We woke up in the motel room to the phone ringing. It was housekeeping saying that check out time was 11:00. Samantha took a shower while we gathered up our stuff. We all snuck out and then Samantha went back and returned the key and such. We put our stuff back into the car. It was drizzly and kind of gross, I lent Sammie my sweater because she was cold. We decided to leave Eureka and eat breakfast in Arcata. Samantha wanted a little bistro, but after walking around the plaza (there was some sort of harvest festival going on) we decided to go to this cool pizza place (the same place that Daniela and I went on our trip). We also stayed in the same motel that Daniela and I had stayed in. Through the whole trip, we would kind of get off the right path and then get back to where we started after a big detour. Last English class Molly was talking about the symbolic nature of journeys, and I couldn’t help feeling that it was symbolic that all we could seem to do was to get back to where we started.
Well, we got cheese sticks and a Mediterranean pizza, it was de-freaking-licious. We couldn’t finish it all, so we went back to the car and dropped off the three pieces that we couldn’t finish. That pizza was SO filling, it was weird. But anyway, it was raining, so we donned our rain gear. I got into my trenchcoat and I got out my umbrella for Sammie and Steve. We made our way back to my heaven, aka Tin Can Mailman, this titanic used bookstore. We stayed there for like an hour and a half, we found all these cool books. Here’s what I found:
The Divine Comedy by Dante. It was a much more readable translation, has bigger print, and has big illustrations. The book is 8.5×11″
Erewhon by Samuel Butler: I got this because it’s Samantha’s favorite book.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll: I’ve always wanted to read these, mostly because of how many ways they’ve been interpreted and the allusions to this book in The Matrix.
Civilization and Its Discontents by Sigmund Freud: I’ve always wanted to read this, I’m into Freud.
Totem and Taboo by Sigmund Freud: I’ve always wanted to read this, it’s Freud’s theories about how man developed from a tribal society into modern society.
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley: A classic. Enough said.
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley: Anus Face lost my pristine new copy of this book so I had to get another. This copy, although used, looks new and has no marks in it.
Beowulf, a verse translation by Michael Alexander: I’m going to be forced to read this sometime in my education, so why not get it over with.
The Medium is the Massage by Marhsall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore: My old mentor / history teacher Mike Muldoon recommended this book to me so when I saw it on the shelf I had to pick it up.
The Outsider (The Stranger) by Albert Camus: This is a different translation of Camus’ “L’Etranger” (The Stranger). The sentence structure is completely different. In the translation I’ve read, the first paragraph is:
“Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know. I got a telegram from the home: ‘Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours.’ That doesn’t mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday.”
In this translation it’s:
“Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday: I can’t be sure. The telegram from the Home says: Your mother passed away. Funeral tomorrow. Deep sympathy. Which leaves the matter doubtful;it could have been yesterday.
Very strange. So I’m going to have to read the other translation.
I also got a different edition of The Stranger, so on this trip I bought three copies of it total. I like collecting other editions of my favorite books, that way I can lend them out and not feel like I’ll never get them back and have to buy them again.
$50 or so later, we all went back to the car and dropped off our books. We decided to check out the bead shop, so we walked around the plaza to it. They had some really cool beads (as always) but didn’t have any cool skull beads. Sammie got a platypus bead and a panda bead. After that we were meandering back to the car when this incident took place.
Steve: “I think that this is the weirdest town I’ve ever been in.”
Me: “You know, you’re really sheltered.”
Steve (in this really angry tone): “You know, why don’t you suck my cock.”
Samantha tried to pacify him with a “Steve…” We walked back to the car in silence.
I didn’t mean it to be rude at all, I just can’t help but to be blasé about Arcata. After you go to New York or any big city like that, Arcata is more of a maintenance level of weirdness. Well anyway, we got back to the car and I asked where we decided on going. We’d been talking earlier about going to this fabric shop or maybe this role playing game shop that we’d passed the day before but it’d been closed. We kind of decided on the fabric shop, but more as an ostensible destination. As we neared the highway on-ramp (it was harder to find than I thought and we drove around for a while before we found it), Steve apologized for his outburst. I really didn’t mind, I joked in all truthfulness that an outburst was better (to my taste) than little things that grate on my nerves all day. On the way towards Eureka we saw for about the third time this sign for a corn maze and we decided to go to it after we were done in Eureka. We decided to go to Eureka’s Old Town. I’d never been there and wanted to check it out. It was pretty cool, I wish we’d had the camera, but I put it in my suitcase in the morning and I’d forgotten to take it out all day. It was really beautiful, there were little plazas and such. Sammie said that it reminded her of Rochester, N.Y. There are myriad towns in the East that look like that. The town around where my cousin Patty lives is like that. Well anyway, we went to the waterfront and found a little map to discover where the bathrooms were. On the way there we found this little chocolate shop. After using the bathrooms we went into this gallery that was before the chocolate shop, there were some kind of hackneyed square abstract paintings. They were very bland and lacked a lot of lines or color…they were mostly all one color. The next part of the gallery was occupied with these paintings by this lady who had a vast repertoire of subject matter: flowers, volcanoes, and waterfalls. I was really tempted to leave a mean message in the guest book, but instead I wrote: “I like your use of color, but some variation in subject matter would be refreshing.” We were quite done with the gallery, so we meandered to the chocolate store next door. Sammie and Steve loaded up on the delicious chocolates, I got a dark chocolate bar with almonds. It was de-freaking-licious, as were all the chocolate creations. We meandered down towards the waterfront. It was really beautiful, but very cold and windy. Eventually we got too cold to enjoy the place and walked back to the car. We were kind of famished and the car smelled of that delicious pizza leftovers, so we all had some but got filled up too fast to finish our pieces. I think it was all the chocolate we’d eaten. We put our half-eaten pieces back into the tin foil, I started the car, and we drove off towards the corn maze. It was just above Arcata, and we followed signs on orange paper plates through this maze of streets bordered by giant fields west of 101. We were joking that once we had successfully followed the plates, someone would just come up and say “You finished our maze! Now give us $5.” Lol.
We arrived at the place and I dug out the camera, because we had to preserve our experience on film. None of us had ever done a corn maze before, so we were all “I hope it’s cool!” We went into this barn and bought our tickets ($3 a piece), and continued to the maze. Here’s the beginning of it:
This is the inside of the maze:
It would have been cool had it been bigger. It wasn’t really a labyrinth (as it should have been), there were just animal shapes cut into it that all fit together. They even gave us a map. It was really run down and everything was dead, but the paths of the maze were still recognizable. We ended up spending about a half hour in it (not lost, but just kind of walking around looking at things). We agreed that it would have been cooler had it been dark.
We decided that we were done, and walked towards the exit. We came into this one area with this guy and two girls sitting on these dilapidated lawn chairs. “You guys lost?” they asked us playfully? “Yeah, we’ve been in here for days…” I believe we responded. Talking to those people was pretty much the highlight of the whole maze experience, but it was fun anyways. We were all really tired. Steve was the least tired because he was the first to doze off, I was the second most tired because I’d drifted in and out of sleep, and Sammie was the most tired because she didn’t really sleep at all.
Steve had had a craving for ice cream all day, so we decided to try to find this ice cream store that we all had vague memories of eating at. We surmised that it was in Arcata. I’d eaten at it on one of the Drift field trips and Sammie had been there on this one field trip with Letko. The sun was setting and I stopped to take a picture of this house:
The sunset was so incredibly beautiful I had to pull off to the side of the road and take some pictures of it. Steve took some too. I took this one:
We got back onto the freeway and reached the Arcata plaza in record time since it was so close to the maze. Deciding that the ice cream place of our memories was in the Jacoby’s Storehouse building, we walked in and got some yummy ice cream. I got a waffle cone of “Monster Mash,” Steve got strawberry sherbert, and I don’t remember what Samantha got. We went outside and I took some pics of the square. It was early evening then, but since I took them without the flash it looks much earlier.
I don’t know why the colors came out so funky in this one:
We walked into the center of the plaza to finish our ice cream. I couldn’t finish mine, I had to throw half of it away. I’d eaten waaay too much stuff that day. We were really cold so we go into the car and blasted the heat once we were done with our ice cream. With that, we began the drive back to Crescent City. We got onto the freeway, I turned on my cruise control and we were set.
I was a bit concerned about only having a quarter of a tank of gas, but we were going and I didn’t want to stop. I started to feel a bit sick, but just tried to concentrate on the music. Somewhere below Klamath, Samantha began to feel queasy. We stopped for a while and sat in the darkness. We were all so tired. After about fifteen minutes we started going again. At the top of this one hill I had everyone get out and stand on the median on the top of the hill. It’s like the most beautiful place ever. But anyway, we kept going and got to Klamath. I was pretty low on gas so we stopped at this little café and asked if there was a gas station open. There wasn’t. Sammie used the bathroom, and we continued on. Whatever happened, it couldn’t be too bad. We had water, coats, and a flashlight. We finally reached Crescent City. I couldn’t believe it was over. It was such an ordeal, we had so much fun, did so much stuff…it was unbelievable. I dropped Sammie and Steve off and continued on to my house. I was so tired. My stuff from Xoxide.com had arrived, my light-up keyboard, my cold cathode lights for my case, and my voice recognition headset. I got everything out of my car and watched Y Tu Mama Tambien as I installed my cold cathode lights like a somnambulist. I blogged about the first day of the trip, worked on my website, and got to sleep around two. I woke up the next morning and started this post after I showered. I watched Run Lola Run and now I’m watching eXistenZ. I have to write my English essay today and wash my clothes. I think I’m going to get started on washing my clothes. If there are mistakes in this post, I apologize. I’m hungry and I need to get stuff done, and writing this post was a gigantic effort. Proofreading it is just too much for today.