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Published: September 5th 2006
Viv15
Sunset, Saltwater State Park, Washington.Firstly - I can't send any emails from Yahoo on Jess's laptop, so am not ignoring you all, just can't reply.
USA I landed at San Francisco on August 17th. The only delay to our flight was whilst we sat on the runway and the airline had to email all our names to the FBI to grant access to fly us to the US. Imagine the FBI digging into files about little me!! All the passengers on board were so grateful to get on a flight and find their luggage had accompanied them that we couldn’t even be bothered to complain about the reluctance of the air hostesses to ply us all with alcohol throughout the flight. I sat next to a really pleasant man from San Francisco who had been touring Europe for a month and we chatted for most of the flight. Did I get his number? Put it this way, he was good-looking, fit, young, single and he lived in San Francisco. Case solved.
It took less than 45 minutes to get off the plane, get through immigration and get my luggage. The immigration officer was also really chatty and friendly - a rarity. We
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Landing in San Francisco did have a small debate over whether Branston Pickle was a foodstuff and the immigration officer said it most certainly was and therefore I had to go for inspection to the agriculture officer. However the agriculture officer waved me through without a second glance. I did try and get him to look at my Branston ... but he just didn’t want to know. It doesn’t matter what you offer some men - they still ignore you.
I got as far as Richmond, California on the train - but then there was such a long wait for the next Amtrak that my friend Jessica said she would come and collect me. Jessica and I went to school together from the age of 6 and she now lives in California. We have remained friends on and off over the years due to the many things we have in common - an overwhelming fondness for junk food, a deep-seated fear of nuns and complete intolerance towards every other person on the planet. We plan to tour the Pacific Northwest and Yellowstone National Park for 2 weeks.
Richmond is not the best area of California, as I discovered when I ventured two
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Yolo county fair - less cowboys hats than I was expecting. blocks away from the station in search of a bottle of water. In fact it looked decidedly dodgy - and there I stood with a brand new rucksack full of clothes, cash and travellers cheques. Luck was on my side - thanks to BAA baggage handlers’ knack of making new luggage look antiquated within seconds and the no toiletries policy on board I looked more bedraggled than most of the hobos. As soon as I had purchased my water and the shopkeeper insisted I carried it in a brown paper bag I fitted right in - not just a down and out, but a down and out swigging out of a hidden bottle. Classy chick.
My brown-bagged bottle and I sat in the sun outside the station and waited for Jess. I quickly discovered that Richmond has far more going for it than desperate poverty and a distinct air of menace - it is also seemingly the religous nut capital of the Western hemisphere. One by one they all sidled up and offered to convert me for a very small sum. They clearly all thought I was in need of saving, when actually all I was in need of
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Would you put this on your skin? was a hot shower and a hairbrush, but I admired their devotion. The kind lady Jehovah’s Witness spent a long time offering me reading material and refusing to be drawn on the question of why anyone would actually want to join a religion when it will only allow 144,000 into its heaven. Apparently the 144,000 are not the only ones who will be allowed in - they will just form the celestial government. I don’t particularly want a heaven with a government, and I don’t think the lady particulary wanted to recruit a seemingly drunk, foreign hobo so we parted on amicable terms. My favourite preacher didn’t try to convert me at all, she just stood in the middle of the path reading from King James’ bible. It was hot enough to melt the pavement, but she wore a woolly hat, an anorak, heavy skirt, socks and trainers. She addressed her audience frequently and added very entertaining asides from the bible. She was clearly very knowledgeable on the history of the subject and it was really entertaining to listen to. Whenever she found something particularly entertaining she would laugh and make a comment to the audience. The fact that she
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Mount Shasta, California had an audience of only one, me, didn’t stop her addressing other members of the audience - I wondered if she could actually see them and also if she could actually see me, but it didn’t detract from the entertainment of the lecture.
Friday we went out for breakfast - they do fantastic breakfasts here, and even managed to drum up a pot of hot tea. Then we shopped for our trip - camping equipment and clothes. Despite having filled my rucksack with clothes I probably don’t need, I bought even more - it was a sale!! In the evening we went to the County Fair. There were no rubber bullets - they actually had the real thing on offer, as well as beer tents all run by firemen. In England all the firemen moonlight as taxi drivers, here they all run county fair beer tents. Which job would you rather do? As well as the stomach-churning rides the fair also had exhibitions of prize baking, floristry, needlework and vegetables. It must be a rare palate that can distinguish one tomato from another. My favourite stall was the Cow Udder Balm moisturiser - but somehow I just couldn’t bring
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Crater Lake, Oregon myself to buy any. It was also very entertaining reading the names of all the entrants for the various judged categories. The same names cropped up again and again and again, and each were notable by their absence in some categories. Mrs G clearly couldn’t sew, despite excelling at floristry, baking and jams. I wondered if it was a source of anguish for her and if each year she slowly seethed at not seeing her name on any rosettes in the needlework tents.
Saturday we had planned to be up early and on the road by 8, but it didn’t quite work out like that. By the time we had showered, repacked, dashed back to the mall (I told you ... it was a sale!) , had lunch and visited the town where Jess’s mum was born it was early afternoon. This was a pattern of our trip, intending to be ‘on the road’ before 8 and yet not quite managing it before noon. It was approaching early evening by the time we crossed the state line. One thing I love about the US is crossing state lines. For me it is akin to the confessional, you feel cleansed
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Bandon Beach, Oregon of all sins, anything you ate in the previous state won’t count and all debts will be written off. Obviously this doesn’t quite happen - but you get the feeling of a fresh start anyway.
We hit lucky with our first campsite - our own water supply, quiet site and clean showers. We didn’t get so lucky with the stove we had borrowed, we couldn’t quite get the hang of it and headed into town for food. The pizza parlour was only a few minutes drive from our campsite, so on the return journey after 20 minutes we started to suspect we may have missed a turning. When we finally found our way back the 3 mile journey had taken almost an hour. This too became a common theme of our trip. When it came to finding food we seemed to have an innate sense of direction. When it came to finding campsites, highways, landmarks and National Parks we were completely hopeless. If only the National Parks office would install pizza parlours in all parks - I’d get there without a hitch.
Sunday we headed off for Crater Lake via Klamath Falls. As we were unable to make
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Starfish and sea anemone, Bandon, Oregon ourselves so much as a cup of tea, we stopped in Klamath for breakfast. If Klamath was a one-horse town then I was pretty sure that the horse was lame and headed for the knackers yard. The only place open was Subway - we knew they must do a good breakfast as the police soon followed us in - and no it wasn’t due to my driving. The staff were lovely and friendly- the young breakfast chef informed us that if she had the chance to live in England she wouldn’t be hanging around in Klamath Falls. Even though I had only spent 7 minutes in the town, I could see her point. Her ancient colleague said that before we left the region we should be sure to see the Falls. We asked her where they were. She waved her hand in the general direction of the door and said “along the way, we went there once when I was a kid - we were driving along the road and we saw some falls.” Armed with such an easy to follow route together with our fantastic luck at finding landmarks, we could hardly fail to find them, however for once
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Home sweet home common sense suggested we should just stick to the highway and head for Crater Lake.
Crater Lake was formed thousands of years ago when a volcano collapsed and is so deep that the water in the lake is appears to be of the purest blue. It seemed odd to stand in the blistering heat and see snow on the sides of the crater. Sunday being my day to drive I set off round the Crater rim and its hairpin bends with the sheer drop of the crater on our left and the sheer drop of the valley on our right. I asked Jess what was on the other side of the cliffs. When she snapped ‘scenery’ and I noted how her face had gone a strange shade of green and she was constantly pressing an imaginary brake, I remembered her fear of heights. She said she would feel more comfortable if she was driving as then I would be on the edge nearest the biggest drop - a true friend! Naturally being permanently on edge, heights don’t bother me at all. Jess drove, I described the scenery for her so she didn’t have to look and we got round
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Heceta Bay and Lighthouse the crater.
Every time we stopped at a different part of the Crater edge the views were amazing, truly breathtaking. It being a weekend there were plenty of other tourists around - but it still wasn’t packed. One couple roared up on their bright red Harley. They both had that perfect teeth, perfect tan, perfect hair (despite the Harley) appearance so typical of middle-aged, middle-income, middle America. Their clothes matched, and just in case we hadn’t noticed it was a Harley, the Harley badge was also emblazoned upon their t-shirts, helmets and licence plate. They were also flying a very large star spangled banner from the back of the bike. Somehow you just knew they had voted for George W.
At the park’s gift shop, and with every gift shop that followed on our trip, I had to curb my natural instinct to buy tourist tat. Buying anything was a debate over whether I liked it enough to carry it around for 6 months or pay to post it home - and so far I have limited my purchases to postcards, clothes and a fleece blanket.
After Crater Lake we headed for the Oregon coast. Oregon’s roads
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Tillamook Cheese Factory, Oregon's top tourist attraction apparently. look very similar to English country roads, except for much wider and I can’t imagine driving 100 miles in the UK and hardly seeing another vehicle. 90% of the vehicles we did see were RVs. They were absolutely huge - many of them the size of a greyhound bus. We later found out that one company specialises in converting these buses into luxury RVs. Many of them were even towing behind a small car or jeep - and one was even towing another RV. On the one hand why would one couple need two RVs? On the other hand - think of all the tourist tat I could buy if I had my own RV!!
Sunday and Monday we stayed at Bandon on the Oregon coast. The town and beach were really pretty. Having consistently failed to work the borrowed oven, we bought our own - and finally managed to cook good, old-fashioned camping food - corned beef hash and tinned ravioli. Oh how we longed for the days of the failed oven and the restaurant meals. We spent hours wandering along the beach in Bandon. Despite the pleasant weather and the beautiful sandy beach it was virtually deserted
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Dinner with Suzie - as with all other beaches along the Oregon coast. We spent hours looking in rock pools marvelling at the star fish, sea anemone and purple urchins waiting for the tide to come back in. I can tell you are impressed at my marine life knowledge, but have to admit that each beach has a handy ‘idiot’s guide’ at the entrance to the beach. Tuesday we headed further up the Oregon Coast, stopping frequently to admire the views and the virtually deserted beaches. When we drove through Tillamook we stopped at the famous cheese factory. Oregon has really beautiful beaches, it has mountains, volcanoes, craters - all incredibly beautiful and worthy of several days wandering and admiring, yet all virtually ignored by the holidaying masses. Tillamook Cheese Factory, however, was seething with tourists of all nationalities. Far be it from us to overlook such a scenic spot - actually it was pretty industrial, but the cheese was lovely and the ice-cream was so good we almost traded our car for a freezer to take some home.
As we drove north of Tillamook we entered US dairy heartland. The guide book said the highway was not worthy of the drive
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Portland, Oregon - Suzie and Jess. and tourists should stay on the coast, but it was getting late so we took the easy route- and thought it beautiful. Rolling green hills and small pretty villages. We wanted to stay at Nehalem Bay which is very picturesque, but the campsite was full, so we took the park assistant’s advice and headed back to Barview State Park, which was a smaller campsite virtually right on the beach. Pegging down the tent in sand seemed a bit flimsy, but it was a beautiful setting and we were pretty sure that our combined weight would keep the tent on dry land. We walked down to the beach to watch the sunset and took canapes and cocktails with us - potato chips and beer. Unfortunately a thick cloud layer obscured the setting sun but the beer was good - Fat Tire Beer, a Belgian style beer brewed in Colorado and the perfect excuse for having a spare tyre.
On Wednesday 23 Aug we packed up to leave Barview and whilst we were packing our neighbour came over to apologise for his dog taking a dump on ‘our land’. He was really nice (the owner, not the dog) and was on
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Too little Seattle, too much me. a fishing trip with his equally nice friend. Why couldn’t the stupid dog have poohed the night before - we could have all discussed it over a beer or 10? We drove towards Portland and stayed in our most primitive campsite yet - no showers and portaloo toilets, but still all spotlessly clean. Our neighbours came across to introduce themselves - Thad and Chelsea, a young couple from nearby Hillsborough who often came out here to camp.
We then managed to get ourselves side-tracked by a tour of Hillsborough. 98% of care in the community residents would find it difficult to get side-tracked in that town, but we managed it. We arranged to meet my friend Suzie for dinner. We went to dinner at the Cheesecake Factory - which does great salads, so at least you can kid yourself part of your meal was healthy before you eat yourself sick on cheesecake. It was lovely to see Suzie again and hear all about her new house. She said that her real estate agent had been fantastic and helpful and a true godsend at such a time - they must be completely different from their bloodsucking UK counterparts.
Back
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Sky Needle, Seattle, Washington at camp we actually stayed up past our usual bedtime of 10 pm until midnight - living on the edge!! Chelsea was very entertaining. She had just finished her degree in ophthalmology and was looking for a job. Thad said very little, and most of that to Chelsea, so we didn’t like to ask what he did. Chelsea, in comparison, never stopped talking, even I could hardly get a word in edgeways. She told us about her family, Thad’s family, her brother-in-law’s family - 24 kids from the same two parents and no multiple births, just imagine the state of his poor mother’s pelvic floor.
Thursday morning we drove into Portland for a few hours sightseeing. It has a really nice downtown area, very touristy and easily laid out - great shopping, nice looking buildings, a little bit of history - everything you could want from a tourist destination in 30 minutes. The trams downtown make it easy to hop on and off when you get tired of your location or, like us, find out that the Old Town area is more Old than Town and you want to get away in a hurry. As we had time to
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Sunset, Saltwater State Park, Washington. kill before meeting Suzie again for lunch we went into the Columbia Sportswear flagship store. This place distinguished itself from every other retailer selling Columbia gear by charging at least double, but I was pleased to see it was all made in South East Asia - that is when the serious shopping will begin.
After lunch we headed north for Seattle. We made good time until just south of Seattle despite the heavy weekend traffic. The traffic was at decent speed but a car in front of us had four very large occupants and all their luggage was literally spilling out of the trunk and tied from there onto the roof with what looked like a massive fishing net that was clearly about to give way any second. We were thankful when we finally got past them - they looked like a traffic jam just waiting to happen. The DJ kept on telling us about traffic locking up at Tacoma and sure enough we got stuck for nearly 2 hours. Then like a knight in shining day-glo yellow, Days Inn beckoned us from the next billboard. We edged over to the exit and spent the night camping amongst snowy
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Church or hat? white towels and grapefruit shampoo. Days Inn may have objected to us using our camp stove in their room, and our stomachs would certainly object to another night of tinned ravioli, so we ate out. Whilst getting ready for dinner we got a bit side-tracked by TV. I love US tv - it is so very very bad but also so addictive. We watched a documentary about a young girl who, together with her boyfriend and his buddy, murdered her mother by cutting her windpipe and then the three of them took off for a 3-day drugs and spending spree. Every parents dream child. Dinner was Famous Dave’s barbecue restaurant. Ribs washed down with Alaskan Amber ale which immediately became our new favourite beer.
Friday we found our campsite - Saltwater State Park, it had been recommended on the internet, although there was mention of some noise from the nearby airport. It was a truly beautiful setting, and the sunset was definitely worth the drive. I am not too sure it was worth two nights of very noisy neighbours, planes taking off every few minutes until gone midnight and filthy showers, but it was definitely beautiful. The camp hosts were a retired couple who clearly put more effort into chatting to their guests than maintaining the campsite. The wife insisted that I was Australian. I explained I was from England and she said “I knew it was that part of the world”, i.e. outside the USA.
We spent most of Friday in Seattle city. It is a lovely city - it has a great Old Town, a really lively market, Pike’s Place, which is full of tourists, stalls, restaurants, coffee shops and locals. Like Portland the public transport system is quick and easy to use. You only pay if you go out of zone which we did to get to the Space Needle, although I am not sure we paid the full fare as I think the driver got fed up with me trying to work out the notes and coins which all look the same to me and just pressed the button and hurried us off the bus (you pay on exit). The views from the Needle were truly magnificent, we could see for miles once you kicked all the other tourists out of the way.
Saturday we headed off to Port Townsend on the Olympia Peninsula east of Seattle. Because it is all islands, you have to go south and then cross over to the Peninsula and head north again rather than just cut across. The journey took us nearly 3 hours. On the highway just before we turned off, some irritating redneck cut us up several times and then decided to sit on our tail for most of the journey. We wondered if he actually lived in Port Townsend or was following us. When we turned into a biker café (because it was the wrong turning, we had been heading for a typical US vista point - no vista and very little point) we lost our little redneck friend. Later that day we found out we had gone over an hour out of our way by taking that route. It mattered little to us because it took us all round the Hood Canal which was really beautiful - even if there wasn’t anywhere to stop and take photos. This, however, made it even odder that a local boy would follow us all that way - so maybe it was lucky we picked on the biker café to park in?
The drive was made longer by the fact that every elderly person in Olympia obviously put on their hats and go out for a Saturday drive just the way your grandpa used to on a Sunday. Luckily Jess and I are of the same disposition and genuinely enjoyed muttering curses against the poor wrinklies for 2 hours. Port Townsend was as lovely as the Hood Canal - but very posh. The only place that sold postcards was the drugstore right on the edge of town and the bookshop sold books which could only be of interest to overly intellectual bearded democrat voters and long-haired Jesus lovers. I have nothing against long hair or Jesus lovers - I just like the phrase. We heard it on the record “Convoy” on the radio, and laughed so much we missed the next line - so now we need to hear it again - unless anyone will actually admit to having heard the record and what comes after the line "eleven long-haired Jesus lovers"?
The ice-cream parlour was run by a trio of women each with a disposition so frosty it must save the parlour owner a fortune on freezers. The ice-cream wasn’t up to much either - take it from an expert. We ambled along to Fort Worden for some more amazing scenery - there is so much of it in Washington it ends up being secondary to people watching. It is a case of glancing quickly at yet another mountain or beautiful lake and going back to watching the perfect outdoors family enjoy their perfect outdoors holiday which their poor children clearly hate every second of and just want to be at home with their playstations, x-boxes and boyfriends.
On the way back, via the quick route, we passed a Lutheran church which was built in the exact shape of Klan hood. It was getting dark and difficult to get far enough away to get a picture that can show exactly what I mean, but you have to wonder about the leanings or sense of the architect and the church elder who commissioned it. What do you go for when building churches - a symbol of faith, hope or mass lynchings and 100 years of horrendous bigotry. Hmm - that’s a tricky one.
This was the end of our trip to the Pacific Northwest. Oregon and Washington are really beautiful states and with the exception of Seattle in Washington and Tillamook Cheese Factory in Oregon, much under-visited by tourists, but it had been a lovely trip. We left Washington to head East for Yellowstone National Park.
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Haidi
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The next line ;
Hi Viv, Sounds like you are having a fantastic time am very jealous ; I have looked up the next line to convoy and it goes like this : With a thousand screamin' trucks And eleven long-haired friends of Jesus In a chartreusse microbus