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Published: July 18th 2009
Close your eyes, and imagine this.
You navigate through the early morning traffic of a small city with tree-lined boulevards, seeing remnants of dawn’s misty fogs roll over the snow-capped mountain ahead, juxtaposed against a foreground of a small handful of medium-sized skyscrapers. Leaving the city’s boundaries, within minutes you are gliding smoothly along the highway, windows rolled down and breathing in the cleanest air you’ve tasted in months.
Around the bend you notice on your right a large waterfall cascading down a jagged clifftop, its watery forces cutting through lush thick vegetation and dense slate rock. You notice the deep green pine trees and tall, proud fir trees dotting the slopes as you pull up closer, the sand and gravel crushing beneath your shoes as you walk in for a closer look. The falls powerfully erupt hundreds of metres above ground level as you gawk at them from an old but sturdy wood-plank bridge.
You drive on, past old timber bridges and new steel bridges connecting one side of the gorge to the other, past hundreds of colour para-gliders zipping from one bank to the other, past quaint little towns with singular main roads and picturesque views
of the snow-capped mountain, past highway stalls offering freshly grown organic tomatoes and bright red cherries picked this morning, until you finally reach the coastline. A 125-foot high concrete column awaits you, and you climb 164 steps to witness the spectacular views of the surrounding clear blue rivulets dribbling back into the ocean, the many shades of green spread over the landscape canvass all around, the sun ripping sharply through that perfectly cloudless blue sky as it makes its descent westwards.
You decide to keep travelling to catch a beachside sunset, passing towns with pretty names like
Longview and
Astoria and
Seaside and
Cannon Beach, and it is here you stop to admire the dramatic coastline and jagged rock formations literally yards from the shore line. As the sun dips over the horizon, you sit shivering and huddled up next to your red-headed boyfriend on a fallen log on the beach, watching as the seagulls catch their last feed for the day.
As you wind back down the lonely highway, the sunset turns into twilight and then turns into dusk. The mist rolls over the trees and mountains again, guiding you homeward to the bright lights and city
noises, and the two of you drive in silence letting the day’s offering of nature sink in.
That was what we did today.
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amy
non-member comment
the goonies!!!! did you do the truffle shuffle??? you need to compile a list of all these movie-related tourist sites, aaron. xxx