Oregon Coast / Drive from Portland to Newport

Monday, September 19

We drove out of Portland and headed west, back to the coast. It was time to view the Pacific in all its coastal splendor.

We took a quick stop in Tillamook at the Tillamook Cheese Factory. Since I am not eating dairy products these days, we didn’t stay long. But I did go inside and look at the cheese being made. I also tasted a few yummy cubes (and put a few in my pocket for Auggie back in the Champagne Chevy! He LOVED it. J)

And then we took our first stop at Pacific City, a small, laid-back coastal town with a beautiful beach. It was a gorgeous day and we took a nice, long walk on the beach. Aaaaaaaaah.

After our walk, we stopped at a little tasting room of an Oregon winery called Basket Case/Twist. They manufactured several labels; we did a quick tasting there to quench our curiosity. While they didn’t have any Pinot Noirs (they specialize in Zinfandel and Syrah), their Syrah was awesome. I took some along with me (and opened it later that night). It was DELICIOUS!

Farther down the coast, we stopped at Cape Foulweather, "discovered" by Captain James Cook, which was really windy (hence the name "Foulweather"). But it offered a superb view of the craggy Oregon coast, as well as our first glimpse of gray whale spouts out in the distance. How very cool – we are starting to see sea creatures now, not just land creatures.

We climbed back into the van to continue our drive, but stopped again soon after that to visit the “Devil’s Punchbowl.” (Pacific waves come turbulently splashing into that circular opening in the rock.) We talked to a friend back home while we walked on yet another broad, beautiful Oregon beach and watched the surfers do their thing in the cold Pacific. (I would freeze in that water in less than five minutes, I am certain.)

We headed a little bit farther south to Newport for the night. We found the South Beach State Park just south of Newport, which was right on the coast. We cooked a great dinner, read more Potter #6 and sipped some of that yummy Syrah before we drifted off to sleep.  

Portland

Thursday, September 15-Monday, September 19

We had a blast in Portland. Or, perhaps better said – we had a buzz ……..

With a superb selection of high-quality (and tasty!) coffee, Pinot Noir, beer and sugar easily accessible at any point in the city, it was a veritable smorgasbord of buzz-inducing stimulants. (I don’t smoke, but I bet there were micro-brew-like cigarettes to be found there, too. (Or is that called “weed” these days?))

We sampled a bit of all during our visit. (Not the weed …)  (But many people clearly do - take a look.) 

Dinner on Thursday evening with Stephanie, Matt and Amelia was delicious, and it was a treat to finally meet Amelia after all these years. She’s a little cutie-pie and yet another adorable child that gave Auggie love, love and more love. My boy leads a charmed life!

While everyone worked and went to school, I took Friday as another welcome computer-focused day. Thanks to an excellent WiFi connection, I was able to finally catch up on some more blog entries – I seem to be falling farther and farther behind. I uploaded some pictures onto Facebook from the trip, too, which you just can’t do when you have a skinny little unreliable connection to the Internet from a campsite. I felt very productive.

We went out for sushi Friday night – another treat! I haven’t had sushi since I left on this trip. Yummm.

Saturday, Stephanie invited me along to her Bikram (hot) yoga class in the morning. I had just started Bikram yoga in the summer in D.C. before my trip, so it felt really good to be back in the room of 105 degrees and 40% humidity. At home, I have been working on chronic hamstring and hip-flexor injuries, and yoga has been helping them very much. Since I am sitting/driving so much on this trip, though, these injuries have been starting to flare up. Despite regular stretching while on the road, they do not seem to be happy right now. Yoga felt good on the rest of my body, but the hamstring seems to be a little angry with me – I’m going to need to ice this today for sure.

Saturday after yoga was supposed to be a bike tour through Portland. But unfortunately the weather didn’t cooperate - it rained off and on throughout the day. We opted to leave the bikes at home and drove into the city for a look around.

Stephanie and I first stopped at the Saturday market, an opportunity to look at local artisans and lots of very cool handcrafted items. Since we were hungry after yoga, we had some yummy food there.

After we left the Saturday market, we made a beeline to Voodoo Doughnuts, one of the yummiest places to OD on sugar and caffeine in Portland. And so we did. Here’s what we had: one Rocky Road (with Cocoa Puffs, nuts and mini marshmallows) and one toasted coconut, with two cups of coffee.

Oh. My. Word.

I haven’t had a donut in several years, so these tasted awfully good. Pure, unadulterated fat and sugar – what can be wrong with that???

You can find the VooDoo Doughnuts’ full (and funny!) menu here. Don’t miss the Portland Cream and the VooDoo Doll, with pretzel-stick stake stuck right through its heart.

And now, take a look at some of the creations that VooDoo Doughnuts had available during our visit:

Grape Ape (vanilla frosting, “grape dust” and lavender sprinkles)

Miami Vice Berry (vanilla frosting, blue raspberry powder and pink sprinkles)

Mango Tango (donut filled with mango jelly, topped with vanilla frosting and Tang)

Maple-Bacon Bar (rectangular-shaped raised yeast bar topped with maple frosting and strips of real bacon) – this was a VERY big seller!

Portland Cream - Bavarian cream inside and two "eyes" on the chocolate frosting

An eclair of some sort

Maple Blazer Blunt - raised doughnut rolled into a "blunt" with maple frosting topped with red sprinkles (this is in homage to the Portland Blazers)

And take a look at that “Worm Hole” – raised doughnut with green-colored coconut, topped with rainbow gummy worms. That one is death on a donut – ewwwwwww!

And we can’t forget “The Loop” and “Captain My Captain,” both raised donuts with vanilla frosting, topped with Froot Loops and Captain Crunch cereal, respectively.

[N.B. – I’ve left the X-rated donuts off this blog, but check out their menu online. J]

By the time Stephanie and I were finished eating those, a pretty heavy buzz was about to kick in. (I don’t usually drink caffeine. VooDoo Doughnuts does not serve decaf coffee, nor did decaf tea seem to make sense given the sugar overdose I was about to consume, so I decided to jump in with both feet. Bzzzzzzzzz … )

As a final note, you may have heard of VooDoo Doughnuts before. They have been featured on “No Reservations,” the Anthony Bourdain show on Travel Channel. They’ve also been featured on “Man v. Food,” the Pacific Northwest edition of “Globe Trekker,” and it was a destination on the 13^th season finale of “The Amazing Race.” Their website also boasts that VooDoo Doughnuts was recently entered into the Guinness Book of World Records just on August 6 of this year – they created the world’s largest box of doughnuts – 666 pounds! – creaming (ha ha ha) the previous record of just 333 pounds.

Who knew doughnuts could be this much fun?

Well, I did by that point … bzzzzzzzzzzzz …

Next stop was Deschutes Brewery downtown in the Pearl. They are a local microbrewery, and Stephanie and I decided to split a sampler flight. When we took our first sips, we both liked #1 best – the Fresh-Hopped Inversion IPA (upper left corner). But after a little bit of savory food on our palates, our final vote was for #6 – the Fresh-Hopped Oktoberfest (lower right corner).

And then I thought about it a little – this actually was THE opening day of Oktoberfest in Munich. So our beer selection was appropriate. I wished the drinking public in Munich a good time by mental vibes, and then Stephanie and I went to Powell's Books, followed by a nice long walk through some of the boutiques along Portland’s 23^rd Street shopping district to help digest our crazy food/beer/sugar buzz.

We went home and had a simple dinner later, which was about as much as our bodies could handle at that point. Whew! 

Sunday morning Stephanie and Matt went to the gym while Amelia and I stayed home to play with Auggie for a bit. Amelia taught me how to play her DS.

I was booked for lunch with a friend, Alexa, who held my last job before I did and had trained me back in 2005 when I had first joined the company. I had not seen Alexa since spring 2005, when she had left the company.

She looked fabulous! She is 9 months pregnant and just about ready to have a baby (which has hopefully happened between my actually being in Portland and finally getting this blog entry posted). It was great to catch up with her and learn that there *is* life after a six-year stint working extremely hard at a job that kept us both traveling and very busy in our respective times. She seems to have found balance again in her life, which gives me hope that this is possible for me, too. This is all very good news.

Sunday evening we all kept it pretty low-key as Steph, Matt and Amelia got ready for their weeks and I got ready to push off again first-thing Monday morning.

And then on Monday morning, it was time to leave. I had such a wonderful time in Portland – my friends, the city and my multi-faceted buzz were all an awful lot of fun.  J

Hoh Rain Forest / Drive to Portland

Thursday, September 15

We woke up in the rainforest, with light rain still falling. I was getting more real Pacific Northwest weather!

We took a quick morning walk around the campground and then made breakfast. Then I had to leave Auggie in the van while I walked the quick one-mile nature walk in the park – dogs not invited there, either. Very cool nature – massive trees, big, green healthy ferns, lichen covering their limbs, again making a human feel awfully small.

We learned about nurselogs.

We saw trees that had begun germinating on nurselogs and looked like they are now on stilts since the nursing tree has since disintegrated.

 We saw the remains of a fallen tree longer than 190 feet.

Though the visit was short, it was a very cool experience.

After we left the Hoh, we continued south on 101, a route we would follow all the way through the state of Oregon and into California. We took our first long walk on a broad Pacific beach, where Auggie frolicked, sniffed everything and had a blast. Still gray and rainy, the weather made for some pretty cool scenery on our beach walk.

We then climbed back into the van and made our way south to Portland, where we would spend a few days with  Stephanie, Matt and Amelia. We got to their house early evening and started our fun visit.