DATELINE: reedsport, or                                                    

Author: Andy

Sand for breakfast! First stop today was the Oregon Sand Dunes. I'd been looking forward to it from the beginning of the trip. We paid $25 each for a half-hour dune buggy ride and it was great. Our driver buckled us into the dune buggy and drove down this lush forest path. Within a couple minutes the path opened up into rolling sand dunes. The driver then accelerated and we started bounding across the Dunes at high speed. It felt a lot like a roller coaster. We would shoot up the backside of a dune and then rocket down the other side at a steep angle and twisted 50 degrees to one side. After a while he drove us down another path, which opened up onto the beach. Fitting that when we finally reach the Pacific, it is on a dune buggy. Our driver sped down the beach, fishtailing the buggy and spinning it out (on purpose). Then we went back into the main dune area for more awesome roller coaster fun. It was a beautiful and exhilirating ride. I'm still a bit dizzy.

Anyway, we made it to the pacific ocean! And it only took us three minivans to do it.

Seattle yesterday was fun. The EMP and sci-fi museum worth both very engaging and consumed 2 hours more of our day than we had planned. My only qualms with the EMP and sci-fi museums is that they were conspicuously light on electronic music and Babylon 5 respectively. I think both of them are heavily weighted towards the tastes of their founder, Paul Allen. Hey it's his museum, he can do whatever he wants.

It was a little surreal seeing seattle grunge in a museum. In one display case they had a shitty-looking t-shirt that kurt cobain once wore. I mean Nirvana was good and all, but treating his torn thrift store shirt like the shroud of turin is a bit much.

I did the drive from Seattle to Portland. We hit some traffic, but once again the car pool lane made it less painful. After dinner we turned west at Eugene towards Florence, where we stayed the night. The drive was surreal. The only light was from our headlights and we were surrounded by very very tall trees. When we finally got to a hotel near the coast, we drove out to the beach to dispense with the fireworks we bought in wyoming.

On a closing note, Ran Tao was a great hostess in Seattle and we already miss her a lot. Hooray for Ran Tao!