Sent: Sunday 11th May 2008, 9:36 PM
Good evening!
Tim and I arrived at our hotel in Newport, Oregon, this afternoon sometime. I’m not entirely sure of when – time seems to lose some of it’s significance when most of the day is spent driving through unfamiliar landscapes, and the sun doesn’t set for ages, even though it’s only just spring.
Before leaving Eureka this morning, Tim and I visited the Target down the road from our hotel. It’s very similar to Australian Target, except that the clothes are cheaper and more generic (sort of like Australian Target before it got tickets on itself). They have some ranges of clothes that are referred to as “designer”, but they’re still pretty cheap. I bought a pair of Mossimo jeans for 27.99, mostly because I needed another option to keep my legs warm (apart from the one pair of jeans I brought with me).
We then bought breakfast from the Target food thingamie. It seems like all the food here is super sugary. They use a different source of crop for sugar than we do (sugar beets rather than sugar cane), but the end result is the same. I had a yoghurt (you can see in the pictures that the yoghurts here are upside-down) and it tasted sort of like melted ice-cream. Tim had a “fruit smoothie”, which tasted a bit like a saturated, saccharine solution. With berries.
We found a safeway a while later, just off the highway, and were finally able to get some relatively unprocessed food. We had a picnic lunch in a park/camping ground in a copse of redwoods (also just off the highway). It was beautiful, sitting in the dappled sunshine, protected from the freezing wind by the towering trees. It was quiet and calm, and refreshing after so long in the car.
The view from the car was also extra beautiful today. We passed three elk in the lowlands near the California/Oregon border, and experienced the coldest temperature so far (10 degrees celcius). Part of the drive was similar to the Great Ocean Road in Victoria (you should be able to see in the pictures in the link below), and Tim said it was also similar to New Zealand with the sharply rising hills crested in fog, and clear, shallow rivers cutting deep ravines between the hills. I didn’t get any really good pictures of this, due to the fact that it’s difficult to take decent photos from behind the window of a moving car, and also there weren’t many places to stop.
Tomorrow we head to Olympia, crossing another state line into Washington.
On a side note, I really haven’t seen any cats yet, but I can verify that the streets are NOT paved with cheese. At least one of the claims made in An American Tail is false, but I guess that was evident from when those meece arrived in America and were terrorised by cats, and were poor and starving just like most immigrants.
Another thing that the North West Coast of America seems to be lacking are bugs of any description. And spiders. And snakes. The only creatures I’ve seen a huge amount of are seagulls, and in the past couple of days, some black birds with red beaks. And pigeons. Not that I mind, at all… It’s nice to get away from deadly insects and arachnids and reptiles.
Love Cass
xoxo
The emo “No Skateboarding” sign along The Embarcadero in San Francisco. Emos love to skateboard everywhere.
Me myspacing it up in the car
Yoplait is upside down.
