7/17/99
-- I drove my 5000th mile a few days ago, I just realized! Also,
Check this highway out. I began to notice as I came up route 5
towards Seattle -- huge highways with 4 or 5 lanes of traffic
in one direction. I've heard quite a bit about the differences
between the coasts, and apparently this is one of them.
I now have two friends with me, Marc Helmick and Andrew Onthank Long, who will be with me for the next two weeks. We'll be traveling South all along the coast, visiting with friends of ours. Man, is it good to have buddies around. I can tell you, it's not like I'm unhappy with the solo nature of my vacation, and the trade off of having companionship vs having complete leeway to plan my course is a good one, it's just that I'm about ready for some help with the driving... well it's good to be traveling with friends again.
One of the purposes that this journal is serving is to give me the feeling that friends are along. It is also an opportunity for me to force rumination about the events that occur during my travels. If I weren't keeping this journal, I can see myself going from place to place, experiencing, but not reflecting on the experiences. The journal makes me reflect on what I've seen and done, and I wind up thinking of things which I could have glossed over completely otherwise.
So, where was I, chronologically... ah. I spent the night of the 14th in a rest stop just to the North of Bremerton. Got up early and headed over to the Seattle area to pick up Andy and and Marc at the Sea-Tac airport. Now, Andy's flight was due in at around 1pm, and Marc's was due at 3:45pm. So I needed, in my estimation, to be at the airport at noon. But first, I needed to do something about the space in my car. If you've check out my gear section, you've seen the state of my trunk. There was no way that I would be able to fit Andy and Marc and their stuff in my car as was. So I hopped off I-5 at the Sea-Tac Mall area, in a town called Federal Way, and transferred only what I thought I would need for the next 2 weeks into my framepack, and shipped the rest of it to myself, General Delivery, in San Diego. I have 30 days to get down there and claim my stuff.
So I got to the airport in plenty of
time, and logged on to check email to see if there were messages
from Andy or Marc. And, indeed, Andy's flight had been delayed
till 6 or so. So I waited till Marc came in, occupying myself
by working on the previous journal entry. Marc's flight was even
a few minutes early, and he and I had a cool little reunion and
catch-up while we waited for Andy's flight. Eventually Andy showed
up as well, and we all headed off towards Seattle. Our original
plan had been to get out to Olympic and camp out there for the
night, but that was shot since it was so late. So instead we drove
into Seattle, and followed a routine which I'm by now getting
used to -- we found a place where it's legal to park the car overnight,
put the car in "City Mode," and went off for dinner
and a prowl about the city. We had an excellent dinner at a place
called the "Elephant & Castle," although none of
us could figure out what the significance of that name is. We
checked through a local paper, and found a place near the car
called the 700 club, which had a band, and a $5 cover, and well,
I couldn't tell you much about that place except that the band,
as a concept, was cool, being composed of a trumpet, drums, a
contra-bass, a guitar, and a cello, but in practice was pretty
lousy, and then I fell asleep in my chair and woke up when Andy
and Marc were dragging me back to the car.
I sincerely hope we don't have
to do this again, but that night we piled all of our stuff
in the front two seats and folded that back seats down, giving
us a tailgate on which all 3 of us could actually sleep quite
comfortably. We rose at 5:30 and got gone, headed over to Olympic
National Park, but stopped over by the City Center when we saw
it was on our way out. Of course, the observation deck wasn't
open, and we all decided that even if it had been we wouldn't
have shelled out the $9 to head up there. We strolled around the
city center, though, because they had a cool landscaped walk,
a nifty fountain, and a "Peace Blossom," some really
cool garden which we strolled through. Check us out:
Oh, yeah. For those of you who don't know, Marc and Andy are Brothers of Zeta Delta Xi, my co-ed fraternity at Brown University. They and I pledged the same year, and we are currently in the process of taking the road trip we never got to take in college. It is somewhat unfortunate that some of our other brothers couldn't be with us, but, I guess they'd never fit into the Saab, anyway. Still, we've been talking about how we miss them.
Anyhow, we left Seattle and headed over to Olympic National Park to spend the afternoon and night. We hoped to do some badass hiking, followed by camping out at a site way up on a mountain. It took us a little longer than expected to get over there, but there was a whole lot of catching up to do, and the car was full of chatter the whole way there. It's interesting to have pals around to do that feedback/discussion thing that I was talking about earlier.
We checked out the visitor center in Port Angeles -- oh yeah, the entrance to Olympic is in Port Angeles, so when we left Seattle, we pretty much backtracked over the road I'd covered the previous night. Another reason why it was silly of me to take two ferries from Vancouver to Seattle. So, we decided to camp out at Deer Park, a campsite at 5,700 feet on the upper slope of Blue Mountain, after driving up to Hurricane Ridge, a ridge to the North of Mount Olympus. The Olympic Mountain Range is interesting, because although they're not so high, they're right on the Pacific Ocean -- in fact, they were created by volcanic activity in the Pacific Ocean, and became cemented to the edge of the North American continent when the Juan de Fuca oceanic plate collided with, and was subducted by, the North American plate. So there's tons and tons of precipitation over those mountains, resulting in the only North American rain forest on the coastal side. Furthermore, the Eastern side of the range is all Basaltic, the crumpled up leading edge of the Juan de Fuca plate, and the Western half is Sedimentary, the normal ocean floor lifted out of the ocean.
The day was
completely wet, overcast, and rainy. When we set out for Hurricane
Ridge, the sky was completely gray, but as we gained elevation,
we passed through several cloud banks, and then emerged above
the clouds to a few thousand feet of clear skies, followed by
another later of clouds. So Hurricane Ridge wasn't the spectacular
view that we would have liked it to have been, but seeing the
valleys covered in clouds helped visualize the way it would have
looked thousands of years ago when they were full of glacier.
By the time we got back from Hurricane Ridge, it was too late to expect to get any really serious hiking done, and after provisioning and picking up some cold weather gear for Andy which he lacked, we just had to get up to the campsite. The road had been opened up that morning, and the description at the visitor center about the site was that the road which lead up to it was unpaved, and completely unsuited for RVs or "unconfident drivers". Sure enough it was pretty treacherous, and I can see how they might have to work on it each time it rained, cleaning up after rock slides and snowfall.
Well,
it began to drizzle when we got up to the campsite, and there
was snow on the ground in some places, and it got to the point
that I was worried about my wheels slipping on some of the patches
of road about the site. I was also concerned about having to pack
away a wet tent the following day, being able to start a fire,
and keeping warm in my lightweight tent... all the same, we stuck
around after the clouds broke away for a little while, affording
us the view over our shoulders there on the left. We also found
that there were two wooden 3-side shacks with wooden bunks on
the grounds. One had a roof which had a broken support member
at the front, causing the roof to droop in the middle, but it
was keeping the rain out better than the other one, so we took
it.
That night was just great. The ranger showed up as we were splitting and shaving wood for the fire, which I was expressing confidence would get lit after a bit of work, and told us they weren't charging for camping yet, a bonus. The fire was really frustrating, because although the big wood which we found was dry on the inside, which means that it's fine for burning even if the outside is soaking wet, I couldn't get anything serious kindled in the rain -- I got a little fire a few times, but then each time I suffocated it dropping something on it by accident. Eventually I just sighed and poured camping fuel on some cardboard and took the easy way out. Prometheus has some bad days.
Andy and I woke up at around
6:30, and Marc told us that we'd missed a deer poking around our
campsite 15 minutes ago when he'd woken up... awww. 5 minutes
later Andy called out "Ew!", and when I went over, I
saw that a deer (black tail, the species found on mountains),
making it's way towards us. We were still and quiet, and it approached,
bypassed us through the woods, and emerged at the clearing of
our campsite. It was completely fine with browsing around our
site, not looking for handouts, or anything, just chilling and
eating while we prepared breakfast.
The campsite then lived up to its name (Deer Park, remember?), and after about 10 minutes of us getting used to this random young deer, who we called Doofus, his 4 friends showed up, one with two points of antler and one with four points, and they hung out for the entire half hour during which we ate breakfast. I couldn't believe how fine they were with chilling in close proximity to us.
It took us a little while to
drive down that crazy road all in first and second gears, and
we saw that there were a few minor rock slides over the road in
the middle of the night. We spent the rest of the morning checking
out the other side of Olympic, with the rainforest and the huge
spruces. To the right is Marc and Andy standing by one of those,
which had fallen over the trail we took.
After we left Olympic, we headed to Portland, to visit with Fab Tillier, another Zete and good friend of ours, and his wife Abby. Along the way we talked about how we were interested in seeing the domestication of our college friend, who's now been married nearly exactly a year, and told us last week that he'd been laying sod. We found our way to Beaverton, a suburb of Portland, and thence to Fab's cute (but not little) house at the end of a nice little street full of other nice houses. We reunioned, showered, and, much refreshed, went out to eat sushi at a very nice place in Portland. We rented A Simple Plan, which I'd seen before but was fine with seeing again, and took piles of ice cream home. I highly recommend that movie by Sam Rami to everyone -- it was a very deep film, highly non-hollywood, and features excellent performances by Bill Paxton, Billy Bob Thorton, and Bridget Fonda.
The following day we drove over
to the coast to hang out, ride the bumper cars, stroll around
the beach, and drive down the coast. We got up, ate a good breakfast,
and were out of the house by 10:30 or so, and headed out to the
coast. Then we got caught in a 5 mile line of cars on the single-lane
highway due to an accident up at the very end of the highway.
We didn't get to the coast until around 2pm. Ooooh, I hate that.
To the left you can see how I was doing. Oh, it wasn't really
all that bad, we were all talking and having a good time, but
poor Abby had to work the clutch on their fine VW Golf GTI (which
I got to drive later, and it schweet, let me tell you, with it's
badass narrow V6 and low curb weight) for hours.
Finally we got to
the beach town, put the car down, and immediately went for lunch.
After lunch we went to this cool bumper cars place, an old school
arena with really peppy cars where you can really wail on your
friends. We rode like 4 times. After that we went down to the
beach, and found that they rented out these beach trikes, kind
of like recumbent bikes, but with mesh seats, handles down by
your sides, and two wheels in the back. That was a blast, although
we all got quite a workout when we rode down to a spot on the
beach where the sand was all loose and the wheels sank in a whole
inch.
By the time we were done it was 6:30, and beginning to be a
little chilly down by the beach, so we all bundled into the car
and drove down the coast a ways. We stopped at a few overlooks,
and at one there was a trailhead leading to this awesome cliff
which overlooked the Pacific Ocean, which we had to do quite the
little vertical hike to get to. Once we got there, I hiked up
an extra treacherous trail to get this fine snapshot of the scene:
Then we went back home, worked out dinner on the grill, which was yummy, can't forget those roasted red peppers, and sacked the hell out at like 1:30am. Oh, and also, last night, I finally uploaded from Fab's fine aDSL connection, the previous two site updates, which was convenient, since the image directory for the 7/14/99 update was 1.5MB, and that's a lot to upload over a 4800 bps connection (my cell phone).
In the morning we all slept in (comparatively, 8:30), had another good breakfast, bid Fab and Abby farewell, and headed off to see the Columbia River Gorge, briefly, on our way down to the Sand Dunes. The gorge was nice, what we saw of it, which was little, since we were keeping it quick. We had to get down to Eugene, OR to visit with Felicia and Glen, and see the dunes.
Of course, when we stopped by REI to get a replacement pump for my stove (the retaining tabs which hold the pump cup had broken off, rendering it not useless, but a pain in the ass, since every once in a while when I was pumping, the whole pump would come out of it's housing), Andy realized that he'd left his wallet at Fab and Abby's, so we went back to their house to get it. Then we sped down to Felecia and Glenn's who's house we've now arrived at.
their house is pretty sweet, and you may read about them in the next update.
