DISCOVERING WEED FOR THE FIRST TIME

Alright, alright, calm down people and get your minds off the illegal weed and start thinking about the City of Weed, CA. It has been written about how this little town of 3,000 still has it's city signs taken by people prone to enjoy the illegal stuff. They even sell copies of the sign in the "Weed Shop", which has t-shirts galore, proudly exclaiming..."Got Weed"? We visited the tiny store on our little exploration walk this morning and many more sights of interest.After sleeping in a little this morning, we hit the restaurant next door to the truck stop for breakfast. We figured we would need the nourishment on our two mile walk into the town. It was a pleasant walk, with the morning air still cool and a nice breeze and by 9am we had hit the main drag and were the first customers of the day at the Weed Store. I was amazed at how many people came and went during the short time we were there, but we had other sights to see and we left to go explore them.The next item of interest was the Weed Arch which is located at the entrance to Main Street. The original arch built in 1922 was built of concrete, and after it started getting surface cracks, and the city engineers could find no blueprints of it's construction, they tore it down for safety reasons. The new one was erected in 1989 and we were even able to find a USDA survey benchmark on one of the columns of the arch.Traveling further down Main Street, we came upon City Hall and an unique sculpture of the city founder Abner Weed. Mr. Weed thought the area was perfect for his lumber mill, due to the wind currents and their ability to help the drying of green lumber. In 1897 and for the price of $400, Abner was able to purchase 280 acres of land where Weed now sits.Completing our circle down Main Street, we ended up at the intersection of where Highway 97, historic Highwy 99, and Interstate 5 meet. In the parking lot of a grocery store sits a rather large totem pole. Originally it was built to mark the start of the Alcan or Alaskan Highway. When Safeway opened a grocery store at that location, they put a large spinning "S" on top of the totem pole. The "S" was removed when Safeway closed their store and Ray's Supermarket took over the building.By now the sun was out in full force and both Craig and I were feeling the heat. We purchased some water and Gatorade for our two mile trek back to the truck and tried to smile and wave as I had to stop and rest in the shade and a group of preschool children, tethered to a walking cord, walked happily by us. It seemed the walk back took so much longer than the walk there, but we were both happy to climb inside the truck and enjoy the cool air conditioning! The down time here in Weed has been nice, and we did enjoy the sightseeing on our walk, but both of us are ready to hit the road again. When we arrived in Weed yesterday, another driver was waiting to take our load and we inherited a transformer load, exactly like the one Craig had last week. We will take off around 3am and deliver the trailer to Salem, OR Friday morning. From there it's anyone's guess what we will get for the Fourth of July weekend.