California

We've made it to California. I have to say that I'm extremely impressed with Oregon, but California is so-so thus far. Although we are finally in warm weather! Camping will be much more fun without having to wear a toque to bed.

So we left you all at the end of day one, a Sunday. On Monday we made it to a suburb of Portland where we met up with Mark’s aunt Barb and her three kids, who had recently moved back to North America from Bangkok. Uncle Dan was missing in action because he was in Brazil. We wandered around Lake Oswego with Barb and she showed us her new house from the outside. They had not yet taken occupancy when we were in town, but since the house was vacant we wandered around the outside and she described the layout as we peered in the windows. Their back deck has a slide attached to it, going to the ground in the back yard! Cool.

We then hung around the Portland area for about another 24 hours, trying to get in contact with our friends Taras and Ellen, who were supposedly due to arrive back in Portland (where they currently live) on the Tuesday. We had no luck whatsoever reaching them, and their suburb, formerly known as “Hillsboro”, will henceforth be called “HillsBORING”. We were not looking forward to another cold February night of Oregon camping, so on Tuesday afternoon, not having contacted Taras, we finally left town and drove on the CRAZIEST roads ever in an attempt to reach the coast. It was very hilly and winding – at one point the highway made a more than 180 degree turn as it wound down a forested hill. Then Karen, our GPS unit, took a fit and tried to make us turn onto a dirt road. No thank you, Karen. Man, she can be moody.

We did make it back to the coast that evening, and wouldn’t you know it, once we were a few hours out of town, Taras finally called us. Drat!! I’m sure we’ll see him again.

We drove ‘til after dark (I don’t want to do much more of that) and pulled over into our own private rest area, where we parked on a hill overlooking a spectacular sandy beach with huge waves. We listened to the waves all night and watched the sun rise from the beach the next morning.

On Wednesday we arrived in California! It was a day filled with more driving, more hanging out on spectacular beaches (similar to Long Beach in Tofino) and we went for a hike in some sand dunes in a state park or something. The sand dunes were neat.

Wednesday evening we UTTERLY FAILED to find a place to pull over for the night. Karen the GPS unit, in another fit of moodiness, let us drive towards a “safety rest area” for an hour, only to find out that it was perfectly empty, all the street lights in it were on, and it was closed and had boards across the entrance. Who closes a safety rest area? Again it was already after dark, so we drove to a nearby state park, decided not to stay because they wanted us to pay $20 for next-to-no facilities, and we got trapped in it and had to drive the entire length of the park in the dark because there was nowhere to turn around. We had failed at the rest area. We had failed at the park. We asked Karen to find us an RV park and the nasty thing took us to a mobile home community instead. Who knew it would be SOOO hard to park somewhere for the night? We drove around until we found a cheap-ish motel and finally settled down for the night. At least we were somewhere where we could shower, although inexplicably, the hot water only ever lasted for about four minutes at a time. Also, it was harrowing to walk around in the bathroom because the floor was soft and felt like it was rotting out from under the cheap linoleum. So far California is NOT as good as Oregon. But it's still pretty good.