Post Oil Vacations

A few years ago I realized that Peak Oil wasn't the end of vacations. Yes, that should be obvious, but at the time the threat of rioting over gasoline rationing seemed pretty plausible if $147/bbl for oil got rationing started, again. I've lived through rationing twice already, you see. Gasoline rationing has a huge impact on lifestyles, including things like vacations. Most expire so you literally can't save up your rations to get anywhere. Its strictly to get to work and back. If govt were unfair, like it often is, only the ones they consider virtuous get enough gas to live, everybody else gets screwed. This is very bad for vacation areas because if there's no easy way to get there, they end up folding.

At the time the idea of having vacations without cars seemed really dangerous or difficult. And then I looked at it harder and found out there are entire websites devoted to bicycle tourism. Reviews, routes, pro-bicycle motels and such, including ones with in-house repairmen. Cool, right?

Anyway, I bought a fancy slotted rack for the back of my bicycle and a grocery basket and some expandable panniers for carrying clothes for a bicycle vacation. I wanted to see how comfortable that is. The basket isn't so great, but the pannier is okay. It's not supergreat, but its okay. The extra weight on the bike is really noticeable when you're shifting it from side to side, and it also means you have to brake sooner and harder to slow down. But it does work, and I admit a degree of admiration for the English cosplayer bicycle tourists who wear period costumes, tweed and riding caps, in the rain, for 80 miles. Yes, they stop every 20 miles and have lunch or tea or whatever, and they fix their innertubes during hour long breaks, taking in the sights etc, but still, that's hard.

I did the research on bikes and found that while I could probably spend around $400 on a decent touring 18 speed with extra strong spokes and slightly wider tires than the typical racing bike, I also learned that my existing hardtail mountain bike would do it cheap and easy if I just replaced the knobby tires with slicks and added a couple fenders to keep the runoff from lawn watering off my pant legs and shirt. Pretty easy answer, actually. The slick tires also made me about 5 mph faster, having easy rolling resistance despite running at merely 50-60 PSI. I'm actually faster, coasting, than my Dad on his Peugeot Race Bike with its narrow tires. More of his energy gets converted into lifting his body weight over bumps than mine, which are wide enough and soft enough to roll over them and merely compress the tire a bit. Physics for the win.

So last Monday I was hiking with Dad on the Pacific Crest Trail near Donner Pass, a place we go when we can. Its a nice hike, not too steep or long, great views, but with traffic noise from all the cars on I-80 which goes through Donner Pass very close by. The trail runs from the new pass to the old one, around a granite mountain and a bunch of lakes, forest, glacier drop stones. Its very pretty. In a month it will be covered in snow. Feeling the breeze coming in, perhaps not that long. So as I'm hiking and listening to the traffic in the distance, trying to ignore it mostly, I'm also thinking about how Star Trek really sucks.

No, hear me out. Star Wars sucks too. Its pure fantasy in a scifi setting, running on Rule Of Cool to justify all sorts of ridiculous tropes. Star Trek is an ultraviolent hellworld/verse. Anytime you see a peaceful view of people in a Star Trek show or movie, they're going to explode. Any second now. That's how Star Trek works. Everybody but Kirk is a redshirt because Gene Roddenberry was a d1ck, a socialist with bad economic skills and probably worse people skills. Fairly classic Aspbergers/autism I suspect. There's lots of people like that out there, and all of them are fans of Star Trek or Star Wars, depending on what their drug of choice is. Stimulants its Trek, pot/booze its Wars. If Roddenberry had any concept of decency and could actually tell a story without slaughtering normal people all the time, imagine how cool that would be. Imagine if you could get a star trek flying life-pod shaped like a high end aluminum trailer. One of those 30 footers that's so nice inside. Put in all the usual trek accoutrements, the ability to fly to another site to camp, and produce food and water on demand, comfy showers, a soft bed. Wouldn't that be a nice way to go on vacations, to land next to some pretty meadow in the Sierras or Rockies and go for hikes, go fishing, enjoy the fresh air? Roddenberry wouldn't have a clue how to tell a story with subtlety. He was too busy blowing people up. I really think he set a bad example to generations of children. We think blowing things up and killing people is a good story. In my advancing middle age I'm not a fan.

While I'm hiking there I'm thinking that when the oil goes away, and we're running electric freight and passenger trains over the pass instead of cars up the freeway, it would be really interesting to see those folks who bicycle over that 7229 foot pass on what is freeway now, huffing and puffing but not worrying about being run over by a drunk coming back broke from Reno. It would be safe. And the road has gorgeous views all the way up. Without cars you can actually stop and look at them too. And there's many little resorts along the way to stay at so the climb could be done over 2-4 days instead of a couple hours. I imagine there will still be people riding homebrew powered scooters and motorcycles, but alcohol has no real fumes but water vapor and CO2 (which makes the trees grow). I can easily imagine campgrounds and cabins for cyclists making the trek. And rail stops to allow people to get on and off the train for hikes. And side lines that run to the various ski resorts as well as off to Lake Tahoe from down in Truckee's main rail station. Imagine smooth fast heavy rail, all electric, zooming back and forth between Sacramento and Reno, stopping at each town along the way. There's quite a few, some of them very interesting. I know of a nice side road made of cinders from the volcanos in the Sierras that runs on the far side of the Truckee River from I-80 down to Reno. A nice ride for a serious downhill mountain biker. There's forest service gates on it, but you can go around those if you're on two wheels.

See, with passenger rail that will carry people and luggage and bicycles, (and scooters and motorcycles) you get a lot of options. Suddenly a bicycle just helps you get around instead of making it kind punishing to just get there at all. A bike ride up 89 from Truckee to Tahoe City is a few easy hours, not very steep. Its very scenic on the existing bike trail. If there's no cars and few buses, its still a nice ride on the highway, plenty wide enough as long as you don't block the road when one actually comes up behind you. Bicycle tourism works if the road isn't too steep to be fun. And people ride up steep things too, on purpose. All summer long, you find aggravated cyclists climbing up old highway 40's Donner Pass Road from Donner Lake up to the ski resorts and rock climbing sites, gasping for breath. When you pass hundreds of them over those 4 miles, you appreciate just how hard it is to reach the top. I could see that being hilarious fun on a Vespa, and really enjoyable on a 600cc Bandit (motorcycle) or other variation, on a bike its sort of your whole day, even without luggage. Its a good 2500 feet climb. That's really hard when you're powering the wheels yourself. Hell of a nice view, though. You would definitely feel like you'd accomplished something when you get to the top. The road along Donner Lake is very pretty, on a bike or in a car with the windows down. Its very touristy, with some boating in the icy water of the lake. Water that used to be the source of the ice in ice boxes in San Francisco a century ago. That's still awesomely cool to see the history of that. And the traces still remaining. The Truckee Rail Yards won't grow weeds because the sawdust piles are still there, 80 years later. Wood absorbs nitrogen from the soil, which prevents plants from growing until the wood has completely broken down.

Donner Pass and the surrounds of Lake Tahoe will be a bit harder to get to, after the oil runs out, but if we have electric passenger trains we can still go up for the weekend and enjoy ourselves. There's already a train that goes from Emeryville to Sacramento, and another train from Sacramento to Reno. Get off on various stops along the way and if there's trains running 3 times a day, that still works out for tourists. Allow flexible riding and offer refunds if you don't go all the way to the end. If the fast passenger train carries the mail and some high speed delivery freight, it still makes money.

And someday, when the Columbia River Canal gets water down into Nevada and refills lake Lahontan, drowning Reno under 600 feet of water (few would mind), the train will cross bridges and slowly crawl around the lake shore where expensive resorts and mansions offer fabulous fishing and views and great cuisine grown locally in the many irrigated fields. Real estate opportunity, folks. The canal is inevitable if only because it will make people rich and Nevada is currently useless, and there's plenty of water to spare in the Columbia River. Less than 10% of its flow would be plenty to irrigate both Eastern Oregon, Northeast California (Modoc Plateau) and Nevada. If they fill the lake high enough they can even outflow it into both Mono Lake then Owens River down to Owens Lake, Mojave, and LA as well as the Feather River and down into Northern Sacramento Valley. The extra water would be beneficial to wild birds and agriculture. More places to visit by train or bicycle while on vacation.

So yes, post oil vacations have a lot of upsides, even if your personal vehicle goes from a big touring car to a nice bicycle, and you get to the general area by train, it still feels like a vacation.