On Tuesday morning we headed to Hertz to pick up our car for the Roadtrip to San Francisco! Our vehicle was a Kia Soul, quite a beast and in such a delightful colour too.
We headed off along the grey I5 under the grey clouds, pretty quickly I was used to the righthand side of the road but not the fact that everyone drives at the speed limit! So there we were at 60 making our way down through Washington commenting on things the car pool lane and how you only need 2 people for it to count, I personally was all for three or more. Or the numerous ads that adorn the roadside and the extremely verbose road signs. Our aim was to head to Mt St Helens so that's what we put into Google Maps and after about 2 hours we headed off the freeway and followed a tree lined winding road that seemed to be heading towards the mountains. After half an hour the houses had vanished and the road was starting to disintegrate, after another 15 minutes later the phones lost any semblance of signal and we had no idea of where we were. Despite our thinking that Mt St Helens was a relatively sizable tourist attraction there weren't any signs anywhere, or tourists for that matter, we barely saw any other cars. Our one tiny thread of hope was the occasional sign pointing us in the direction of 'Lava Canyon', we thought it was a pretty good sign. George and I swapped over and we carried along the road until the towering trees disappeared revealing a landscape of scorched rocks and hardy bushes, with Mt St Helens looming in the background.
There wasn't a visitors centre, we'd taken the wrong turning off the I5 and it was an hour back north of where we were, just a little car park. We bit and scrambled over the rocks for a bit until we were stood in the middle of what must've once been a river of lava, it was full of black porous rocks that had carved their way through the landscape. Mt St Helens was ringed by cloud so we couldn't see the top, but it did look quite dramatic.
We made our way back to a little town we'd passed through called Cougar, there were a great selection of places to eat, the gas station or the diner. Weirdly we opted for the diner, but when we walked in it was like a scene out of a movie everyone went quiet and stared at us. A real small town experience for us then, after a quick burger & chips (with free drink refills!) we headed off back to the I5 for the next 2 hours to Portland.
On the way we stopped off in Walmart and were freaked out by the spreadable cheese section, the fact you got powdered drinks and in return I freaked out security guard by asking where the toilets were; he was initially disturbed by the fact I'd said the word toilet, and then directed me to where I could buy one. Ah culture confusion, always fun.
As we headed into Portland the popped out to say hi so after we dumped our bags in the fanciest hostel I've ever been in we headed out for a walk. We made our way down to the river, where the sunset had turned everything a beautiful pinky gold.
On our way back we stopped in at a craft brewery bar where we (illicitly for me) sampled some tasty beers. Portland is so hipster, but as a rather fortunate result is full of lots of independent bars, restuarants and shops, basically it's a pretty cool city.
The next morning I went off for a run, and had an idea to go see the rose garden as I knew George would be fairly uninterested. It didn't look all that far on the map but what the map didn't day was that it was up a rather steep hill, anyway I persevered and had a great time running amongst the roses. There was a slight issue when I tried to leave, see it was a very big garden set in quite a large park, filled with very windy paths. After a while I found one that appeared to be going in the right direction, it even joined a road, very quickly it started going downhill at a pretty steep grade and as I turned the corner I saw it led to a dual carriageway. There was no way I was going back up that hill to work out a way back out the other side, so I ran along the dual carriageway at rush hour in the pouring rain on a tiny pavement. Well at least it was downhill.
That morning we headed to Powells city of books, a bookshop so big it is spread across a number of buildings, all with multiple floors and you're given a map upon entrance. Essentially my idea of heaven, especially on a rainy morning.
I had to limit myself to one book and persuade myself that spending a few weeks budget on one book was a bad idea. The rare books room was pretty special, a signed edition of the Silmarillion, a first edition of all 30 volumes of dickens and so many different of editions of Lewis and Clarke.
It was amazing. We easily killed a couple of hours in there.
Now I really wanted to queue for doughnuts at apparently the best doughnut shop ever, Voodoo doughnuts, everyone was walking around with these pink boxes filled with sugary goodness. However grumpy George believed that 45 minutes was too long to wait, which is obviously a ridiculous sentiment.
So we headed into a cafe to wait out the rain. We even asked our waitress what there was to do in Portland when it was raining but she replied 'oh we do all the things we do in the sun, in the rain' which was quite blatantly not answering the question. Fortunately the rain petered out, which allowed us to walk around and see a bit more of the city. After a tasty lunch we jumped into the car, and headed off to the coast!
As we left Portland it was lashing it down, we joined the freeway heading West and started climbing up through the mountains that separated us from the coast. The forest was really dense as we wound our way through, but as we came through to the other side the land cleared, now the rain was impossible to see through. We had to slow right down, trying to work our way through Tillamook, a little town which we were aiming for. Given that it was a torrential storm we didn't get out to look around and nor were we interested in the cheese factory. So we headed onto the coast which was another 20 minutes West, as we reached It the clouds cleared and the sun shone through. We drove up to an 'Octopus tree' which we'd read about, and as we rounded one bend we got a first glimpse of the coast.
It is stunning, so dramatic with these big dark cliffs and fragments of rock just off the shore, but also golden sandy beaches with big rolling waves coming in. It truly takes your breath away. So we drove up to the Cape and got out for a walk around, the octopus tree was not as amazing as we'd imagined, but we wandered round and watched the birds on the cliffs.
Generally just admiring the view.
We were pretty keen to take advantage of the lack of rain whilst setting up a tent so we headed off to find or campsite, google couldn't locate it but we had a vague idea. The drive along the shore was once again breathtaking and as we wound around we kept driving in and out of the clouds. We turned up at what we thought was our campsite, but it turns out it wasn't, fortunately the guard was very helpful and pointed us in the right direction.
So we headed down the coast a bit further to ours which was decidedly less developed. We'd booked into an rv/atv park. There weren't showers, washing up sinks and only one water pipe that was down the road. It was also a popular destination for 'ATVs', we had no idea about this, so were a bit taken aback by the plethora of quad bikes driving past us as we were right by the access point for the dunes. At least we had a sandy bed, though George did think I was being ridiculous when I banished all traces of sand from the tent, personally I thought it was a sensible thing to do. We had dinner, lucky for us the rain held off, then we headed off for a walk down to the sea, only to discover that one couldn't. The dunes were dominated by the ATVs , and were so tall that you couldn't see over them all the while the quads would come flying over the top. Not ideal for a romantic walk.
At least the ground was soft.
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