Rest your hand on the top of your steering wheel. Now move it to the three o’clock position, then to nine o’clock, then back to three. Repeat for five hours. That was my Friday night.

On Friday afternoon I checked out of my Eureka motel. Having done some fortunate research, I realized that I should get off onto Highway 1 to follow the coast instead of taking 101 like I’d presumed. At the junction of 1 and 101 there were signs announcing, “Drive through a redwood.” So this was the famous road through a tree. I envisioned an enormous redwood with a paved two-lane tunnel running through it and I’d have to turn my headlights on. Honking my horn would produce a resounding echo and bats would roost high above my windshield. Unfortunately the reality wasn’t quite as impressive.

I followed a small gravel road onto private property and before I knew it, I was handing $5 to the slack-jawed attendant at a wooden entry gate. I rounded the corner.

The tree was big, but no bigger than I’d seen in the forest. I followed the minivan in front of me and edged my truck up to the opening. Both side-view mirrors on my truck began to flex back, pushed by the inner edges of the tunnel. I quickly shifted into reverse and backed out. Of all the ways to spend a sunny California Friday afternoon, wedged in my truck inside of a tree was fairly low on the list.

I briefly considered asking for my money back. I paid fi’ dolla to drive my truck through the tree and I wanted to drive my truck through a tree, dammit.

Highway 1 took me down the coast.

^ I want that house

The road hugs the coast as close as possible and I rarely hit 45 miles per hour. One 100-mile stretch took me three hours.

I wasn’t planning on making it all the way down to San Francisco on Friday, but there are very few towns with four-digit populations on Highway 1. The sun began to set and still I saw no Best Westerns or Days Inns. This route wasn’t as much fun to drive in the dark. I rounded the ten-thousandth curve and screeched to a halt. A small doe stood in my lane, motionless, staring at my truck like a…well, you know. My bumper was less than a foot from her hindquarters. A few miles away I hit my brakes again when my lights caught another doe a few feet off of the right shoulder, and a third time just down the road when a large buck stood in the empty oncoming lane.

I spent the night in a Travelodge just north of the Golden Gate bridge and crossed it on Saturday morning.

^ When I neared the Golden Gate bridge the first time on Saturday morning, I reached for my camera. Fifteen minutes later I retrieved it from the motel room where I’d just checked out.

Mark Twain allegedly stated, “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco,” but it was sunny and very warm as I drove around the city on Saturday. After a short walk on the beach I continued south to Redwood City, where I’d found an extended-stay hotel on Craigslist.

Less than 50 feet from the hotel, on the last turn of my trip after traveling 350 miles from Eureka, I saw flashing lights in my mirror while sitting at the stoplight. I pulled over. I wasn’t approached by Erik Estrada but rather a sunglassed officer with a knife slit for a mouth. “I pulled you over because you ignored the sign and stopped right on the train tracks…what happened to your mirror?”

I did receive a ticket for stopping on the tracks, which wasn’t a moving violation because, as the officer helpfully explained, once I stopped, I “wasn’t moving.”

I checked into my hotel and watched college football and Mexican professional wrestling, which I’d highly recommend for its sheer entertainment value and amazingly garish costumes.

I left Portland last Saturday morning and headed south on I-5. The leaves are just starting to change color and there’s nothing in central Oregon but trees and hilly cow pastures. I entered Linn County and a huge sign proclaimed it “The Grass Seed Capital of the World.” As you can imagine, I nearly wet myself with excitement.

Around noon I pulled into Myrtle Creek, a small tourist town, and confirmed what Shelby had told me earlier - there’s no self-serve gasoline in Oregon. It’s actually against the law to get out and pump your own gas. I told the young girl who approached me to fill my tank with regular and asked her why the law existed. “I dunno, maybe to create jobs?”

^Myrtle Creek

Further south, I exited I-5 to head towards the Oregon coast. The land dried out and deciduous trees turned to pine. I entered California. I met up with Highway 101, the famous Pacific Coast Highway that skirts the western side of the state all the way down to Mexico. I passed through the mountains and at times had to slow to 20 for hairpin turns; it was becoming clear that this route would be much slower than the taking the interstate.

It was extremely foggy on the other side of the mountains and I could only catch glimpses of the Pacific Ocean from the road.

The towns in northern California are poor. Most are small conglomerations of trailers and gas stations, with hand-lettered plywood signs by the street that advertise used tires and homemade redwood furniture. I spent this week in Eureka, a semi-touristy coastal town of 30,000 people where the median household income is less than $26,000. Portland residents ride bikes to save the environment, Eureka residents ride bikes because they can’t afford cars. Picture a mixture of Key West, Mayberry, and Dodge City, with two heaping scoops of economic downturn stirred in.

The town does have some cool old Victorian houses, but I can’t forgive it for producing Brendan Fraser.

^ The Carson Mansion

After more than two months in large cities, it was good to hear people use phrases like “ain’t gonna” and “howdy”. Every other radio station plays country, which I appreciate. People in Seattle and Portland have no accent or local dialect - their speech is generic, like that of a national news anchor. At the Widmer Brewery in Portland the waitress gave me a small sample of a seasonal beer when I was seated. I liked it and asked for a pint, and when she brought it she said, “Here’s your burr, honey.” I thought she had a southern accent until I looked at the menu and saw that the name of the brew was “Brrr Red Ale.”

While I’m on the topic, a few blocks from my Eureka hotel is the Lost Coast brewery, where I ate supper on Wednesday night. I ordered the Pastrami Burger and was served a giant hamburger made of grass-fed beef topped with ample slices of grilled pastrami (yes, pastrami), swiss cheese, and Thousand Island dressing. It came with fries with a parmesan and mustard seed seasoning. Lost Coast also offered a beer sampler, which is several ounces each of ten of their beers, along with a flyer describing each one. I sipped them all and thought about how cool it would be to tour microbreweries around the world and write about them. Maybe that’s 2009.

Today, I quit working a few hours early and drove back north on Highway 101 to see the redwoods. It turns out they are really really ridiculously massive. This particular species is Coast Redwood.

^ To convey a sense of scale I took off my shirt and hung it on the tree bark. It’s a Large.

^ A placard introduced this specimen as simply “The Big Tree.” Several people took turns posing for photographs.

^ The Big Tree. I’d guess that it’s 18 feet in diameter, or more than 55 feet around, which probably makes it hard to find jeans for it at J.C. Penney.

A ragged one-story motel on Highway 101 with 8 or 10 rooms has a sign proclaiming that it was built from a single redwood tree. I’d believe it.

There are many road signs in the area warning of elk crossings. On the way back, I finally saw some wild ones in a large fire-swept clearing.

^ Deer are skittish and moose are shy, but these elk acted like dairy cows. I was thirty yards from them and they didn’t pay any attention to me or my truck’s noisy dual exhaust.

Tomorrow afternoon I’ll leave Eureka and see how far I make it. When driving west and south on US roads, the mile markers and exit numbers count down, telling you how many miles you are from the edge of the state. I’m at 711. I’ve got a ways to go.

On October 10th, my month-long stay in Seattle was over. I said my goodbyes to the kind people at Office Nomads and packed up my truck.

Seattle seemed to exude the “I want to be different, just like everyone else” adage that is so commonly used in reference to teenagers. There’s only so many combinations of square black-rimmed glasses, carefully scuffed tight jeans, ironic berets, and thin brown leather jackets that a person can wear. It wasn’t a bad vibe but it felt a little forced, like everyone trying a bit too hard to be cool at a dinner party with people they don’t know very well. Wicked coffee, though.

Coworking in Seattle did have one disadvantage, and that was fighting I-5 rush hour traffic every day. Even my Seattle escape attempt on Friday night felt like swimming through molasses. I left at 4:00 pm and crept south on the interstate through Seattle, Tacoma, and Olympia - it was a full 70 miles before I could lean back and flick on the cruise control. I rolled into Portland a few hours later.

That Saturday I drove around the town and later spent a few hours at a local bar watching college football. Sunday I went to the movies and saw “How to Lose Friends and Alienate People” and “Body of Lies”. My high school buddy Shelby had kindly offered me a futon in his house a few miles from downtown Portland and I spent Sunday through Friday there.

Portland’s unofficial motto is “Keep Portland Weird” and the city definitely included an eclectic group of people. It also bills itself as the microbrew capital of the world and I went to the Widmer Brewery restaurant for lunch on Wednesday to try their Widmer Hefeweizen, winner of its category the 2008 World Beer Cup. I paired it with bratwurst, sauerkraut, and sourdough bread, and returned for the same meal on Friday.

Portland felt much smaller than Seattle, and had an excellent bus system while still being both walkable and drivable. The city is bisected north-south by the Columbia River and again by Burnside Steet running east-west; the resulting parts form the four quadrants used to give directions within the city. One highlight of downtown was Powell’s City of Books, one of the largest bookstores in the world with three stories and more than 68,000 square feet of retail space. The store really is a small city - it hosts 40,000 visitors per day.

On Saturday morning I shook off the repercussions of the previous night’s activities and cranked up my truck. Then I shut it back off, retrieved my phone charger from Shelby’s house, and drove south for California.

The forecast for Saturday was drizzly and extremely windy, so I stayed in and watched Florida State (barely) beat Miami and Kentucky (barely) fall to Alabama. By Sunday I was getting antsy in my apartment and drove 90 minutes northeast to the Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest.

The park stretches 150 miles along the I-5 corridor, almost to the Canadian border, and I chose a random entry point on the southern end. At the visitor’s center I reviewed some maps and elected to try the Mt. Pilchuck Lookout Trail - three miles of rocky trail, gaining 2,200 feet of altitude and promising a great view from the top. It was in the mid-50’s at the bottom of the trail, which I accessed by driving 7 miles up a rutted and steep gravel road. The landscape was almost temperate rainforest, which turned into pines and rocks higher on up.

Bottom of the trail, 3,100 feet.

^ A few hundred yards into the trail, it got, shall we say, rocky

^ A dense fog obscured most of the view on the way up

^ About a mile into the hike, I passed the snowline. It got chillier.

^ By now the trail consisted of rocks, slush, and rocks covered in slush

^ My destination

^ This was the view from the top when I got there. Too foggy to see anything at all. 5,324 feet.

^ When the guidebook labels a trail as “strenuous”, you might want to pay attention to that.

^ Turns out this guy was born in Spartenburg, SC. We talked about The Beacon, a local restaurant that will keep you up all night if you eat supper there.

^ After ten minutes and a sandwich, the view cleared a little…

^ …then closed again

^ A side of the small wooden lookout structure, looking down. Apparently this used to be a heli-skiing area.

^ It was windy and in the 30’s (if that) at the top.

^ I’m walking back down, now

^ Where I just was

^ This is an accurate portrayal of most of the trail. It was like walking through a small creek, stepping on rocks the whole way. I had gone to REI the day before and bought a great day-trip backpack, which had chest and waist straps and sat high and tight and moved with me, as opposed to my high school backpack which bounced around like an amateur cowboy on a mechanical bull. But all the hiking boots I tried on, even the wide versions, were too narrow, so I was relegated to wearing old tennis shoes. Everyone else at the top was sporting very expensive-looking hiking boots, which no doubt kept their feet dry, while I had to step on the jagged rock points jutting out of the water.

^ I’ve seen waterfalls, and I’ve seen snow, but I don’t think I’ve seen them together.

^ Looking back at the top. After this picture my camera batteries gave out, which isn’t surprising after 869 shots.

It began to rain about halfway down, then rained harder. It wasn’t pouring, but it was still about the level of no-interval-delay-on-your-car’s-windshield-wipers. I finally gave up dodging puddles and trudged along in the mud.

At home I took a hot shower and made a supper of homemade granola and green tea. Just kidding, it was three frozen chimichangas and two bottles of beer. I haven’t been in Seattle that long.