Coming back to the States was a bit like coming back into civilization: people everywhere, cars, traffic jams.... That wasn't helped by the fact that it was peak holiday season there, which made it quite hard to find vacant sites on campgrounds at all, not to speak of the beautiful, spots on the seashore we had envisaged to occupy all by ourselves! Bummer! The other thing is a phenomenon we hadn't know about before: Quite reliably every afternoon there is a cold breeze coming in from the Pacific Ocean - and I mean, really cold, so maybe 10 to 13 degrees Celsius -, bringing with it dense fog to kill off the warmth the sun might provide otherwise. This is a real killer. Combine this with the overcrowded beaches and parks you'll see our reasoning in leaving the coast after a drive around the Olympic National Park east of Seattle and through some - actually quite amazing - redwood forest in the South of the park. We tried a bit of the Oregon coast before retiring for a week at Eugene, Oregon.
Fog moving in near Astoria, Oregon
It wasn't all bad on the tour around Mount Olympus, at the start we had a couple of nice days at the Victorian town of Port Townsend, some arty community with cozy town center, old beautifully redecorated cinema, a marina in walking distance to the center, all nice and enjoyable. As mentioned, there was the Redwood Highway, a smallish road amongst huuuuge Redwood trees and lots of short walks into the forest.
That little red bug at the tree is Claudia and she's 1.6 m or 5'4" tall
Seattle: left after 2 hours or so, not ugly, but not great either, didn't do it for us.
In Oregon we had hoped for a bit of space, still no way to get some, so we finally gave up on the coast at Newport, heading for Eugene. We just wanted some place to rest after a lot of driving through Yukon, British Columbia, then Washington and now Oregon. In Eugene we found the right spot. They have a well kept county park close to town there, great service, not too busy and still close enough that we could do most of our stuff by bicycle. Eugene itself is ok, nothing special, a farmers market to visit, a cinema to visit...
After a week here we felt ready to attack our next destination: Crater Lake National Park.
