USA 1

Day 5 - Wednesday 29th August 2018 - into Washington, USA

Woke early but took awhile to organise as we knew we had to have things in order for the border crossing. Tried to sort out everything - ate a lot of fruit for breakfast to get rid of it. Still had to pull over at a “gas station” to chuck some things, but needed to get petrol anyway so it all worked out. Got to the border crossing and joined the queue. Took about 20 minutes to get to the front. The guy asked some questions, they scanned the car and took our picture, and then he gave us a slip and told us to pull over into the carpark and follow the directions of the guard in there. We parked and headed inside as directed and….stood in line for almost an hour. There was a heap of people inside waiting to be processed, some clearly foreign but some definitely American, so it wasn’t super clear what had singled us out to go inside. Anyway after waiting for forever we just had our fingerprints taken and did a retina scan and provided them with some more details of what we were doing and then were sent on our way. The whole process set us back about 90 minutes. We then stopped for lunch which was fine - just had some sandwiches at the first roadside place we could find (bought the sandwiches as we had no food after the border crossing). Drove on and everything as fine until outside Seattle. There was a three car pile up that had just happened so getting through took a long time (close to 2 hours). Thought we were on our way smoothly but then coming out of Seattle we hit more traffic. Another bad car crash but right as we were about to drive past it they stopped us (for five to 10 minutes) whilst they cleared the last of it and drove the tow trucks away (from what we could see it looked like two trucks had collided). That added about another 2 hours to the trip. About 6pmish we pulled over to have a breather and to grab some dinner. Also went for a bit of a walk to stretch our legs, get away from the car, and also because there was a walmart nearby so I could buy a connector for my phone (Lily’s car has an added stereo system for playing music from devices but of course it uses an aux cord to connect to it and apple got rid of the headphone port on phones after the 6 so my phone couldn’t connect to her system but she hadn’t prepared any playlists so we hadn’t been listening to anything really). After that got on the road and drove…and drove….and drove….and drove… started to really get to us about 10pm (me especially as the jet lag kicked in and we still had a few hours to go and I started to feel really sick and worked up about how long we’d been in the car) so we searched on the navman and found the closest accomodation which was an Inn. Pulled over and parked and asked if they had any availability…one room left. So lucky. The guy on the counter said they’d had a whole heap of people check in during the last hour. Maybe they all also got caught in the Seattle nightmare. Checked in, sorted ourselves out, tried to calm down. Managed to make myself sick but seemed to settle down after I lay down and had some time to chill out. Slept terribly but I sort of suspected it. I was too tired to fall asleep and didn’t get to sleep till about 2am. Woke up a lot throughout the night too. Anyway, at least the day was behind us and the bulk of the drive out of the way. Only had another hour of our drive left and the planned drive we’d had for the day was only about 40 minutes to an hour.

Day 6 - Thursday 30th August 2018 somewhere in Oregon, USA

Lily went down to the free breakfast and brought me back some food (awful American breakfast with sugar in everything) and I packed everything up. We got on the road in much better moods than the night before and feeling okay again. It was very overcast and a little bit rainy (but not enough to worry about). We made good time and made it to Fort Stevens (where we had meant to camp the night before) so that we could explore the area, which was our original plan for the day anyway. We walked to a shipwreck on the beach which, as Lily commented, wasn’t “even worth taking a photo of”. You would see one post remaining of the stern and some of the bow (in fact almost the entire remaining wreck was a tip of the bow). We did end up taking a few pictures just because we were there and then decided to go for a walk on the beach (we had thought we would have to hike a bit to the shipwreck but it ended up being less than a 3 minute walk from the car, so we had all our boots etc on ready to go anyway). Was pretty interesting walking along the beach to be honest. There weren’t too many people about probably thanks to the weather and the fact it’s a Thursday. There were some people flying their kites and walking dogs but to be honest it was windy and overcast and a bit miserable and I suspect even if the sun had been shining it still wouldn’t have been particularly inviting. Not that that would stop people I’m sure. There were a lot of dead things along the beach - dead crabs (torn apart presumably by birds), dead birds (not one or two, I’m talking at least 6-7 that we saw on our half hour walk), washed up jellyfish etc etc etc. Was interesting for us as tourists, but I can’t imagine living here or coming here as your summer beach location. I guess if I lived here I wouldn’t know any different and would probably think it was amazing - after all I have no complaints about Mooloolaba and we put up with blue bottles every year.

After the shipwreck we headed off to our next location - Seaside, Oregon. A horrifically unoriginal name that made it really annoying to look things up about the area. I’m going to wait to post this until after we leave the coast (with the convenient excuse that we genuinely don’t have any good wifi at any of the places we’ve stayed) so that this doesn’t panic anyone - but along the Oregon (and presumably Washington) coastline they are almost more prepared for a tsunami than we are for a fire. As we came into Seaside, Oregon we passed a sign warning us that we were entering a tsunami zone. As we continued to drive through there were signs indicating “tsunami escape route”.

We stopped for a quick, late, lunch - which was average. I had a caesar salad with salmon, Lily had a BLAT sandwich. My stomach is really struggling to adjust to the food. I’ve definitely felt off/not 100% since arriving because I’m usually really good at home (or just lazy) and mostly eat fruit, veg, sometimes pasta, rice, and fish, all home cooked and rarely eat out. Have been finding even buying groceries isn’t always a guarantee it’ll sit well in my stomach because of the sugar content. When I ordered my salad she asked if I was happy for them to crumb and deep fry the fish (SALMON!?!?! WHO DEEP FRIES SALMON!!!!) and I must have pulled a face I guess because I certainly hadn’t figured out what I was going to say before she quickly said “if that’s a problem we could always just grill it” which I was much happier with. Even so the salad came out doused in so much mayo it took me a little while to realise there was cheese mixed into it. Anyway it’s not as bad as I was making it out to be and it filled me up which is the main thing. Couldn’t handle the portion size and only ate about half of it but she happily boxed up the rest for me.

After lunch we found our campground and upon checkin the ranger gave us a walk through of what to do in the event of a tsunami (wait out the earthquake and stay as low to the ground as you can and wait for it to pass, as soon as the tremors stop you can either follow the map to the closest tsunami meeting point or “you can do the sensible thing” as the ranger put it, and just run as fast as you can to the closest hill/mountain. They estimate you have about 20 minutes after the earthquake hits before the tsunami will hit land. The rest of the instructions are about what to do when you get to safety, basically wait until someone official tells you it’s safe - don’t just assume it’s safe after 20+ minutes with no tsunami and don’t just assume it’s safe after the first wave hits.

Our campsite is an RV site because Americans love spending money on these incredible RV’s that are basically houses on wheels that they then drive around (sometimes with a car being towed behind) with and pay $100’s to park every night and however much to run, and no one in America seems to camp in an actual tent unless they have to. Certainly our site wasn’t partially well set up for camping - there were 10 camp sites (compared to hundreds of RV sites) and they were so small they told us we couldn’t park our cars in the campsite but had to pull in and unload and set up, and then move the car out to the carpark. Caused a bit of panic for us because we had been intending for me to sleep in the tent and Lily in the car but still right next to each other. We tossed up the idea of us both sleeping in the tent but it would have been a tight fit so we figured we would just have to deal with it. Set up the tent and then sorted ourselves out a bit. Lily started to get antsy because “we hadn’t done anything today” but I suspect we were both a bit worked up about the unexpected sleeping arrangements and now nervous about what the next 4 and a bit weeks were going to look like when so much had “gone wrong” already (bit dramatic but we were both exhausted still, everything felt monumental the later in the day that it occurred!). We ended up going down to the beach and going for a really good long walk. The sun had come out at this point and it was actually really nice - just a bit windy. It definitely helped us wind down a bit and then on the way back we grabbed some groceries for dinner. We ended up just getting a veggie platter (it was just a ‘tray’ with carrots, broccoli, celery, and snow peas with a tub of hummus) because Lily was still full from lunch and all I wanted to eat was some veggies without oil or dressing on them. We sat in the ‘clubhouse’ (which we laughed about endlessly because driving an RV wasn’t wanky enough you also needed to have special clubhouses to go to when sitting inside with your family and built in platinum TV and couches and heating got too much) and took advantage of the free wifi to do a bit of planning for the next day. Got pretty worked up at bedtime again as Lily set up the car in the parking lot and I had to walk down into the dark by myself to the tent. Got ready for bed and sat in the tent for about 10 minutes getting even more worked up like an idiot and ended up just taking a valium. Almost immediately calmed me down and I had a long moment of “you LOVE camping what is your problem?” because jet lag and the day caught up with me and I fell asleep almost instantly.

Day 7 - Friday 31st August 2018 Seaside, Oregon

Woke up feeling amazing - felt like the best nights sleep. Fitbit (when I loaded it later on the wifi) said I actually slept shockingly (woke up a lot and only had light sleep) but I only remember waking up a few times (when it started raining and any time I started to get a bit sore or cold in the position I was in) and I felt like I’d slept well which was the main thing. No doubt the valium messes with my heart rate a bit which makes fitbit a bit inaccurate and also one of the many reasons my doctor said to only take it when I feel like I absolutely have to! Most of the time knowing I have it as an option is enough to help.

Despite the rain in the night it was sunny when we got up and actually a nice temperature. Lily brought her gear down to the tent and we had a cooked breakfast and just took our time a bit. After that we packed up (we left the tent set up but took everything out as the camping area was very secluded and we weren’t sure how safe it was to leave stuff there) before heading off for the day.

Drove to Ecola Point and tried to do a hike to Indian beach, but the trail had washed away in a storm in 2016 (although the first sign we read said Winter 2017 so not sure which). Wound up on a beach anyway and it was very pretty, except lots of dead things again. We tried googling why and the general consensus is “don’t know”, the theory being tossed around is a virus or potentially a storm but from what we could see this is a phenomenon that’s been occurring since 2014 and they don’t believe a storm/bad weather would produce the number of dead birds that has been recorded. It put us off going for a swim though, that’s for sure.

We ended up driving to Indian Beach and doing a different hike from there, going to a lighthouse lookout. We had been looking at doing a hike to Tillamook Head but it was going to be 4 miles. On the way to the lookout there was a WWII bunker (we think - there wasn’t any signs at the actual site but the maps indicated WWII remains and it was very bunker like).

After we finished the hike, we went and got some groceries and then went for a walk on the beach to checkout Haystock Rock. Supposedly there are puffins on it but it was very sunny and whilst there were definitely a lot of bird life around the rock they could have all been seagulls for all we knew. Went back to the campsite and did laundry. We cooked dinner on the balcony to the laundromat and then went to bed.

Hopefully will have this caught up in the next couple of days now that we have access to electricity and maybe even some wifi!Read more