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o The West Coast Book Tour Narrated and photographed by Emily Pohl-Weary I was too nervous on the first night in Victoria to figure out how to make the camera work, so I only got one photo, of superheroine Melissa Darou, who was there from the CFUV radio show "Women on Air." She looks awesome, no? All I remember is she had the power of words.
OK, here are my tour mates Tamara Faith Berger and Sonja Ahlers at one of innumerable truck stops we frequented on our way down south. Notice Sonja's toe socks? Apparently, once she tried "toe gloves," she could never go back to the "foot mittens" the rest of us prefer.
Here are Tamara (left) and Sonja (right) in the Stardust Motel. When we drove
up to it, Tamara announced that she "loved it already" because of its
name. But no sooner were we settled in than she flipped back the sheet to find a
stranger's hair and a mysterious brown stain. This and a few other things led her
and Sonja to sleep with their clothes on. After the lights were out, Sonja also
remarked that it was "the kind of place where people get killed." Well, I didn't get any photos of Modern Times Bookstore and our event in San Francisco, due to extreme exhaustion (we drove for two straight days to get there and then were stuck in a two-hour traffic jam on the bridge into the city from Berkeley) and a general sense of malaise. However, the next morning Sonja and I bought identical $4.99 flip flops in Chinatown (which I liked so much I had to also purchase for my sister). Then Tamara and I fell in love with City Lights Bookstore, a magical place founded in 1953 by beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. If you are ever unlucky enough to visit the absurdly hilly SF, make sure you check out City Lights and La Trieste, a coffee shop around the corner. Those two spots make it worthwhile.
Here is a nice driving shot of Sonja, leaving San Fran behind like a bad memory. Notice the scenery is getting desert-like? That's because we're in southern California.
Here are a couple views from the passenger seat. I'd never been to Cali, so things looked pretty alien to me. Right around this point on the way back, we passed a place dubbed "Cowschwitz" by the locals: a ranch with at least 2,500 cows huddled together in tiny little muddy pens surrounded by barbed wire. I wondered aloud whether the barbed wire was there so the cows wouldn't break out or to keep animal rights activists from breaking in. Maybe both. To give credit where it's due, both of these shots were taken by Tamara. She's got a good eye, no?
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