[jyl]

We spent a few days in Berkeley, seeing friends and cooking dinners for them. I coughed for two days after getting out of the smoke. The Caldor fire grew to 100,000 acres and was just 15 miles from the lake basin. 30,000 people were evacuated from the area southwest of the lake, 400+ homes were burned. My kids were evacuated from the Tahoe summer camp where they were working, they and the other staff packed as much of the important camp stuff as would fit in their cars and got it out. The camp manager’s cat was packed into our car and we drove it down to his house in Oakland.

We saw one of our good friends in the Bay Area who is being openly cheated on by her husband, who also used to be one of my closest friends. She’s been a perfect wife and mother to their three boys. He started telling her she was fat and unattractive, which has never been remotely true, she’s always been lovely. She went to counseling, lost a ton of weight, is now thinner than when we first met 25 years ago, absolutely gorgeous albeit sad, and he’s still running around with some married woman. What an *******. That was depressing.

We got offered a condo on the Oregon coast for the second week of our vacation by some friends, so we decided that was a good Plan B and drove from Berkeley to Portland today. Well, we drove 584 miles, hung out by the side of the freeway for an hour, got flatbedded the last 16 miles to the mechanic. I think the ABS has failed which causes the car to light up every warning light, emit a piercing warning tone, and eventually shut off. So we were met by another friend at the mechanic’s shop after dark, where we quickly transferred most of our stuff into her car so we could leave our stricken car outside the shop. This is in a part of Portland that has become block after block of homeless in tents and broken down cars, not somewhere you want to be after dark. My mountain bike wouldn’t fit in our friend’s car, so I found my bike shoes and helmet and rode it home. Again, not an area of town I really wanted to be riding through at night. Naturally, I’d not taken a spoon to California, so I was naked, as it were.

So, we’re home and glad to be here. Tomorrow morning I’ll call the mechanic, go to work for a few hours, then we’ll drive out to the condo on the coast. In the 911, since it is running. My wife hates riding in the Porsche :-( Our kids are driving their cars from Berkeley to the condo tomorrow, and we’ll meet up and try to make the best of the last couple days of a very disjointed vacation.

Meanwhile, I’ll be following the Caldor Fire progress. It is 128,000 acres now, being fought with everything available, lots of tankers and helicopters, dozers cutting firelines and thousands of firefighters doing everything they can to keep the fire from destroying more of one of the most beautiful places in this country. Yeah, I’ve been whining about my disrupted vacation while hundreds are losing their homes, tens of thousands are in shelters or getting ready to evacuate. *****.