Roadtrip - The Ashland days

Having arrived, surprised the hell out of Kerstie and met all their friends at dinner we settled in to Kerstie and Thom's house for a week of fun, food and frolicking. We drank good American beer (shock horror! the microbrews in Oregon are actually really good!) ate lots and lots of delicious authentic Mexican cuisine and went shopping (Target hasn't quite made it to Canada yet and Col was going through withdrawal). We spent a day kayaking down the Rogue River in Tahiti inflatable canoes which was awesome fun (although no pictures were taken due to the watery nature of the experience) and made especially enjoyable when Kerstie managed to get a thorough dunking through one of the first sets of rapids.

Kerstie managed to finagle a day off work before we left and took us for a trip up to Crater Lake. Whilst it looks like a crater from a meteor impact it's actually the caldera from an ancient volcano that's filled up with water over the millenia. It's way up in the clouds, very starkly beautiful and apparently has some great ski touring in the wintertime (could be another roadtrip in there someday). There's a National Park surrounding the lake itself to protect its natural beauty from the depredations of man and so the trip up to the top is made through some of the lushest forests that we'd seen so far on the trip.


The lake itself...


Road through Crater Lake NP...

The sides of Crater Lake are exceedingly steep and there's only one path down to the water itself where they run boat trips out to one of the small islands in the lake, so we decided to make the hike down to the water just to see it close up and hike back up (the boat trips were priced to a captive market at $20 a head).


The track down...


It turned out to be a bit of a scrambling track down and the first people we saw on the way back up were almost at the end of their rope. I guess they'd pushed it a little too hard coming back up or hadn't been out in a while because while the hike was reasonably energetic it certainly didn't leave us in the state that some of those poor buggers were in. Once we got to the bottom it turned out that the boats weren't running that day anyway because the winds were too high, which didn't really matter to us anyway since we were in it for the walk. One strange thing was the dozens and dozens of chipmunks loitering around near the dock that were being shooed away by the rangers who were just packing up for the day.


Cute, but...

We sat down to take a bit of a snack break and discovered that these chipmunks are actually brazen chocolate thiefs in disguise as small rodents. One of these supposedly cute little guys jumped up onto the bench between where Kerstie and Col were sitting, stuck its head into the chocolate bar that was sitting between them and started chomping down. And continued to eat while we all jumped up in shock and yelled at it. It wasn't until bags were thrown at it that it scampered away leaving a nice little imprint of its front incisors in our choccie bar. Little bugger.

After a delightful, jampacked week with the Kneelands it was time to get all of our stuff back in the minivan and start the trek homewards via the interior of the states this time instead of taking the coast road.

Roadtrip - Day 3

Thankfully the rain was finally letting up, and we started appreciating the spectacular beauty of the landscape along the coast now that the sun was shining on it and we didn't have to squint through the rain anymore. After all the rain and some pretty twisty spots, and the tsunami signs, we were cacking ourselves when we saw these signs for the Oregon Coast bike route. Come ride in Oregon! Crouch down into the driving winds! Ride through biblical proportion floods! Avoid the carnivorous seagulls!


Perception is coloured by experience...

We ended up taking Highway 101 all the way into the far northern tip of California before turning left and heading back inland to the I-5 and our final destination of Ashland. Lucky we did go down that far as well, because otherwise we would have missed the forests of enormous redwoods in that area. Incredibly huge trees, right in front of you before the hairpin bend, then they're shrinking off into the rear view mirror and there's no time to take any photos and as suddenly as the forest started it was over and we were in the interior of Oregon. Which thankfully is much drier than the coast, and resembles the desert more than the rainforests that we had become so accustomed to.

Of course the main purpose of the whole trip was to see Kerstie and Thom, but it was also a secret, we were going to surprise them the way they did to us by showing up at the cabin last year when we flew over during the 2003 BC fires. Amy (Thom's sister) was our inside agent in getting things set up. She was putting a birthday party at her place for their friend Annie. Thom and Kerstie were coming along to celebrate. Completely unaware that we would be there. We got to Amy's at about 5, the party was to start at 6 and everyone else showed up just before Kerstie and Thom arrived. It turns out that Thom had found out about us coming (Amy trying to cover her tracks with a slip-up to Kerstie), which was probably just as well, because it meant that he had a camera ready when Kerstie opened the door to find her sister there. Col wasn't supposed to be at Annie's party! Col lived 3000kms away. What the hell?! Needless to say, surprise was achieved, everyone had a great party for Annie (with yummy salmon for dinner) and we got our own back in the nicest possible way.

Surprise!!


Sisters reunited...

Roadtrip - Day 2

So now we were in the right place, the famous Highway 101 that wends its way down the western coast of the US from above Olympia all the way to Mexico as far as I know. Still raining (typical Washington State) as we headed south, and it turns out that where we stayed in Bay Center was a bit susceptible to, well tsunamis. I think this may well be one of the strangest signs I've ever seen.


Tsunami evacuation route ...

I guess it happens often enough in the area for them to signpost the evacuation route and all, but we found it a little weird to be driving along a pretty major highway, with town after town and plenty of farms, all on land that is obviously far too low if there's ever an earthquake out to sea (with the San Andreas fault line running around that area, not so unlikely).

We drove south and eventually hit the Columbia River which is just massive, and was one of the major trading routes for the early explorers and settlers way back when. Originally Dave Thompson claimed all the land north of the Columbia for Canada as he was the first white guy to explore its course from its beginnings in the Kootenais in BC all the way down to the coast at Astoria. Obviously Canada doesn't own most of Washington State so someone dickered well for the Yanks, and now the Columbia separates Washington State from Oregon at the town of Astoria, named after John Jacob Astor who first set up the trading fort there in the 1800s.


Bridge across the Columbia River to Astoria, Oregon...

South some more, and we ended up in Tillamook which is home to the Tillamook Dairy Co-Op who produce some of the nicest aged cheddar I've ever had and some really really yummy ice cream as well(which we had to sample). In the carpark of the main touristy centre and dairy processing factory we got these photos of some of the more outrageous vehicles we were sharing the highway with.

Obviously this guy is a serious relaxing type! Enormous caravan/5th wheel? Check. Boat tied on top of the roof OK? Check. Got the motorbikes as well? Check.

RV - Recreational Vehicle - and dammit I'm goin' ta' re-cre-ate as much as possible...

And once you get your enormous Winnebago to the campground and set it up(hooking up to the 15A power supplied and setting up the satellite TV) you might need to nip into town for a bite to eat so you may as well tow your full sized Ford Explorer with you...

The gas consumption on the Explorer would have killed us, let alone this combo...

It was really strange at first seeing all these 4WDs tailgating these massive Winnebago RVs until I realised that they were being towed. The funniest license plate on the whole trip was on one of these 4WDs being towed behind a big Bounder Winnebago. "I PUSH".

We were very lucky with our campground selections and managed to find another very lush site in Mapleton. We had decided by this stage that we were sick of the constant rain and so we might go inland a bit and try and get away from it that way. Of course the roads inland all followed the river courses and this campground ended up being right next to a river and was pretty damp anyway, but at least we'd made the attempt. And it's absolutely green and lovely and we were pretty much the only ones there again. Nice.


Col's hiding behind the tree...

Roadtrip - Day 1

Well it didn't take long before we got to put the iPod (and the iTrip FM transmitter) to good use on our road trip down to see Kerstie and Thom in Ashland, Oregon. I had a bit of time off from work and it was the last break that Col had before Uni started so what better way to spend two weeks than exploring the Pacific Northwest Coast and catching up with the Kneelands?

We spent a night at the cabin in Adam's Lake before heading south through Kamloops towards the dreaded border crossing. Of course being a Canadian, Col has never had any problems crossing in the States before but since I had an Aussie passport, we had to park the car and go into the Customs office, fill out a visa waiver form and hand over our first US cash payment of the trip.

I've got to say we were lucky with the crossing not being too busy and we got through OK, but I sure hope the roads on the other major crossing a bit further west nearer to Vancouver were a little more, well a little more like a major road. As soon as we were in the US we found ourselves on some pretty narrow country roads driving through cornfield after cornfield as the rain started pelting down. Not too sure that we were even on the right track we just tried to keep heading west where the map said that the interstate I-5 was which was our arterial route south.

After passing through some very shady looking areas and broken down little towns we eventually found the I-5 and joined the much faster traffic flow, two lanes at last! We wanted to make some time through Washington and get past Seattle if possible and after the first few hours of torrential rain and slippery driving conditions all of our worst stereotypes of Seattle and Washington being a grey rainy hellhole were confirmed. At times, there was so much rain dumping down that it made no difference whether the wipers were on or not, and we were noticing a lot of cars pulling over to the side of the road to let the worst of it pass. "Must be tourists" we thought, "we're used to bad conditions, we'll just push on". Lucky the I-5 is a 2 or 3 lane divided highway most of the way down through Bellingham to Seattle and Tacoma and then Olympia. Seattle for us was just an excuse for the traffic to pile up as we hit it right at rush hour and it didn't let up until we were well past Tacoma, and we were pretty happy about the commuter lane (for two or more people in the vehicle) that we shamelessly drove most of the Seattle bypass in.

We stopped off in Olympia for a bite to eat and ended up having a pretty tasty Thai meal (of all things) in the state capital of Washington, but it was too rainy and cold still to do any exploring of the grounds of the capital building which looked pretty impressive. Onward ever onward that day and we finally hit the coast at around 8 o'clock. Dark, still in the driving rain, now on narrow twisty secondary roads and tired, we were getting towards the end of our rope and finally managed to get to the coast and Highway 101 which was to take us all the way down the coast of three states before we got to Ashland. We pulled up for petrol and could not for the life of us get the pump to work. dodgy guys in Chevy Camaros pulled up alongside us, everyone spoke with the weirdest accents, we were exhausted and it was all just getting a bit too much. We discovered that in Washington you have to pay first (or leave your card with them) before they'll turn the pumps on and so we just filled the tank up at what turned out to be a pretty expensive 210c/Gal. Of course coming from Canada where gas is priced in c/L we had no idea what we were paying but at that point it really didn't make much of a difference. All we wanted was for the van not to run out of gas and to find somewhere to stop for the night. About 30 more dark, twisty and slippery kilometers south we stumbled into a campsite out on a peninsula called Bay Center. We pretty much just pulled in, chucked everything in the front seat, rolled the mattress out in the back and fell into an exhausted pile in the back.

Imagine our surprise in the morning to wake up and find that we'd actually happened across a really beautiful little camping spot on the coast and that we had it all to ourselves!


First night camping in the van...


The Pacific Ocean...

We had a little chat with the campground manager the next morning and he was more than a little surprised to see us "With the huge storm last night and the price of gas!" I guess those people pulling off to the side may have been Seattle natives after all....

All I can say is, thankfully we had the iPod with all our music on it to keep our spirits up and that we were very lucky to find the perfect little campground at the end of it all.

The Two Rings

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.

Okay so this isn't really appropriate for our particular case, and I'm not likely to set off on an adventure with a chubby gardening friend and a couple of tag-along local juvenile delinquents (at least not without Col anyway), but you just can't help yourself sometimes when pop culture and real life collide. So when I got home this afternoon there was this little box on the kitchen counter.


I wonder what's inside?

And inside it was the results of a furiously creative collaboration between us and Ralf and Jeff, the jewellers par excellence at Vandenburg Jewellers in the city. They are possibly the nicest jewellers that have ever existed on the face of the planet and much kudos needs to go to Inie who tipped us off to their existence when we started our own little odyssey for the rings. Very professional and upfront about what was involved in the process of designing and making the rings, Ralf was so willing to spend plenty of time getting us jewellry newbies up to speed and then by some magical process extracting exactly what we wanted in a wedding band without us even realising that that was what our hearts truly desired.


The Two Rings

As you can see, they are both in a 19kt white gold (with palladium as the alloy because we're both a bit nickel sensitive) which gives them a very cool antiquey feel. Now if I ever develop leprosy and get transported to a magical world of the imagination I'll have all the right tools at hand (so to speak) and hopefully I won't manage to screw it up nearly as completely as Thomas Covenant did. [Stephen Donaldson has a lot to answer for...]

Col chose a magnificent orange sapphire as the centerpiece of her ring which is just so perfect, because really, what other colour could you possibly associate with Col? The setting is really cool as well, a dual band that splits and curves out to hold the bezel for the sapphire. My band has a thin 22kt gold band in the form of a wave inset into it - I'll leave it up to the reader to determine the influences for that particular design decision :-)

We're both unbelievably happy about how they turned out and will be both wearing them as engagement rings. I keep getting strange looks from people when I tell them that I'll be wearing it as an engagement ring as well, but I see no reason why the girl should be proclaiming her attachedness to the world and the guy can't do the same. And I've got an awesome ring and want to wear it too dammit! Whether we decide to get an extra band or something for the actual wedding is still up in the air but probably not for me at least.

Incredible!

Just in case I haven't mentioned it earlier I am the luckiest guy on earth. Without question. I mean who else would be lucky enough to have found someone who goes out and buys one of these as a present out of the blue?


The new 4G iPod!

Roadtrips are just going to be awesome from here on in!!!
Colour me blown away...

Summer in Alberta/B.C. = Lake trips

No summer is complete in the Hope family without plenty of trips to the cabin at Adams Lake. I'm sure I've put up photos before on my photo albums about how beautiful and peaceful it is out there, and that's a good thing because I completely forgot to take any photos while we were there except for these paltry few. The biffy that we were digging the hole for a month ago is almost done now with the little shed sitting perfectly over the hole facing up into the woods up the hill. All sorts of bush carpentry was undertaken on the weekend to get the seat built and to make it well within the specification limits of being comfy, the right height for the short and tall people and able to take whatever load is asked of it. So sadly no piccies of the masterpiece (although maybe we'll steal some from Bonnie and Ken when they get back) but here's the cute little hotel we stayed at in Valemont on the way down. The trip from Edmonton to Adams Lake takes around eight hours from door to door and so when you're leaving after work it's almost mandatory to stay overnight somewhere along the route from Valemont to Clearwater. We decided not to go too far that night and had booked a place in Valemont which is about 2 hours from Barriere. This place was pretty new and had cedar panelled walls which smelled just amazing. Like staying overnight in a sauna almost!


Glacier Mountain Inn...

There's all sorts of people on the highways, some of them ride very cool machines


Cool Harley parked underneath our room...

We stayed in Valemont and didn't have to get to the lake super early because we had booked a meeting with the local marriage commissioner for the next morning. She turned out to be a lovely lady, very accomodating and willing to make the ceremony what we wanted it to be and so we set a date for the big day which will be July 20 next year out at the lake. More details and info on that will be sorted out in the coming weeks and months.

And finally just as we were about to leave I remembered I had my camera with me and managed to take a shot of Jason and Lindsay who were out there with us for the weekend as well. We had a great time with them trying to learn how to wakeboard on the board that Jason brought out with him. For the record I'm terrible at it and did not manage to get myself up out of the water once. Col on the other hand is a natural and popped up first time and even was doing tricks like going with the board at 90 degrees to the boat although that may not have been intentional! I'm sure if I'd just been able to rise like a phoenix from the waters (I'm sorry, that similie really really doesn't work but it's all I got) that I would have been cruising around the wake like a true waterman, but it was not to be. Maybe next time around. Still we had one perfect day of completely calm water and that was pretty much the best waterskiing I've ever had in my life. And one day when I grow up and get to be as good as Ken and Col, I'll be able to carve rooster tails with rainbows in them like they both did. Did I mention that it's amazingly fun being out at the lake?


So photogenic it's ridiculous...