Pacific Northwet

I tried writing this last night, but it turned into a boring travelogue: we drove here, then we went there etc etc yawn yawn. So I’m having another go, with bullet points to keep it punchy:

• It’s been a week since the last one of these, and we’re now well underway on the trip. We picked up the truck and trailer on Tuesday, and have driven around 1200kms since then. Our first night in the US was in Issaquah, WA, and we’ve then been making our way down the Oregon coast, staying in Astoria (location of The Goonies, fact fans), Newport, and Port Orford.

Big truck, big trailer, small child

• This week has been very wet and pretty cold. The Pacific Northwest is known for being rainy, but I hadn’t envisaged quite this much! It’s added an extra degree of difficulty as we’ve been learning the ropes: our first morning hitching the trailer up was in a torrential downpour, and it’s made the driving a little slower and tougher. We’ve barely got out of single digits temperature-wise, and we’ve been running the ‘furnace’ in the van non-stop.

• Getting across the border was a minor drama. There was about an hour’s queue, and then we had to get our trailer searched (and our BC-bought grapes confiscated) and then have another immigration interview (apparently going on a crazy 6 month roadie with small children is a not a common reason to enter the US).

• Our RV park in Issaquah, WA didn’t have any pull-through sites, so I got some good trailer backing in early (thanks for the practice, Dad!).

Mo unimpressed by late 80s pop culture

• We’re back in Washington at the end of the trip, and we were only there for a brief, and very wet day this time. Highlight was a trip to the little town of North Bend for a damn fine cup of coffee and a ridiculously sized plate of breakfast at Twede’s Café, aka the Double R Diner in Twin Peaks.

• The rest of our WA time was in traffic on freeways in teeming rain, although there was some good pop culture spotting on the way: Olympia, WA, where the riot grrl movement began and where a major thoroughfare is called Sleater-Kinney Rd; and Kurt Cobain’s hometown of Aberdeen, WA, just the sort of bleak and miserable logging town that would make you wear a lot of flannel and learn some minor chords. The pine forests and constant mist of Washington are very atmospheric and otherworldly– you can see why this part of the world has given rise to musical visionaries and business weirdos.

• We weren’t originally going to Astoria: on the original itinerary the next stop was going to be the hipster citadel of Portland for a couple of nights. But after reading about the antivaxxer-driven measles outbreak a few weeks ago, we’d pulled pin on that given that Kitty had only just had her jabs. Nice one antivaxxers, as well as undoing a hundred years of scientific progress on diseases, we had to miss out on Voodoo Donuts and Powell’s Books. So we rerouted straight to the coast on the WA/OR border – the state line is partway along the Astoria-Megler bridge, an amazing 4-mile structure across the Columbia River.

A friendly campsite sasquatch

• We’re staying at a lot of Kampgrounds of America (KoA) parks on our trip – Astoria was our first, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was the best. It gets bonus points for being sasquatch-themed, but everything else was awesome too – great facilities, free pancakes for breakfast, multiple playgrounds, and an indoor pool which Mo and I tried out before we left. To catch up to our itinerary following truck issues we trimmed our two nights in Astoria back to one: I wish we’d had our extra night; in fact, I’d have liked a week here!

• Towing the van makes for quite a different sort of a road trip – it’s much harder to just pull over on the side of the road when you see something interesting, and trying to manage kids’ naps adds another layer. Choosing where to stop is as much about whether they have RV parking as anything else, but this throws up a few interesting stops we might not have otherwise chosen, such as the Tillamook cheese factory.

Elk spotting

• The 101 down the Oregon coast is a cracking drive, even when the weather is shonky, and fantastic when the sun finally came out like it did today. We managed a few good stops along the drive: a mini hike in Cape Perpetua State Park, a quick look at the Oregon Dunes, and lunch by an elk viewing area.

• We’re still figuring out the van, and getting set up with supplies etc, but today was the first day that properly felt like the road trip holiday. A lot of our free time has been taken up with unpacking, reading manuals, learning how things work, and buying half of Walmart, but we’ve hopefully broken the back of that now and can get into the swing of van life.

• One of the challenges of planning the trip was how much driving we could handle. This version of the itinerary has about as little driving as possible while still getting round a pretty big country, and I’m glad we didn’t go for one of the more elaborate versions with more driving. The start of the trip is front-loaded with more driving days and less ‘doing stuff’ days, and it’s been pretty tiring.

Please sir, can I have s'more?

• Mo made best buds with some kids at one of our campgrounds, and their parents had a fire and were cooking s’mores. So Mo had her first s’mores experience and celebrated by getting marshmallow all over her face.

• Oregon is one of the states that has legalized marijuana, and there are loads of dispensaries everywhere. They’re often the only shop in a small town that has had a lick of paint recently, and all feature the symbol of a green medical cross.

• In Newport we visited Rogue Ales, one of my fave US breweries. Looking out over the harbour we ate local clam chowder and salmon and chips while Kitty threw stuff around the room, and then went to their version of ‘cash sales’ and loaded up the van with tons of cost-price awesome beer.

Some rogues

• Oh, and while all this has been going on, Kitty has cut about 4 new teeth, is standing up at every opportunity, and can go up stairs. She’s pretty cool. We have a sweepstake going about which state she’ll first walk in. I went first and picked New Mexico, which is the end of May: I think I’m going to be well late.

• Tomorrow we head into northern California and Redwoods National Park, and then down through the parks west of the Sierra Nevadas. The weather will start to warm up and in just over a week we’ll be down in the desert and swapping single digits and the furnace for running the air con full bore in 30 degree heat.

MO’S PLAYGROUND REVIEWS: If you’re ever in Langley, BC, waiting for your truck to get fixed, there’s an excellent playground at the community centre. Full marks for local kids to make best friends with, and little-sister-friendly climbing equipment. The playground at our campground in Port Orford has a tetherball set, which a car-tired pair of sisters found absolutely hilarious.

BEERWATCH: The Pacific Northwest is a mecca for beer nerds. We didn’t make it to Pelican, but it was super fun to visit Rogue, one of my favourite beer companies. Their ‘Kulture Clash’ imperial blonde ale mixed with kombucha wins the gold for downright deliciousness (which is lucky because I bought a case at their garage sale). Silver to Black Raven ‘Kitty Kat Blues’ pale ale with vanilla, juniper and blueberry (sounds too fancy but totally works, and you can’t not buy a beer named after your daughter). Bronze to the Rogue ‘St Chuck’s’ rauchbier which was perfect with a bowl of clam chowder at lunchtime. I’m a bit over the hazy/juicy/east coast IPA trend, so having a few big old-school west coast IPAs like Rogue ‘Straight Outta Newport’ (Bo’s tasting note: “earwaxy”) was nice too. We also stocked up on a few other Oregon luminaries (Pelican, Deschutes etc) which we haven’t drunk yet, so they might pop up in future episodes.