Baaaaaaaa! Baaaaaaaa!

Short Version:
Truck crash chaos, we taunt Amerikans unjustly. Arsenic.

Long Version:
It took us a long time to get to Oregon. Not because it was particularly far from where we were in northern Kalifornia, but because the road was blocked by trucks which had jack-knifed atop the Siskiyou Summit, which is the passage over the Siskiyou Mountains through which the Interstate passes. At 4310ft it's not all that high - it's barely half the elevation of either the Deadman or Conway Summits, both of which we crossed en route to our unplanned overnight in Susanville. Actually, since we passed that way, much attention's been focussed on Mono Lake (pronounced MOE-noe, not MON-oh, apparently) - not because we passed that way, or because we harvested a bird there, but because the lake, which has always been known to have thrice the salinity of seawater, has now been found to be hosting sizeable communities of hitherto unpossible extremophile bacterium (poetically named GFAJ-1) which usually eat phosphorous but which, when starved of their normal sustenance, become eaters of arsenic, which has the coolest name of any of the elements (tungsten's the runner-up) but which kills pretty much everything with which it comes into contact.

The traffic jam on I-5 stretched for miles and miles, and was heralded well in advance by nifty electronic informational signage, which told us the road was blocked, and that all traffic was to exit at Yreka. Which we did, along with literally thousands of other vehicles. Yreka was ill-prepared for the onslaught, at least from a traffic management perspective, and it was with some relief that we found our way onto the narrow, winding byway that our map showed parallelling the Interstate. I'd not want to be driving anything bigger than the Reaper up (or down) that road. Twisting, turning, off-camber corners, potholes and other surface damage, overhung by rock outcrops... it was like being back in NZ, apart from the other drivers, who over here are, for the most part, actually capable of driving. Still, it popped us out fifteen or so scenic miles north, back onto the deserted Interstate, free and clear and laughing and making derisional sheep noises at all the stoopid Amerikans who'd blindly obeyed orders and were now sitting in food-vending establishments in Yreka, drinking highly-caffeinated sugary beverages they'd stood in lengthy queues to obtain while awful plastik musik played through tinny speakers. Baaaaaaaa! Baaaaaaaa! Stoopid Amerikans! Stoopid... Wait, what's that up ahead? It looks like... the tail end of a traffic jam. Rats.

We sat for an hour, then crawled for another one. We learned about how dirty snow becomes when it's been lying on the Interstate for a while; our windscreen was so befilthed by the time we started down the northern slopes of the hills that we couldn't see much at all, and had to stop at a gas station in some random highway town to wash it. And then another anonymous hotel room, and on the TV was more unfathomably popular "football" being played by men in tights and helmets who get paid insane amounts of money, and then we hit the thrift stores and then the highway, and rolled back into Corvallis just before the end of the working day, to the Cyclery where Carl was actually literally in process of sending us an email when we arrived. Synchronised!