Driving towards the Fire

Yesterday was one of those days when everything goes wrong :-(
It started with Hadas getting a sore throat. Her tonsils had actually been swollen for a couple days, but yesterday it got to the point where she was sick and miserable. We had her checked for strep bacteria, which came back negative, meaning it’s viral. So, no antibiotics to the rescue, only rest.
Later in the day we headed inland, towards Lassen Volcanic National Park, and at some point started noticing that the air had became smoky, from a fire.
Forest fires have been a recurring theme in our travels. We closely followed the recent Yosemite fire, to see if we should change our plans (the fire has been successfully contained, so our plans stay intact). We watched a fascinating movie about the big fire that consumed Yellowstone in 1988. We saw the forests near Rocky Mountain National Park, with a vast proportion of the pines dead due to a Mountain Pine Beatle epidemic, and heard that the only question is WHEN the huge fire will occur. We learned that the official National Parks Service policy is to let small fires burn, allowing nature to perform its house cleaning, as long as human developments and assets aren’t jeopardized. We saw the haze in Crater Lake and heard the explanation that northern California is burning, due to an especially dry year.
But all that was mostly theoretical. Now we were inside it, the smoke getting thicker and thicker, to the point where visibility was very limited. We drove through towns and villages, where people live under a thick blanket of smoke these days. I can’t say it was a pleasant experience, but it was definitely a unique one. To make it clear – we didn’t see any fire at all, only smoke, and at no stage were we in any danger. About 20 miles from our destination town, we were stopped and told that the road was closed due to yet another fire. We had to drive back the 70 miles, namely after a 3 hour drive we were back where we started, on the coast. As I mentioned previously, time spent in the car is an expensive resource in our family, and some of us (particularly Maayan) weren’t very happy.
We decided to make the day the antithesis of the rest of our travels, and continued with a night spent in Motel 6, dinner at McDonald and a gross greasy breakfast at a diner. As an aside, we searched our memory, and could still count on one hand the number of times we visited McDonald in our almost 4 years in the US. We’re proud of that...

Anyway, we had to reshuffle our plans and skip Lassen Volcanic NP. Instead of camping we are going to spend 2 nights in a fancy resort near Clear Lake, CA. Then we’ll head to Yosemite, with a short stay in Sacramento. This will hopefully allow Hadas to recover, so in a way our unfortunate day turned out for the better, or for the Hebrew speakers among you: “Col Acava Letova” ;-)

Giora