Travelling South through Washington State and down the Oregon coast.

After a lazy departure from our oceanside apartment we wound our way alongside Puget sound, catching occasional glimpses of the Canadian shoreline as the mist lifted, then turned away from the coast to join highway 101. The decision to leave the coast was pragmatic, the highway offered a far easier and faster drive to our destination, Port Angeles, but as it turned out this route wound around the edge of Lake Aldwell, with stunning vistas that topped even the verdent rain forest on the coast.

Dodgy was giving the odd shudder so we had an enforced stop over while some very friendly mechanics checked him out. Next morning, $600 poorer we set out in dodgy again, still shuddering but with lots of new hoses, filters, bearings and other bits. “The shuddering’s nothing to worry about, — lucky we spotted those other problems,” said the friendly mechanic as he took our cheque.

We coursed our way south past Seattle, which lay across the Sound then joined [I]5 and for a few hours endured the tension and aggression of what was probably the worst drive in all our travels. We finally crossed the Columbia River into Portland, Oregon, unfortunately in the middle of rush hour. The freeways were chaotic and slow, and an hour and 10 kilometers later we headed out of the city, west to Lincoln City on the coast. We had discovered a chain of campgrounds that had small log cabins available at a moderate cost. They were fairly bare, but were heated and we could move in our mattress from the car and use our camping gear. Best of all the were warm and dry and offered free internet access through their wireless network, so we could catch up with our emails. We rolled into the campground in at dusk in steady rain, thankful that we were not tenting it.

Next morning we toured beachside Lincoln City before heading south along the spectacularly rugged Oregon coastline.

The urgency of the tsunami warning signs scattered at intervals along the fore shore seemed to have little resonance with the real estate developers, with new estates perched on sandbars perhaps a metre above high tide level.

The rest of the day we travelled along the beautiful, rugged Pacific coast. The scenery speaks for itself, so other than to mention the whales at Waldport (look closely at the blue seascape) and the fascination Oregon seems to have with arched bridges, I will let the photographs tell the story.

Oh, and the pumpkins, thats another story , Halloween.

We finally crossed into Northern California in the late afternoon.