September US adventure, Pt 3: California and back

The rest of the trip was a blur. Partially due to the nature of wine-tasting, where you're constantly maintaining a buzz throughout the day, and partially because there was so much damn driving!

From Oregon coast to wine-country in California was a day-long trip. The second we left the coastal area and headed back to the No. 5, Summer greeted us with a vengeance. California was in excess of 30-degrees, and humid! Luckily (?) we spent most of the day in the air-conditioned car.

(playing frisbee at a rest stop)

The next two days we spent touring the valleys of the Sonoma/Napa area. The first day was spent in the Russian River valley, and we had the good fortune of randomly beginning at Lancaster Estate. The entrance read 'by appointment only' so we decided to just take our own tour of the elegant property. We parked at the house and to our surprise, an enthusiastic woman, by the name of Sheila, came bounding out to welcome us. Before we knew it she had introduced us to the Sales Manager, Jason, who swept us off on an hour-long tour of the winery, including the crops, and the cave. We finished off the tour with three generous glasses of their Cabernet Sauvignon, each of indecipherably increasing quality.

We saw a modest 4 wineries in total that day. But that was just the warm-up round for Sonoma, which we toured Thursday, and hit at least twice that. Tasted lots of good wine, but disappointingly Sonoma is becoming more commercialized that its reputation had us believe, and it's actually a rarity to find a free tasting since most places now charge you $5.

In order to enjoy the ride home and not be frantically rushed on our last day (though we still were in the end), we decided to spend our remaining three days leisurely working our way North via the coast.

Friday, our travels took us through the Redwood forests of California, where we got sucked into a number of tourist traps, including 'Confusion Hill' (featuring a house built on an angle which 'defies gravity'. Don't know what to be confused about; it's crooked!), and a giant Paul Bunyan statue that laughed when I knocked on its 12-ft tall shoe.

We camped in Elk Valley, in a site that was right beside an elk breeding ground. The campsite is actually built around this meadow that the elk spend most of their year in, and it was really neat to get so close to these animals.

After another long day in the car, we made it a good chunk of the way back up Oregon. That night we treated ourselves to a fancy seafood dinner, to end our trip on a high-note.

Sunday was another jam-packed exciting day driving down the highway, and then we were home again...

Phew! Overall, it was a ton of driving in a very short amount of time, but still a great trip with Bryanna (thanks, Bry!)

September US adventure, Pt 2: Oregon

Alrighty, I won’t write part 2 in half the detail of the first part, but try and highlight the best of the Oregon part of the trip.

Sunday, we made up for lost sleep, and then explored the beach we were camping on. Our next campsite was less than 2 hours South, so after packing up we decided to leisurely tour the coast for the day, taking in the gorgeous scenery.

We stopped by the world’s largest known cave of sealions, and spent an hour or so watching the smelly beasts. I’m still learning how to use my camera, so I couldn’t keep my pics from coming out blurred (though, I know it’s possible, since the movie turned out just fine!). Nevertheless, a professor from a University in India has added my pics to his website about caves around the world: http://www.cave-biology.org/. Neat site; check it out!

Our campground, turned out to have over 400 sites on it, with over 1/3 of them having hookups for R/Vs. And it was full! We had the good fortune of having a gang of teenagers for neighbours, who had evidently discovered alcohol recently, but had not yet mastered the delicate art of not-advertising-to-the-whole-world-that-I’ve-been-drinking. They provided good entertainment throughout the night.

Monday, the place became deserted and walking around the campground was quite eerie. So we went and explored the touristy area of Florence, the nearby town. Bryanna bought herself a kite, which we took to the sand dunes and played with for a while.

Next, we went and rented ATVs, which was a blast! Basically, the whole point of dune buggying seems to be to find tall sand-drifts and rolls down them. Though I found it frustrating for the first five minutes (a gorilla of a man had to come help me pull it out when I managed to sink 1 foot down into the dunes), I quickly picked it up and by the end I could see it becoming more addictive than any other downhill sport I’ve ever done. I vow that one day I will own an ATV, even if it’s just when I’m old and senile, for driving myself around the retirement home (I'll get a basket on the front, and streamers coming off the handles)

Anyway, those are the highlights from Oregon. Our next stop was wine country, California! …

September US adventure, Pt 1: Oregon bound

So Bry and I are back from our adventure down the Pacific coast of the United States, with our batteries recharged and our wine collections a little fuller. For those that don’t know, we had been planning this trip for a while. Moving from one co-op position to another, Bry only had a one-week window to vacation in and with our limited budget we decided to do a road-trip down to California wine country, taking in the Oregon coast along the way. It was a whirlwind tour, with over 40 hours of driving during the 9 days, but tons of fun and lots of good memories. So much happened, but I’ll try not to make this too long and leave it a ‘brief overview’.

With over 10 hours of driving ahead of us on our first day, our master plan was to head out at 7am in hopes of beating the lines at the border crossing, and make it to our campground before sunset. After grabbing our Supersized coffees from Starbucks and a car wash to make our mode-of-transportation presentable, we began down the No. 1 highway by about 8am. Around 8:20, as we were passing through Burnaby, the caffeine took hold of my brain, I shook off the cobwebs of sleep deprivation and realized I had taken us the wrong way. No, we were not headed South at all, but rather across our country on the trans-Canada. With more cursing than I care to go into, a quick turnaround and spin back into Vancouver, we reached the Peace Arch border-crossing just before 9AM. Where we proceeded to wait in line for nearly 2 hours … good times!

The rest of the journey through Washington went without incident. Until Vancouver, WA that is. Here, only half way to our destination on the first day of vacation, we were in a car accident. And by “car accident”, I mean I was parked in a stall at an AM/PM and a pickup truck drove sideways into me.

Karma? Come on, Karma, what did I do? Why are you out to get me?

Okay, I’m still in the process of working things out with the insurance companies, but I was 100% not-at-fault (as is the case with the other 3 accidents I was in last year, but I’ll save those stories for another time) so hopefully everything will be fine in the end. So I shan’t whine too much. Yet.

The sun accompanied us all the way to the Oregon coast, where a heavy fog greeted us, in spite of the forecast’s declaration of clear skies. It loomed over us to some degree for our entire stay over the next 3 days. After dinner at McD’s (where we learned the Canadian ‘Super-size’ is the equivalent of the US ‘regular’), we spotted a funky car which was sporting a hair cut (yes, it had hair) and stopped for a photo-op. So did another couple of tourists, who kindly offered to take a picture of us. I happily agreed, but she snatched my camera before I could fully remove the strap from my wrist and it dropped straight to the ground. My new, $500 baby bounced once, then rolled along the sidewalk while I tried to maintain a smile and not strangle this apologetic stranger.

Karma? Are you listening? What did I ever do to you?? What is your problem??? If I ever catch you lingering around, I’m going to kick your sorry ass. Watch yourself!

Thankfully, the camera worked fine afterwards. For the time being. It has since gotten sand blown into its guts, during our adventures on the dunes, and grumbles every time I retract the lens.

We finally arrived in our campsite (thank God I reserved!) at about 9pm that night. I have to hand it to Oregon, their State campgrounds are pretty kick-ass. Every one we’ve been to seemed well-cared for, all of the amenities you'd expect (free hot showers!), cheaper than Canada and have great locations. At this site, we found ourselves situated right off the beach! Our site was separated from the sand by a one-lane road and a row of bushes that was a stone’s throw away! After setting up camp we went exploring the pitch black, foggy shore, then fell asleep to the sound of the waves crashing in.

Okay, I think I’ll leave that as Part 1. I know it’s only the first day of the trip, but I’ll tell you all about Oregon in the next installment…