West coast thinking in Seattle and Portland

We left Vancouver early in the morning, headed for the USA - all we had to do was clear customs and we'd be set. There was absolutely no line at the border crossing which was great, but, on the other hand, it meant that the customs officer had all the time in the world to interrogate us. Questions such as: "How long will you stay?", "Where is all your stuff? - It doesn’t look like you have enough for a three-month road trip", and "Why did you decide to cross here - so far from home?", etc. Finally, satisfied with our answers, he let us in with the following warning - "Just make sure you guys don't do any work in the US!". This made us both smile, because we were in total vacation mode, with work the furthest thing from our minds.

We then headed straight for the nearest AT&T store to get some SIM's for our mobile phones, as foreign coverage and data roaming can be very expensive. We warmed ourselves up with coffee, while we waited for the store to open. Then we had some fun choosing, not only what number, but also the area code we would like - so many possibilities! It was decided that the 'coolest' area code for a phone would have to be from sunny Hawaii (808).

Our phones, rigged up with their newly acquired data access, had their GPS switched to the location of Seattle - home of Starbucks, Amazon.com and Microsoft. Soon we were navigating the city streets looking for a cheap parking lot, which turned out to be for us, at a downtown Target store. We had been to Seattle a couple of times before and decided to just walk around and have some lunch. We watched the crazy fish throwers, hollering excitedly in Pike Place Market, as they worked their trade. Soon we found a place to eat at a local deli where we had some divine pizza. After finishing lunch, we wandered over to the original location of Starbucks (who by the way, name one of their coffee blends after the street the original location is on – Pike Place). It was kind of busy, mainly with fellow tourists, so we skipped out on getting a coffee from them this time.

Our time was almost up and it turned out we would get free parking from Target if we made a $20 purchase. This was no problem at all and we used the opportunity to stock up on some trail-mix, a nice bottle of local wine plus a few other bits and bobs. Melissa took the items to the checkout counter, with ten minutes to spare and was surprised and a little flattered, at getting 'carded' for the wine.

Off we raced, mindful of how short the days were getting. We punched in our hotel coordinates, which we had arranged the night before, onto our GPS and were both a little surprised to see that it was in Vancouver (!?) We thought that maybe we had messed up the booking. Another look revealed that it was in a suburb named Vancouver, Washington just outside of Portland – so all was good. We were tired from driving all day, so we thought we would just walk next door to Jack in the Box, which is a west coast burger chain that we hadn't experienced yet. As we entered the huge restaurant, the first thing we noticed was that there were no customers inside and the servers were all rushing around madly taking care of the drive through customers with no one available to serve the car-less. We waited for several minutes, noting that the calorie counts were listed for all the food items. Given the seriously high values and the lack of service, we decided to leave and try somewhere else. Our next burger would be from In-N-Out, but that is a different and far yummier story!

The next day we crossed the Oregon border, headed for Portland the home of counter culture, the Hipster and the original man bun. As we parked our car in the trendy Pearl district of Portland, we were already noticing a change in atmosphere - everyone was smiling, laid back and were so young – In fact just walking around town, we felt the openness of this place. There were so many parks and the stores were very dog friendly. We headed over to Powell’s bookstore, which we had heard was a bit of a hangout for the enlightened folk. With ourselves now feeling a little enlightened after walking around Portland for a while, we decided to check it out. With the US elections on, we noted a sign informing us that Chelsea Clinton (the daughter of Hillary and Bill) would be arriving there for an evening of book signing. Alas, we didn't stick around.

We decided to have lunch at a local micro brewery called BridgePort Brewpub. We had a very nice meal there and Colin had a flight of beers (which is a small sampling of the best of their wares). After lunch we continued walking and stopped in a coffee shop, where Colin had a hot chocolate that the barista created some latte art of a cow on (very cute!).

We then headed back to our car and traveled up to the Japanese gardens, which unfortunately, were not filled with too much zen, as they were currently closed for maintenance. Instead we had a look at the International Rose Test Gardens from which Portland received its nickname, the City of Roses.

The next day Melissa was keen to check out Portland's Voodoo Donuts, which were very highly rated. Both Colin and Melissa loved these sweet, gooey treats, so much so that Colin keeps bringing them up and hoping that they have franchises in other cities (which they don't, unfortunately – boo!). He instead settled for purchasing a Voodoo Donut T-shirt.

We took off from the donut store and headed for the sleepy, seaside town of Newport Oregon. This was a beautiful place and we enjoyed having lunch there by the beach. With the sun shining warmly upon us, we felt that for weeks we had been chasing after autumn, trying to stay ahead of the cold weather. Now, at this time, standing beside the Pacific Ocean, we were finally starting to feel comfortable at last. Granted though, we were still all wrapped up in our sweaters and scarfs!

We finished up the day in Bandon, Oregon, which was again right by the beach - a totally stupendous, natural beauty. We each took a thousand photos of the beautiful ocean rocks as their colours faded with the day, along with the stunning sunset.

Next up: Sunny days in San Francisco