On Our Way to New Orleans and FAI 2020

We are headed to New Orleans for the Folk Alliance International Conference.  We are driving in the interest of keeping our carbon footprint as low as we can.  I do wonder about our state of mental healrh as we start out in winter weather. 

Our plan for today was to get to Baker City, Oregon from Tacoma, Washington where (as most of you know) we live.  It seemed like an easy drive.  We had done it in the other direction in what I thought was somewhat fluke-y conditions.  We had ended up in Baker City because the highway out of there was closed.  I don’t even remember what our travel goal was for that night, but I distinctly remember that the highway was blocked when we got there.  We had no choice.  We were just lucky we got there in the nick of time to get a motel room before all the rooms were gone.

If I’m truthful with you I have to say that I’m not generally familiar with these kinds of conditions.  I have driven over Snoqualmie Pass in all kinds of weather.  There have been times when the pass was closed, but usually just for a few hours at most.  Perhaps I’ve just been lucky with that.   I’ve made trips south down I-5 in the winter and never had any blockages.  There was a detour once for a mudslide.  The most memorable was the ice storm of 1995 when we were booked in Forks, WA for NYE.  It was like we were in one of those computer games where you keep falling down wells, and having buildings collapse.  I won’t go into the details.  By now you’d suspect that the first sentence of this paragraph is a lie.

What I’m trying to get to is the fact that we are in La Grande, Oregon tonight.  We are not in Baker City.  Fate has thrown its’ dice and stopped us dead in our tracks.  We stopped here to fill up our gas tank, which was near empty, and when we went to the freeway entrance to get back on, the freeway entrance was blocked with those plastic cones, and as it turns out is still blocked to my knowledge. 

We also were required to put on chains today.  That’s a new one for me.  It has been literally YEARS since I have had to use chains.  That was to get over Snoqualmie Pass and I tell you I did not drive anything on Snoqualmie Pass today that really required me to be wearing chains.  I have driven in much worse conditions without them.  I suppose it was a good “Experience” though in that it gave me an opportunity to use a perfectly new set of chains, and was a good refresher course in how to install chains on our car.  It was as much work as you might think.  I will tighten them better if there’s a next time.

I have looked at the FAI schedule, and both Kristi and I are stoked about the workshops they have planned.  I haven’t looked at the official showcase schedule yet, but we always love those.  I am also excited about running a PGS room this year.  We have some great acts booked in our room, and it will be great to see them close up and personal, and to make some new friends.

Tomorrow we are going to drive to Pocatello, Idaho to visit our friends, Becky Hardy and David Van Hemert.  Kristi went to the University of Idaho with Becky many, many long years ago and they are still best of friends to this day.  Kristi tells me that it is supposed to be better weather tomorrow.  I haven’t looked yet.  It will be what it will be.

One thing about traveling in different seasons is that things look a lot different in the winter than they do in the summer.  That is not to say that they look better in either, but it is interesting to experience places at different times of the year.  Today we were driving somewhere near Umatilla and we hit the top of a hill and looked out at the hills with a smattering of snow on them across a river valley.  I don’t exactly know where we were, and by the time I got a camera out it was too late to take a picture, but I will remember that vision for a long time.

In the interest of a spousal opinion, I have known for some time now that the decision to drive the most direct route from the relatively mild (though today it’s snowing) Pacific Northwest coast to New Orleans in the heart of winter is taking pretty much total leave of our senses.  But in making a ridiculously microscopic and fairly impossible, useless study of predicted weather outcomes, I talked myself into believing a few inches of snow on one day of the trip shouldn’t be any problem, after our decades of driving through all kinds of sub-arctic snowstorms in the far north west of the continent.   Wrong.  As of now my microscopic study (on local trip websites) tells me these few inches have created closures in three spots on this interstate freeway within a fifty-mile perimeter.  People are crashing their cars all over the place.  But to quote Scarlett O’Hara, “tomorrow is another day”.   The Rocky Mountains await us and like an eager sled dog I’m ready and energized to go.