California and Pacific Northwest Week #1 and Week #2
Apologies for the long hiatus between blog posts but we’ve been taking care of a bunch of life matters in recent weeks so haven’t been up to much adventuring. But all that’s been sorted and now we’re back on the road for a final couple months before we head off to New Zealand in late September.
A quick catchup since the last blog post - we spent two weeks visiting family in Massachusetts in June. Highlights included reading my grandmother’s (Oma’s) memoir, going for lots of beautiful walks, running the Northampton 5k Cross Country race, playing in a 9 ball tournament at my dad’s house and of course spending lots of time with family. Then we returned to California and picked up our van from San Diego and drove up to Santa Monica where we were going to be housesitting for my aunt while she was traveling for two weeks. It was super helpful to have the housesit as we needed to buy heaps of furniture (got rid of most things when we left LA) and pack up our storage unit for the movers to come pick up. After several attempts at helping them jump start the moving truck — first time by an Aussie lady with a camo-interior pickup truck (success!) and a second time by the storage facility’s truck (failure!) — we’re told that it eventually made it to the warehouse for storage until it sets sail to NZ.
With all of the life stuff sorted, we hit the road two weeks ago with our first stop in Berkeley, CA. We were surprised at how cool the temps were when we first pulled into town but it did warm up some during our brief visit. Ginny did some serious thrifting, I played some basketball and we caught up with old friends. I did a run through the UC Berkeley campus and was shocked to see the temporary buildings still standing that my department was in during my two years getting my master’s degree. I also took BART into the office to see a couple coworkers which was a first for me since the end (?) of the pandemic.
We took three days to drive from Berkeley up to Eugene, OR, which allowed us to take a leisurely route snaking up through the redwoods and along the CA coast. On a tip from a friend, we stopped at Glass Beach north of Fort Bragg which used to be the city dump and the ocean turned all of the bottles into beautiful sea glass. However, people have since stolen all of the sea glass so we think they need a new name. The grandeur of the redwoods never ceases to amaze me and we were blown away by Founder’s Tree which stands at 350 feet tall! We also stopped in Arcata to see if it really is as hippy as we had always heard. Arcata has a historic town square where everyone gathers and there were lots of health food stores, crystal shops and weed dispensaries. So yes, it lived up to the hype!
Our first stop in Oregon was in Eugene to visit our old friends Courtney and Peter. They took us all over town which included visiting the Cascade Raptor Center, Hayward Field (if you’re obsessed with running, you know), Saturday Farmer’s Market and all of the Pre-things, e.g. Pre’s rock, Pre’s trail, etc. It was an awesome visit and how about their cat June? She doesn’t look real but I promise you she is (and super soft as well)! We also had some incredible meals with them including a pasta dish with freshly foraged mushrooms from the market (can you get any more Oregon than that?) and a Oaxacan Old Fashioned (delicious!).
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