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The fountain show at the Bellagio. It is amazing, but it is a pity about the music (Celine Dion, My Heart Will Go On)

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It is pretty fabulous...

Redwood forests, California

Leaving Gold Beach in the rain, and knowing this was our only chance to see the Redwoods, we were praying it would clear up by the time we reached the forests. Sadly, it was not to be. There was torrential rain for much of the trip, and snow was still clinging to a lot of the trees.

Although we had been warned many times about the Elk that live in the redwood forests, we didn't see any until we drove past four or five young males just sitting outside a house. Quite why they thought that would be much nicer than the peace and quiet of the forests, we're not sure, but it was remarkable to see them so close.

We did have an incredible time driving the Avenue of Giants, a scenic road that goes through the forest, but it would have been magical to be able to walk through them. But, as Hamish pointed out, it's just something to leave for when we come back (in summertime!).











































We did find a drive-through tree off the Avenue - it was a tight squeeze for the car, but we did drive through it!

Arcata had been our original destination, but given the weather and the cost of accommodation, we decided to drive further south to Mendocino. This meant we had less time in the towns along the way, although we did stop in Crescent City, Arcata, and in the Humboldt Redwood State Park. This was on the 18th of December.

Mendocino is the town used in Murder, She Wrote and it was extremely cute in an old-fashioned way. Because of the season, we got a fantastic deal on the Mendocino Hotel luxury suite - complete with fireplace - so after an extremely good meal in their restaurant, we fell asleep by the firelight.

The next morning we returned to Fort Bragg, just north of Mendocino for a walk through the town's main street and some breakfast at a Wizard of Oz-themed cafe. We found a few more beaches just out of Mendocino.

Heading south again, the road quickly became another twisty, rough, up and down road along the coastline. Looking out at the view, especially when you come round a corner, or to the top of a hill, never gets tiring!













And finally the sun had come out, so we were able to stop and wander around as much as we could. Our roadside picnics are much more enjoyable in the sun...we even managed to watch some small deer play in a little wood right by the side of the road near our picnic spot.

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Courthouse of Santa Barbara

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Our lunch spot came with a view of the dolphins playing with the surfers in the pacific ocean!

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Jellyfish at Monterey Aquarium, Monterey, California

Thanks to Pete and Helen for the tip!

Gold Beach, Oregon

When we left Newport it was an ok day, but there was meant to be another big storm brewing so we thought we should make a big push down the coast. When we arrived in Newport, we found out that they had had their first snow in something like 5 years, so we knew it was very possible that we could have been caught out. We did our biggest day driving (up to then) that day going 177 miles (285 kms). It was a rugged coastal road, and there were some pretty amazing sights. We stopped at one point and there was an absolute racket down at the waters edge...

Seals!
Who we also noticed were practiced their syncronized swimming.

We stopped in Bandon, in the Old Town, a quaint little collection of shops. We would have liked to have stayed longer, but we still had plenty of road to cover that day!

Before driving into Gold Beach, our stop for the night, we watched the sunset over the ocean. The sea is so still, and there is just the Pacific Ocean to watch. No islands, no land, nothing. We kept an eye out for the spray of whales, who are migrating down the coast to the warmer waters, but we were all alone.

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San Francisco waterfront...and it was a beautiful Christmas Day here!

Merry Christmas xxx

Newport, Oregon

So it is time for a bit of a catch up, we are about a week behind in words.

Up to Newport, we had travelled 409 Miles (659 kms) from Seattle.

In Newport we stayed for two nights at a place called the Sylvia Beach Hotel. Instead of room numbers, here you have room authors. So there is the Agatha Christie room, the Jane Austen room, the Robert Louis Stevenson room, and so on. We were given the chance to poke round before choosing our room, and we settled on the Tolkein room, which featured a huge bed on a four-poster frame made of tree branches and with vines crawling over it.

We settled in and, after a quick meal at the pub across the road, went up to the top floor to sit in front of the fire and read from the huge collection of books there. There were just 4 other guests, so it was lovely, peaceful and quiet, with just some excitable cats around to entertainment.

The following morning, we headed back to Depoe Bay, a small town just north of Newport. We strolled through the tourist shops and along the waterfront before spending a little too much time finding out just what salt water taffy really was. We still don't really know, but it is pretty delicious! The marionberry (a local berry like a blackberry/raspberry cross), which we had just tried the night before, remained our favourite.

The afternoon was spent taking care of small jobs like laundry, checking our next stops (no internet at Sylvia Beach), etc, and then a walk along the bayfront with some local seafood at the cafe there.

That night, we were the only ones in the hotel, so we watched the sunset, made a roaring fire and curled up with our books for several hours. Fabulous!!!

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The Macy's Christmas tree at Union Square.

Merry Christmas!

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Ruth at the Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco

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Hamish perusing photos at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art - the 'Double Down' exhibition - photos of Las Vegas in its early days.

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Chinatown, San Francisco, California

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Lucy and Charlie Brown at the Charles M Schulz Museum, Santa Rosa, California

Portland to Newport

Leaving Portland in the snow was an interesting test of our driving and navigation skills, but it all went well, and we safely arrived at our next destination.

Astoria, a small town near the mouth of the Columbia river, just south of the border between Washington and Oregon.  From reading the guidebooks they suggested it was a quaint little town with plenty offer.  We arrived in a bit of a snow storm, but found our hotel ok.  On arriving the hotel's front door was locked, with a note to call a number to be let in.  Though, no phone.  Luckily a couple of the guests were arriving back, so we snuck through with them.

We suspect that the hotel doubled as a halfway house, with most of the people we saw looking like they were in some state of disarray.  Before we had met any of  the other guests, we had signed up for two nights.

We had an excellent dinner where we were the only people in the restaurant for a good 90% of our meal.  We sampled two Oregon wines, and Ruth had some local seafood.  Something I am still struggling with is the constant choice when ordering something.  Do you want salad or veges?  Salad, what dressing would you like with that?  Bread?  What sort?  That and salads to start...  what is up with that?

That night was an interesting one, the heater in our room was a little weak, as was the sound proofing.  A constant melodic hacking cough rang through the night from our neighbour who was either a small child or an old lady - the tone changed so much.  We pulled the plug on the second night, and spent the morning exploring the tourist spots of Astoria.  Luckily the storm had passed, leaving a practically cloudless sky, with hardly a breath of wind.

 

First up was the Astoria column, standing at 125 feet with 360 degree views over Astoria and the surrounding area.  

From there, you could see the Astoria bridge, which connects Oregon and Washington.  The bridge is 4.1 miles long and is apparently the longest continuous truss bridge in North America.

We got on the road shortly after that - it was FREEZING outside, I don't think it got much above zero all day.

First stop down the coast was Seaside, a beautiful beach town, though mostly shut up for winter.

We still went to the beach... and yes that is snow.

There were some pretty amazing views on the way down the road, below is pretty much what we saw that whole way to our next stop, Newport.

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Outside Gualala, California - at the highest point on the road south

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In the Avenue of Giants, California

Portland, Oregon

Our long weekend in Portland was an accident. It turned out that it was a mistake not to have planned to go there...Portland is very, very cool. And not just cool because it snowed on our last day!

Portland was also the place we had our first real coffee...right at the bottom of our hotel! Stumptown Coffee Roasters is a Portland-based company that is just starting to expand outside the state, and it was really good coffee. They're a pretty interesting company - the owner will pay much higher rates than normal for beans he thinks are worthy, and he is a huge supporter of fair trade. This was no Starbucks!

Sufficiently warmed, we braved the icy wind as we walked to the Museum of Contemporary Craft which was holding an exhibition on everyday objects -particularly mass-produced - being transformed by craft. There was a dress made of just one zipper, a tower of polystyrene, and doilies made into the patterns of diseases (did you know herpes was so pretty when stitched white onto black velvet?). Very cool. 

Once we left, it had stopped raining so we toured Portland's beautiful old houses and went up to 23rd Avenue, a long street filled with great little shops. We could have stayed for hours, but we needed to get home and get ready for the game...the Portland Blazers were playing the LA Clippers! 

Sadly, the Blazers couldn't pull off a home town win, so we didn't go out partying with the team. Instead, Google maps took us on a giddy tour through the one-way system

The next day was spent at the 3D Museum and the Portland Art Museum. The 3D Museum was little more than one man's eccentric hobby, but it made for a fun morning. It turns out that no one looks good with the glasses on, even though they had a few different kinds!

The Portland Art Museum was a much slicker job. There were several collections of Asian art and artifacts, along with a great deal of First Nation art. I wish we could have spent more time there, as there was much more than we could see in the few hours we had before they closed.

That night we ate and, more importantly, drank at one of Portland's breweries...delicious!

Having been curled up in our hotel room all night, it was amazing to open our windows to snow! Snow everywhere!

Clearly we needed some books to read through this weather, so we finally got to explore Powells, a bookstore by our hotel which covers an entire block. Heaven!

We left Portland extremely pleased with our discovery, and headed out to Astoria, and the start of the US-101 - the road that will take us all the way to San Francisco. 

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Relaxing by the fire at Sylvia Beach Hotel, Newport, Oregon

www.sylviabeachhotel.com 

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Sunset over US101 at Cape Fairweather

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SNOW!!!!! (and elephants)

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NW 12th Avenue, Portland, on our way to dinner

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Coffee was well earned after a whole lot of walking around Portland's NW 23rd Ave and the Pearl District.

Olympia

Olympia is the state capital of Washington, and for some reason we were expecting a really small town - I don't really know what gave us that idea - though it does have a population of around 43,000.

We only planned to have one night there as the main attraction there was the state Capitol campus, from there we were going on to Astoria, which is at the mouth of the Columbia river.

The Legislative building was the highlight with the "Temple of Justice" just behind - just for the name alone.  The legislative buildings interior was a whole lot of marble - though looking up to the top of the domed roof was quite cool, through a 5 tonne golden chandelier.

Due to the severe weather warnings, we decided to change direction and aim for Portland, which is further inland, to hole up for a few days.  We still hope to get up to Astoria, and follow the coast, but we will have to wait and see.e

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Oh, America.

Weather warnings

With severe wind and storm warnings for the Washington and Oregon coast, we have detoured to Portland. This was not on our rough plan, so we know nothing about it! We've done some exploring already, and it looks like a good place to ride out the storm. 

The Pacific North-West

Seattle, Washington. We were staying in Belltown, a part of town with lots of restaurants and close to downtown. The Ace Hotel was a very cool base for our two days adventuring. We started with a walk through Pike Place markets, home to many touristy-shops, locals buying their fruit, veges and bread, and the original Starbucks. 

We then spent hours walking through the Seattle Art Museum, which had some very cool exhibitions. Edward Hopper's Women, in particular, had some really interesting paintings and sketches, and also included some photographers who followed Hopper and his focus on solitary women, often in cafes. Hamish was fascinated with the Egyptian exhibit ("it's all so old!"), while I spent time in the porcelain room, admiring all the beautiful pieces which were grouped by colour rather than the style, date or creator. 

Several of the works had a sense of fun about them - Mann and Maus by Katharina Fritsch was brilliant and a little nightmarish! We both wanted Andy Warhol's Double Elvis for our house, and Do-Ho Suh's Some/One made us get up close, trying to see if the thousands of military dogtags that make up the armour were real.

We spent the hour before dusk walking through the Olympic Sculpture Park. Just a few years old, this park covers 9 acres and looks out over Puget Sound. Even the land is sculpted into a zig-zagging path around the artworks. 

We hid through the ship-like forms of Wake by Richard Serra - these are created with the same machinery that once made submarines, and walked under the red steel animal form of Eagle by Alexander Calder. My favourite was Love & Loss by Roy McMakin - you had to work out what all the pieces were saying, but if you look at the photo you can see the word LOVE forming from the seat on the left, through the O infront, the V formed by the tree, and the E painted on the table. The & is illuminated above, and the LOSS is formed down the hill. 

 

The following morning we went to the top of the Space Needle, giving us a somewhat cloudy view over the city. You can't help but marvel at all the straight roads in the States, and they're even easier to see when you're 520 feet in the air! We descended as the clouds rolled in, and went to explore the nearby Downtown area. 

After the trials of collecting our hire car, we returned to the Space Needle and visited the nearby Experience Music Project and Hamish made a quick visit to the Science Fiction Museum & Hall of Fame. The EMP had some really interesting exhibits; in particular, the collection of oral histories from people involved in all kinds of music and its production, and a huge collection of guitars showing the development of the electric guitar. I spent some time looking at a collection of letterpress posters produced by Hatch Show Print. 

Distance travelled today:  61.5 miles.

Distance travelled total: 61.5 miles.

After a two hour wait for our rental car to be ready (1st it was late to the depot, then didn't pass their inspection - so had to get a different one brought in) we finally got on the road.  It has to be said, that it is a very strange feeling pulling out onto the wrong side of the road, but luckily it was all one way to start with.  We got onto the interstate ok, and enjoyed the same lane the whole way - screaming across 7 lanes would not have been fun.

We finally saw the turn-off to Olympia, 3 miles of warning later we got off, and then promptly drove past our hotel... twice... and ended up somewhere in the middle of town, without a map.

How to get out of this?  Head back towards the interstate, do a U-turn on the exit - beautiful.

Tomorrow what we do will depend on the weather - there's Olympic National Park if it's clear, or exploring Olympia before heading to Astoria. 

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Our new home, Queen Anne Hill (from the Space Needle) - Seattle