On The Oregon Trail (Part 1)

I took a race/vacation trip this last weekend up to Eugene, OR, to both meet up with some running forum friends as well as get in a little sightseeing.

Google maps out the journey from my house to Eugene, OR, at right about 500 miles (anyone want to break out the Proclaimers song right about now?) My plan was to initially was to ease on up there, bunk down at a hotel in extreme northern California or southern Oregon, and ease into Eugene in the morning to the expo first thing to sign up (I had missed the deadline for online registration.)

The trip started off in herky-jerky fashion. I got going about an hour later than I wanted to, and ended up having to backtrack to my house when I found out the AAA map vending machine I had tried to proffer a Northern California map from indicated I had an expired membership card.

Amazing that I had been traveling with my expired card pretty much since last September, so it was fortunate I discovered this before heading off for more remote parts of the country. I was even more fortunate to actually locate my newest membership card (still glued into its cardboard template in the original mailing...kinda’ embarassing, actually.)

Can you imagine being stuck 20 miles out of Weed (cannibis jokes aside, the town was named for Abner Weed, who owned the local lumber mill) pleading my case before with a skeptical tow truck driver staring at my expired AAA card that I did fork over the annual membership dues?

The northern Central Valley of California is much like its southern half in that it’s something of a boring drive. The first eye-catching thing that grabs you, though it is a little hard to see from the interstate, is in Redding where the Sundial Bridge resides.

The Sundial Bridge is a pedestrian bridge designed by Spanish architect/engineer Santiago Calatrava and closely resembles his Puente del Alamillo bridge he designed for Expo 92 in Seville. The bridge, which resides at the Turtle Bay Exploration Park, has a deck surface consists of greenish, translucent structural glass; apparently, it provides quite a visual at night when the deck is illuminated from underneath. Below is a slideshow of the pics I took at this rather striking landmark

Sundial Bridge, Redding, CA