The Long and Winding Road

The long and winding road took us to Berkeley, where we slept in Lovebud's co-op. She told us about her trip to Oregon, where she'd visited redwoods and hot springs. We wanted to do the same and after a really short stay in San Francisco, we barely grabbed an organic fair trade vegan lunch, we headed north to Redwood National Park.

More trees. Seriously, we travel from LA to Vancouver and all we do is watching trees. However, these trees were the tallest in the world, and we spent a foggy and rainy day on a hiking trail, in a forest world like the moon of Endor.


From the redwoods we drove until late at night and crossed the border to Oregon. We wanted to visit Crater Lake on the way. Crater Lake was created by a volcano that collapsed on itself. We arrived in the middle of the night, in full snow storm and drove up the slippery slope to the top. There was no campground, so we just parked on an empty parking lot and slept there. The morning arrived a few hours too early when a park ranger knocked on our window, demanding to see ID and registration. Illegal camping. We were kindly advised to leave, unless we wanted to camp until the snow melting in April.

And then we came to Oregon...

The pages on Oregon in Lonely Planet USA are sparse, and honestly, there's a reason for that. The only remarkable thing about the Beaver state is that it is not allowed to pump your own gas. There's a scenic drive along Hwy 58 trough a mountain pass, but the weather was so bad that no mountains could be seen. The rumors about hot springs were true though, but they were well hidden. A frantic search in wet woods and along a huge dam finally led to the hot springs. It was more of a one feet deep muddy pool, but it was HOT. Nice!

Additionally some hundred miles later we arrived in Portland. Christmas and window shopping. By an accident we found Backspace, a hip little internet café (a café with free wifi).

The beautiful void of Oregon