with a pair of bright orange wings.

	Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest is a dried out, desert wilderness some 2 miles above sea level.

	The old and the young Part of this pine has died (and will weather many centuries), while the live section is thick with needles and cones.

We turned back, stopping at Patriarch Grove and taking a walk among these ancient pines. They really have bristly cones, a very thick growth of needles and extremely hard wood -- fallen trees had deeply weathered structure, but looked very tough. These trees are believed to be older than oldest sequoias; due to an unfriendly environment they grow for about 40 days in a year, hence very slowly, and survive millennia. The oldest pine is said to have lasted so far 47 centuries and is supposedly the oldest known tree in the world. I was most fascinated by the fact that anything lives here at all. We had spent two previous nights at about 6,000 feet (so we should have been adapted to a higher elevation), but still my head was spinning and I kept wheezing like an old steam engine.

We are probably crazy, but sometime about then we began to feel homesick after our house with a pool (obviously we're still romancing with our house). Although it was only Friday evening, a decision fell to reach Tehachapi and detour nicely through California Valley home on the next day. Our favorite Tehachapi Travelodge offered only smoking rooms (yuck), and we had to take the competition. We had more luck at Best Western, taking a room upstairs from a card playing quartet of old men. I had thought that these characters only thrive in Czech pubs of the lowest class, but here they were, in a hotel room by an open window, four adorable old geezers in white undershirts (it was really hot), immersed in a card game.

Perhaps and old witch was reading our fate from her cards just next door. When we rolled out of our room, encrusted with our stuff and civilized by a double bath (evening and morning) after three days outdoors, we reached our car and Sid just gave out a howl. Yes, one of the tires was flat. He toiled a bit with our foot pump, then we crawled over a few feet of parking lot to a neighboring gas station (air out of order), then to the next one. Compressor pressure revealed a relatively serious damage -- air was escaping from the tire, hissing loudly. It was clear we would not make it far this way, and a nice lady at the station told us of a nearest repair shop. There we left our wagon to meet its fate and went to Burger King for breakfast. Not that we would suddenly lust for a burger; there simply was nothing else in walking distance.

	Ancient pine has seen many centuries

	Oaks near California Valley combined with sun overhead create this shadows of extreme contrast

They fixed our ailing wagon for twelve dollars and we hurried around the railroad loop towards California Valley. There we started to notice that our wagon smelled funny, but we were not able to find out what was causing it. A few miles farther, our air conditioner suddenly broke down and a needle on the engine thermometer attempted to roll itself around the upper stop. Besides a boiling radiator, everything else seemed in order. We waited for it to cool down a bit, then added water to a filler marked "COOLANT", and tried to drive some. We were boiling again after two miles. We repeated this trick once more, with even less success, praying for a spot on the road shaded by some trees, and ditched it on the next suitable place.

Two bikers stopped first. One had an awesome beard, the other one was completely hairless. Interested, they opened multiple fillers on our engine and exclaimed that it was strange indeed. They promised to call help, as soon as they'd get to any signal. We don't have a cellular phone just because of this -- in places where we would need it, like in a middle of lifeless desert, there is never any signal. In towns (with signal), there are phone booths that we can use to call toll free. Most services etc. have "1-800" numbers (a toll-free call) and besides that, we can always charge our calls to our home phone bill (hence we don't need to keep change to feed the machine). Well, these chaps promised to call AAA (our roadside assistance company), and we prepared for a long wait in a shade across the road. Not that we would despise our wagon so much, but we discovered a dead skunk maliciously hiding behind the nearest tree. It was not smelling skunky, but it this heat we had no doubts it would soon start to decompose and reek.

Two hours later, though unmoving in our shade, we had enough of waiting in the midday heat. Cars kept stopping and people kept offering water and help, but we had not need for more. Finally, our family council decided to try drive a little and see what develops. As we drove, the car kept cooling its engine properly, until we reached Paso Robles. There we tried to cancel a service request with AAA, who claimed not to have us on their list - there was nothing to cancel. I wonder if AAA messed up their records or if those two guys let is pass. I consider the latter improbable -- people here don't tend to abandon fellow drivers to expire in a desert. But our wagon did not like it in the town. Sometimes the thermometer hit the ceiling, only to pull it down again (perhaps it had been doing this for a while already, but we did not notice it until near California Valley). However, on an Independence Day weekend, we had no chance to find an open repair shop.

	Two corpses A dead skunk is peeking out behind the tree...

	Sunset at Stanislaus National Forest A mountain on a horizon is Mount Diablo, some 80 miles away, almost at the ocean coast

It seemed most rational to wait for a cooler evening (we would not dare to turn on our air conditioner again, and it was well over hundred outside) inside a pleasant restaurant named Odyssey World Cafe. They sell food over a counter, but you can take it and sit down in the restaurant's cozy room -- with rugs, bookcases, wooden furniture. We topped our dinner with two "smoothies", and thus impregnated drove out on our remaining 200 miles. We even tried the A/C and our wagon seemed happy all the way home, giving us trouble only when we reached a city.

We busied ourselves on Sunday with activities that we call "living in our house" -- we splashed in our pool, did some gardening, washed clothes, napped, ate, cleaned up slowly, browsed the internet and read books. Relaxing.

Sid took our car to Tony's on Monday -- he found a considerable congregation of the Czech community there, for we were by far not the only ones who "boiled" over the weekend. Tony fixed the problem easily -- for some reason one must put water in the radiator not through a filler marked thus, but via an inconspicuous tube on a side... well, such are the miracles of Japanese technology. Hence it turned out that the only thing ailing our poor wagon was a mighty thirst.

Copyright © 2002-2005 by Carol & Sid Paral. All rights reserved.