How Lovely Southern Oregon Is

Last weekend, in among watching the World Cup final and the third-place playoff, I was with my dad for a road trip up through southern Oregon and the northern coast of California. He'd been to Crater Lake before, and wanted to take me along, so we dutifully packed up the car with sunscreen, bug spray and water bottles, and set out.

Mount Shasta, driving up on the first day 

We slept in a different town each night, and took in a variety of places on the way. The itinerary, roughly, was Ashland, Medford, Crater Lake, Roseburg and the Oregon Caves, all in Oregon; then Crescent City, California; back to Oregon for a quick wander around the one redwood grove growing outside of California; then back down through the Avenue of the Giants to Willits; and finally stops in Healdsburg and San Francisco.

I'm proud to report that the car got put through its paces, covering about a thousand miles on the trip, but held up great. This is notable because it's 21 years old, and the family keeps predicting that it's on its last legs, but it keeps managing these nice long trips. My secret is taking it in for scheduled maintenance pretty religiously, and opting for short commutes - since the middle of 2016, its most intense action (apart from these periodic trips with my dad) has been a single drive per week up to SF's financial district. Other than that I used it to drive to the gym or to lunch most days.

But back to what we saw. In terms of towns we saw, the highlight for me was Ashland. I'd been hearing about the place for ages, because of the Shakespeare Festival, but never got the chance to pass through until now. To be honest, after a day's driving in epic heat, it was like stumbling into an oasis, albeit a very hot oasis. We strolled through the center of town for a bit, checked out Lithia Park with its bandstand (which was preparing for a show that evening), and stopped for dinner at a sushi place near the park.

It all seemed extraordinarily genteel, well-kept and pleasantly laid out, and I'll be honest, if life were to send me to Ashland for an extended period I think I'd be pretty pleased. Even the 100+ degree heat was kind of welcome, because my head was getting scrambled by all the AC on the drive up. More than anything, though, it was the sight of the bandstand filling up for the evening, with locals of all ages staking out spots on the grass to listen to music - it felt a million miles away from anything here in the Bay Area.

Crater Lake was probably the natural high point. We got there the following day, after staying the night in Medford. My dad and I went for a look at the East Rim of the crater, and then went for a walk to Mt. Garfield, one of the highest peaks there, and got some amazing views not only of the lake itself, but also the hilly countryside behind it - it was easy to see where Ansel Adams got his inspiration from. And the neatest part was that even though it was about 95 degrees there that day, there were still a few lumps of snow lying around.

Crater Lake from the Watchman Overlook

The plan the next day was to head to Coos Bay and check out the Oregon Coast, but a navigational failure meant that we drove for a couple of hours south before realizing we'd have had to double back about halfway to Roseburg to get there. So instead we drove to the Oregon Caves, another national park, and got the hour-long tour of some amazing cave systems. Beyond the geological wonder of the place, it was interesting seeing the effect humans have had on the cave system, with a number of trails and chambers hacked out at different times by Victorian and New Deal-era administrators. It's a long drive up a number of winding country roads, but worth a visit for all that.

That evening we got to Crescent Bay, and the weather turned cool for the rest of the trip, because Crescent City is right on the Pacific and so bedeviled by fog most of the time. It was under this kind of weather that we drove up again into Oregon the next morning to check out the Oregon Redwood Trail.

That's a state park, and not a very well-known one, judging from the effort it took to get there. We got lost a couple of times and then, when we found the way, drove for about four miles up an unpaved road to get to it. Without taking too much away from it, you don't go to see huge trees, although there were a few impressive specimens there. But the spot is notable for being home to the northernmost trees of a network that stretches all the way down to Monterey, California. It was early in the morning, at least as far as day trippers are concerned, so we had the place mostly to ourselves for our quick amble through the groves.

Near Crater Lake

The other highlight for that day was the Avenue of the Giants. This was a special bit for me, because it's probably the first time I've introduced an outdoorsy spot to my dad, rather than him showing one to me. But I'd been there before for a half-marathon, so I knew to look out for it, and was pleased to see he was really impressed by it.

One thing to note about the trip is that the hotels got worse and worse each night. We didn't spend a lot of time looking for cute inns or B&Bs to stay in, so we opted for the national chains and some of them were pretty basic. The best was the Quality Inn in Medford on the first night, and the worst was the Redwood Inn in Willits, which is about a hundred miles south of the Avenue of the Giants. They ended up being fine for our needs, particularly as related to watching World Cup games, but we agreed that we could probably have just stayed in Quality Inns in each place. Or driven back down to Medford for a second night after Crater Lake.

On a more positive note we managed to find a local brewery each night (except in Willits), and passed the evenings in an even more convivial fashion. The highlight was probably Seaquake Brewing in Crescent City, which looked like the hoppingest place in town on the Saturday night that we were there.

This leads into the other aspect of Crescent City, and a number of other places we passed through on the trip. Apart from Ashland, most of these towns were pretty down-at-heel, reflecting the loss of jobs and industry in the region. Places along the Avenue of the Giants are still sustained by logging, but Crescent City in particular seemed to hold a lot more ramshackle houses and people who looked pretty down on their luck. Adding to the miasma were the ever-present gun shops (including an army surplus in Medford offering full SWAT gear for the budding white supremacist) and the signs advocating for the "state of Jefferson", which the northern counties of California want to secede into.

On the positive side, people were super friendly, there and north of the state line. One lady in the Crescent City Safeway struck up a conversation with me and my dad while we waited in the checkout line, which seems unlikely to happen in Palo Alto.

One of the things that always strikes me about California is how diverse the landscapes are. Since moving back I've been all over the state, including Yosemite, Mono Lake and other outdoor spots, and I just can't get enough of it. I also can't recommend it highly enough.

World Cup 2018: New Year's Day and the Holiday Season is Over

That's that, then.

Another World Cup, done and dusted. The French have been crowned champions, the narratives have all tied themselves up, and the trophies are all handed out. In addition, the podcasts making sense of what happened have been recorded, so we're officially done with soccer for the next three weeks or so. I'm a little sad that I'm going to have to find new topics to write about here in the blog, but such is life, I suppose.

The Guardian's Football Daily, the Totally Football Show, and Game of Our Lives have all given their thoughts on the action on and off the pitch, but I wanted to reflect on the passing of another tournament.

This is my seventh World Cup, and my sixth that I've watched from start to finish (I came late to 1994 despite it being held in the US). Much like Ted Mosby's triennial rewatch of the Star Wars trilogy in How I Met Your Mother, it becomes a useful way of marking the passage of time.

In 1994, I'd just finished my first year of high school, and glimpsing how the Italian fans celebrated getting to the finalist me on a path of fascination with Europe, which would lead to me living there several times as an adult. It also made me fall in love with football, and all the pageantry and silliness surrounding the World Cup.

In 1998, I was finishing my first year of college, and still on a number of paths I'd started down four years earlier: for example, my German teacher indulged my interest and told me I should be supporting her hometown team, Eintracht Frankfurt (and to this day, I do check their results in the Bundesliga every week).

When 2002 rolled around I was a few months into my first job, and my first stint living in Britain, hired because I could speak German. I watched the final in a pub in London with the brother of an Irish friend I'd known in Germany.

For 2006, I'd just started my second job, and stint in London - quite literally, as the tournament started on the first Friday after I began the job. That's a particularly sweet memory not just because Italy won it, beating France on penalties, but also because I thought I'd sold a story (it turned out not to be, because the publisher was weird and dodgy). I guess that's a metaphor for how Italy did afterwards, as I don't know that the promise of those early days of June 2006 bore out, either in football, my personal life or my professional life.

In 2010 I was still in the same job, but a little stalled, on all fronts. Yet there were the stirrings of some progress, which would bear out the following year when I switched to my new job in telecoms. The other abiding memory is being in Bordeaux with friends during the group stage, and seeing the French national team implode, even as Italy could barely muster a draw with New Zealand. I remember being so unsatisfied with the final, both the level of play and the quality of Spain as winners.

For 2014 I was once again embarking on a new chapter in my life, having just transferred over to California with work and discovering the joy of streaming matches on my computer at work. I watched the final at my mom's house, enjoying my stepdad's pleasure at seeing Germany win, but my clearest memory of that tournament is rather the Brazil-Germany semifinal, which I watched in an Irish pub on Castro Street in Mountain View with a British friend. The best thing was how the Brazilians in the pub, shellshocked from their team's humiliating defeat, started singing and dancing and generally having a party - since they were all there anyway.

And this year? 2018 was marked by my job loss at the end of the previous year, and my departure to London for a few months. It's also marked by my having found a new job while the tournament was going on, including being greeted at my interview by the hiring manager who said he'd been watching the group stage match between England and Belgium. The final I watched in a hotel room in Crescent City, CA, during a road trip of a few days with my dad where we took in Oregon and northern California.

So where will I be in 2022? Going by previous years, it wouldn't be inappropriate to guess I'll be embarking on whatever my next step is going to be after this one, but who knows? I expect I won't be anywhere near Qatar, unless I move to Europe again at some point in the meantime. And as for who wins, there's no basis for it but I might as well guess now that France won't defend its title, and nor will Croatia get to the final again (Brazil is the last team to reach consecutive finals, win or lose, in 1994, 1998 and 2002).

Looking at my final World Cup post from four years ago, I held out hope that 2022 would be stripped from Qatar and given to the US, but now that NAFTA is set to hold the 2026 tournament, it's unlikely to get taken away from the Qataris, so it'll be interesting to see how that all turns out.

The last thought here is sadness that the tournament's over, but a little relief too, as I get to go back to normal life (such as that is, given that I'm having to start turning down freelance jobs as well). It might seem strange, but I'm glad the World Cup doesn't come along more often, as the large gap between each one lets me better take stock of what's changed and what hasn't. Rituals like this, which let you mark the passage of time, are important and good ways to chart how the rest of the world has changed too - after all, in 2014, I don't think I'd have expected the political situation we have now.

So roll on World Cups every four years, and European Championships in between. And in the meantime I'll be consoling myself with the Champions League and club football. After all, the Premier League starts on 10 August, so less than a month to go!

World Cup 2018: It's Going Home, or, 1996 and all that

So despite my previous post, I'm not in much of a gloating mood to see England go out. As I said, I have complicated feelings about them, and so while I can't properly get excited to see them win, I also can't get too depressed to see them go out. And I have to give them credit for getting this far, after years of, to be honest, rank underachievement.

It's funny that the Lightning Seeds song, Three Lions, was dusted off and resurrected for this World Cup campaign, as not only does it date from the last tournament in which England reached a semi-final, but it's also from the first tournament where I followed England. Those are names to conjure with, you know: Paul Gascoigne, Alan Shearer, Teddy Sheringham, David Seaman... maybe not as revered as the Class of 1966, but still recent enough that they haven't faded into history as untouchable icons the way Jack and Bobby Charlton have, or Sir Bobby Moore, or Geoff Hurst...

That's also the first (and last) time I saw London completely spellbound by the national team, to the point of knowing how the game was going by the sounds I heard as I walked outside on the street. I'm sure it would have been like that this year, although I get the sense that the mode of celebrating wins and goals this time around has been communally, at pubs, and throwing all your beers in the air when something good happens.

From there England became a quarter-finals team. That's the stage at which they left the next three World Cups, in 1998, 2002 and 2006. They had slightly more mixed fortunes in the European championships, going out of the group stage in 2000, losing in the quarter-final to France in 2004, and not even qualifying for 2008.

1998 is my other abiding memory of that England team of the 90s, capped by watching their 2-2 draw against Argentina at my friend Sean's house, a game that still resonates in the English psyche now. Michael Owen's run to score a wonderful individual goal, David Beckham's tussle with Diego Simeone and his sending-off, Sol Campbell's disallowed header that would have put them through...

Somehow, something changed in the squad with the turn of the millennium. Gascoigne and Shearer and the like were stars, but they weren't STARS, the way Beckham became, and it's possible the players started to believe their own hype too much. In my last post I mentioned an incident, which occurred in the 2006 quarter-final against Portugal, where David Beckham and Wayne Rooney both left the pitch in tears, wound up to the back teeth by Cristiano Ronaldo's play-acting and the Portuguese gamesmanship more generally - but also a sense that they weren't being allowed to play as they wanted.

Even now, 12 years later, I look back on that display with distaste. Not because of the crying, per se, but because those were spoiled children's tears. Paul Gascoigne's tears in the 1990 semi-final were an emotional outpouring at being denied a spot in the final (and one that I didn't see, as I wasn't following football back then) - Beckham and Rooney were crying because things didn't go their way.

But even before then, I remember how cock-sure England and its fans were in the run-up to the tournament. Mars bars changed their names to "Believe", and Michael Owen confidently predicted he'd pick up the golden boot, despite not scoring and tearing his ACL less than a minute into the third group match against Sweden, which ended his tournament. After England went out, a shell-shocked friend confessed he'd really thought they could do it this time, which always mystified me - it didn't look that different a squad than the one I'd previously seen in 2004.

But enough about the past - what about this England? I don't know if they played that amazingly well this year, thinking about it objectively. They were deadly on set pieces, and Harry Kane is well-positioned to bring home the golden boot (the first English player to do so since Gary Lineker in 1986), which speaks for itself, but in the games I saw, they never looked that incisive in front of goal. Which isn't necessarily a criticism of England, because I think a lot of teams struggled with that, but it's a clear weakness to be addressed.

By the way, I'm aware of the 6-1 drubbing of Panama, and know that logically it can't have only consisted of penalties and set-piece goals. But without taking anything away from England, Panama was a terrible, terrible team, and England has always benefited from these early mismatches.

Which is, incidentally, the other point worth highlighting about this team, as opposed to previous tournaments. Between 2002 and 2016 there was always something a bit ponderous and yet still lackadaisical about them. The worst example was (again) 2006, where the team came in with high expectations from themselves and their fans, bolstered in particular by the famous 5-1 victory against Germany in Munich, but were dull, plodding and not at all fun to watch in the first two matches against Paraguay and Trinidad & Tobago.

I remember at the first game the embarrassed looks on the faces of Gary Lineker and the rest of the BBC commentators when the cameras cut to them at half-time. England had looked so bad, so unlike the swashbuckling heroes that they always fancy themselves, that it was as if a team of ringers from a local pub had somehow infiltrated the England camp and made it onto the field at Frankfurt - that was probably the moment that the next ten years were decided for the team.

So, to come back to this England squad, I have to single out in particular Gareth Southgate for praise. He's done a good job of building on the good work done by his predecessor Roy Hodgson (and his one-game predecessor Sam Allardyce), but seems to have also done a good job of creating a cohesive team, rather than stuffing it with all the big names and egos - after all, one of the criticisms leveled at Hodgson was his seeming inability to stand up to star players who were probably past it, like Wayne Rooney in 2016.

And I have to give special credit to Southgate for preparing England for its first World Cup penalty shootout win. He is, after all, the man who missed the decisive penalty back in 1996, so it makes sense that he'd have them train on that specific aspect of the game.

I found myself consoling a friend after the match today, one of the ones who was insisting I get on the England bandwagon. Not wanting to gloat, I instead suggested that he look at this as a great achievement (which it is) and as a chance for England to build into a team that really can challenge in the years to come (which is also true). In fact, as I was talking to him I was reminded of another team from 2006, one that seemed to burst out of nowhere with feats of athleticism and team cohesion. I'm referring to Germany, of course, which made it to the semi-finals that year and in 2010 before winning in 2014.

That's not a bad template to follow, and if England can replicate that run of form, then it really will be coming home.

(To be followed by a humiliating group stage exit four years later, but hey...)

World Cup 2018: Fuck Your Brexit, England

I was going to post something tomorrow, after the round of 16 ends (or oitavos da final, as you'd say in Portuguese), but it struck me today:

I don't particularly want England to win. In fact, I'd be happy to see them crash out tomorrow.

This is kind of a difficult thing to say... not because I've previously wanted them to win, but I suspect I'm going to piss off a bunch of friends (assuming they read this blog).

To unpack this for a second, I like English football, and a whole bunch of other things about England (I'm currently listening to my third album by an English band in a row today). I like being there, and the country has provided the bulk of my work experience, including randomly pulling up three months of work earlier this year, when I'd just lost my previous job (at a UK company). I also like my British friends, many of whom have impeccable taste in movies, music and books, among other stuff.

But there are other considerations. It's fashionable to say that you need to separate the people from the government, that football rises above these considerations, and that it's a harmless form of patriotism.

But uh, fuck that.

England is the only country participating in this World Cup that voted to kick people like me (i.e. Europeans) out. Even as bad as things are getting here in the US, I'm not currently in danger of being deported or losing my ability to live here. Russia may be a shitty kleptocracy, but it hasn't thrown up any further barriers to my living there in the last couple of years. France, Germany, Belgium, etc? They'd all be moderately happy to have me, even if I talk funny.

And you know where this idea of leaving the European Union came from? This impulse to stop people coming in and "taking their jobs" or whatever? It wasn't the government - it was the people. Or more appropriately, one faction of the Tories tried to shut up the more vociferously racist and xenophobic wing of their party by holding this referendum, and discovered to its surprise that actually a majority of Brits wanted to leave, and to kick out other Europeans in the process.

I have a long history of rooting against England, of course. If you're a foreigner in a particular country, it can be fun to have some #bants by rooting against a different team than what everyone else is supporting. And the team has veered between dour and calamitous in the years since I moved there - a far cry from the heroic and slightly manic 2-2 draw with Argentina in 1998. Standout moments include England failing to qualify for Euro 2008 (despite having actually played with some flair in a couple of matches), or the "Gazza's tears" phenomenon taken to an illogical extreme by David Beckham and Wayne Rooney crying in impotent frustration as they got outplayed by Portugal in 2006.

More to the point, there are knock-on effects to stuff like World Cup wins. In his wonderful Game of our Lives podcast, David Goldblatt talks about how England's loss to Germany in the 1970 World Cup may have led to the shock Conservative election victory four days later, on 18 June, suggesting that a successful quarterfinal might have helped the national mood and lessened voters' desire to dump Labour out of power.

It could be nonsense, but with the current climate in the UK, it's not hard to see that a UK win would immediately be seized on by Theresa May and her current Tory administration for positive PR value, including in the negotiations against the EU over separation. Compare this with two years ago, when England lost abjectly to Iceland just days after voting to exit the EU (leading to jokes about leaving Europe twice in one week).

Am I saying I'd like doom and gloom to descend on England, that green and pleasant land where I've spent much of my youth? Not really. But it's not a good time for complacency and unearned good feelings. I'd like to see the UK remain good and angry, and unwilling to give the Tories an inch in the Brexit negotiations. Not that I'm confident of things changing if Labour were to win a snap election, as Jeremy Corbyn isn't that keen on the EU either. But putting the likes of Boris Johnson and Michael Gove out of a job would be a step forward.

So if England lose tomorrow, or later in the week, or whenever, I won't particularly celebrate, but I also won't be too distraught. Because, while I'm sure very few people pulled the lever for Brexit because they explicitly wanted to kick me or my relatives out of Britain, this is a decision that directly affects me, and my family, and I'm not prepared to let it go.

Also, screw the Welsh national team, who also voted to leave, but while we're at it, thumbs up to Scotland and Northern Ireland, who voted to stay.