Thanksgiving American on the road

Driving up and out of Sonoma County on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, two diversions faded:

• Waves of vineyards swathed in golden yellow — the road trip was an education in the fall colors of wine country.

• Cell phone coverage that had allowed me to check in with my parents back in Oregon while my wife Laura drove us north. They wanted to know all about our long holiday weekend with my sister in San Jose. I bragged about beating her at what amounts to the signature competition from my immediate-family heritage: Risk, the board game of world domination.

Our phone connection broke before I could recount all the highlights:

• Strolling the Santa Cruz boardwalk on a sunny Saturday and taking one of the best rides in roller-coasting, the 81-year-old Giant Dipper rising high above the Pacific before plunging into wooden caverns that seemed too impossibly cramped to survive at such great speeds.

I still think we should build a coaster on South Beach at the harbor's edge. Put it on stilts so that the waves would crest beneath the feet of riders at high tide. Of course the Coastal Commission would never approve, which would make the construction of the Highway 101 landmark that much more brazen and noteworthy to tourists.

• South of Santa Cruz, we'd started that day at Soquel, a quaint Highway 1 town with a bakery-deli so popular with locals and regionals that it's take-a-number. What's fortunately less well known is the Buddhist retreat and temple a couple of miles up in the redwoods. We hiked a bit and checked out a 20-foot-high, sitting Buddha.

• All that serenity was therapeutic coming a day after its antithesis — trolling for a San Jose shopping mall parking lot on Black Friday as we joined the effort to rescue the global economy and cash in on early Christmas season discounts.

This involved a 15-minute odyssey through a jammed lot and full garage. Refusing to become one of those predatory motorists who stakes out a row and attempts first claim on anything that opens up, I drove past a "residents only" sign and parked on-street a couple of blocks away.

• That and a turkey dinner weren't our only keepings of American Thanksgiving weekend tradition. We skipped Thursday's pro football games with their inferior matchups and saved ourselves for a raucous viewing of the Civil War on Saturday evening.

I'm a Duck, so of course I enjoyed watching the University of Oregon crush Oregon State's Rose Bowl dream — on the Beavers' home field, no less. My sister cheered even louder, in a testament to how cockamamie college football is. She wanted OSU to lose so that her alma mater, Penn State, could play a higher-ranked opponent, USC, in the Rose Bowl.

Such are the contorted rooting rationales that emerge from a sport that settles its ultimate disputes with computers and polls. I'm just glad the president-elect has promised to lobby for an eight-team college football playoff tournament to determine future national championships.

That's gotta be right up there with ending wars and avoiding a depression.