Day 15: Mt Shasta, Portland, & Home
We got up early around 6:00 and took off as we would eat in the truck today. The other reason why I wanted to get home early was just in case we had problems with snow on the way back. There was frost on the windows of the truck this morning. The sun did not rise until 7:15 when we were at Mt. Shasta and got a nice picture with the sunrise. There was no place to stop so I pulled over on the shoulder took a quick picture and as I was getting back in the truck a police car pulls up. I walked over and said 'hi' and he informs me that in California it's against the law the to park on the shoulder unless you have an emergency. He mentioned that this was just a warning and I could have been fined $200. He understood I was a visitor from out of state but warned me not to do it anymore. I said thanks for letting me know and not ticketing me. We both went our own way. Every time I see that picture now I won't even think about the sunrise, it will be how that sunrise almost cost me $200. There are some caves near Mt. Shasta that we wanted to find this morning but they were locked up for the season. This is the best time of year to go into caves because there are no tourist and who knows you might even meet a bear inside hibernating. Oh well.
We crossed the border into Oregon and I swear the sun went away for the next four hours until we reach Portland. There wasn't much to see other then passing through the Siskiyous. This is nice country that is still sparsely populated with some mining still going on in the mountains. There are many gravel roads along here that will take you to old mining areas and the top of cliffs with nice views of the valley. We'll save that for another trip as the good news is that there was no snow nor was there any predicted . The sun didn't come back until we reached Portland in the afternoon. This was going to be our resting place as we always go to Powell's Book Store when in town. This is the best used-bookstore in western North America. I was able to find three more books on Baja that I had never seen before. We purchased about $70 dollars worth of books including several kids books before we got out of there about two hours later.. The other thing we always do in Portland is eat pizza at Rico's which is kitty corner from Powell's. They have the best pizza in town with a lot of filling but it is a little greasy. This would be our dinner as we left Portland around 5:00 to start our last drive before reaching home. It was around Portland that Jacob finally figured out that is was possible to get home tonight. We told him to shut up and not let his little sister know or else we would stay in a hotel tonight. He didn't say a word about it the rest of the way.