Post Trip: I Saw So Many Freakin Trees That My Retina Nearly Exploded

I'm back, I landed last night. A few things are very apparent...Central Texas is much flatter than the Pacific Northwest, and there are fewer trees, far fewer...and they are not nearly so huge.

Also, it's a lot warmer here.

I digress...alot, so I would not be able to talk about the whole trip in a single post. I'm planning on writing several of them based on my experences.

Not counting airport stopovers I visited 4 states, two (Canadian) provinces, and we drove 2,037 miles on our hardcore roadtrip of rockage 2K5.

I made the trip with my good friend Dan Bakken who grew up with me in Temple, Texas but now lives in Idaho where he goes to school at New St. Andrews College...in Seattle we stayed with his very nice and hospitable grandparents who happened to live right next to the airport.

Places visited:

Seattle - Rocks without question, except people drive much much slower there than I'm used to. Nice town, very green, lots of trees and water and more trees and nearby mountians. The city has a great vibe, not unlike Austin in that respect. everything is developed with space in mind which I like. My friend and I were walking and just randomly walked by the Sub Pop office. Very cool. It was suprisingly hard to find a good independent coffee place...I guess Seattle is more of a mecca for Corporate coffee than coffee in general now. The Space Needle was an expensive trip but worth the view.

I was doing cool stuff from the moment I landed. Dan picked me up and ferried me around town to give me a sense of the place, which it did. We went back to his grandparents house and they fed us dinner. Dan's grandparents are awesome to say the least...they had plenty of hospitiality to share. We went out and drove around town again, hanging out and stuff. We went downtown. Saw a street fight involving a couple dozen people. Seattle is surpsingly not a very active town at night, everything closes really early, that was suprising.

Seattle Day 2 - So much stuff on day 2, too much to write about: We parked downtown and spent the day on foot. It was an unseasonably beautiful day there (or so the locals said...the weather was definitely nice) We went up in the Space needle, found some coffee at this really good place on 4th street, found the Sub Pop office (randomly...which made it even cooler), lunch at Unconventional Pizza...pretty good, visited the Seattle Library which is easily the coolest library building, mabye the coolest building, I've ever seen, met up with some of Dan's friends, went to the Seafood market, the first Starb***s (it was interesting to see where the Evil Empire began), The Waterfront along Puget sound (very cool). For dinner Dan, this cool dude Ryan and I decided to splurge and enjoy life so we went to this place downtown called McCormick and Shmicks...yea it was the most I had ever spent on a single meal but the food was incredible...we had really good times that day. We walked around downtown some more...it was 8 PM and most things were already closed so we decided to call it a night. It had already been a really awesome day.

Vancouver - I've read a few times that Vancouver is considered to be the most beautiful city in North America. After vising, based on the other cities I've visited, I have to agree.

Without question Vancouver lived up to the hype that it recieves. The city is extremely beautiful. Stanley Park is a jewel and West Vancouver is a really cool area. Downtown rocked, that's where our hotel was. The view from just about anywhere there was incredible. The people were VERY nice and friendly. It was like a really beautiful place with people at least as nice as people in Texas.

Dan and I drove up early that morning. Ryan decided to come along and followed along in his car. We had a minor delay at the border, you know, Canadians...just kidding it was pretty routine and it was my first time into Canada and I'm from Texas...I would have stopped myself too. We at first had a hard time finding a bank (to get some Canadian bills)...well, we found a few but they were downtown and parking there is pretty lousy. We got those Canadian bills and went to Stanley Park...we walked around there for a couple of hours, it was pretty enrapturing (is that a word, I think so). Then we drove over to West Vancouver and hung out there. It's a really cool part of town that has a small town feel. Vancouver is beautiful...did I mention that? Mountians right next to the coast, beautiful trees...and for the most part beautiful buildings. The city is very dense by North American standards and fits into it's environment really well. For dinner we went to Boston's Pizza, really good stuff, had some Canadian beer (also good stuff). Ryan decided to stay the night there and we looked around downtown Vancouver. Dan bought a cigar from a certian country that Americans aren't allowed to buy cigars from. Some guy tried to size us up for a good mugging (asking us if we had change to see how much money we had...which wasn't a whole lot and the shop onwer tipped us off as to what he was doing). The shop also sold more bongs and various other paraphenlia than I could possibly have imagined. I'm comfortable in cities, even somewhat rough areas like downtown Vancouver at night. Dan seemed to be much less so but that's understandable we live in very different areas....Vancouver is a beautiful town but it has some problems. Most noticably a major drug/heroin problem. The city is the site for a controversial iniative to give free heroin to addicts in hopes that they won't do dangerous things or O.D. or anything like that...I'm wary of the idea, I will write an entry on it later. It's a city of contrasts, a very diverse city. Overally a very nice city. At least two people asked us if we were looking for weed (which is plentiful and not as criminalized there, but still illegal)...something that I'm used to but Dan wasn't. Interesting times. We went back to the hotel and crashed there. The next morning we left early, but not as early as we wanted to.

British Columbia - We drove right across the place. The Cascades, Kamloops, Revelstoke, Glacier National Park. It rained most of the way but changed to snow at times. B.C. is an extremely beautiful place...probably the most overall beautiful place on the continent.

Calgary - We drove across the Canadian Rockies at night in the snow which was fairly adventurous to say the least. Calgary looked like a nice city but it was cold (8 F).

The Canadian Rockies/Banff National Park - Words cannot describe the incomprehensible beauty of this place.

B.C./Montana/Idaho - We cut though Eastern British Columbia and re-entered the States in Northwest Montana...we drove along this lake there, I forget the name, but it was snowing and everything was white and it was incredible. We cut over to Idaho, stopping to watch an amazing sunset over a large lake, to the quaint little college town of Moscow (Idaho) where my friend goes to school and stayed the night there.

Washington/Oregon/Mt. Saint Helens - Yes, the Mount St. Helens. We drove across the mostly empty expanse to the columbia river. We drove along the Oregon side of the river and things got beautiful again past this town called The Dalles. Oregon struck me as an interesting place, with interesting people (emphasis on interesting), they don't allow you to pump your own gas there. All stations are self-serve, I think it's to promote job creation, I'm not sure...but it was really strange because I've always pumped my own gas. I guess it goes against my independent minded Texas mentality. We drove on to Portland. I would have loved to stop there it looked like a really nice city but we were short on time. We crossed the Columbia (again) and drove up these really beautiful but really windy roads to the St. Helens area. We saw this forest service road on the map that was "closed in winter" but since it had been a dry warm winter we decided to chance it. Well, about 20 miles (and 50 minutes later) down the road a guy from the Forest Service waved us over and told us the road was closed. But, he stopped us right were the best view of the volcano, the side that exploded in 1980, could be seen. It was awesome, beautiful, amazing, watching the sun set there. We took lots of pictures. There was a layer of volcanic ash on the road from recent mini-eruptions, along with snow and some large rocks. We drove back down the road and got on I-5 to Seattle, finally ending a really long road trip.

Vashon Island Washington - The last day we took a ferry with my friend Dan's grandparents to their little cottage on the shore on Vashon Island. Vashon is a beautiful place, a good sized island in Puget Sound. It was a great retreat and a great way to unwind after the eventful stuff from the road trip. I could describe what the Northwest is like but it's hard to if you haven't been there. Not much in Texas gives you a base for visualizing it. Everying is so green. So much stuff grows. I kept asking Dan if certian plants grew there naturally and of course the answer was yet. I was espeically intrigued by the ferns and moss...moss grows everywhere there. We hung out along the shore there even though it was raining pretty consistently and it was colder than I am used to. We took the ferry back, had dinner and I began to pack for the airport.

Seattle Tacoma International Airport - My flight was overbooked. Delta was offering a $400 travel voucher, a free hotel stay, and some other hookups for anyone willing to fly out the next day. I really didn't want to get on the plane that night and I didn't have anything to do in Austin the next day so I volunteered and they put me up in a nearby hotel. My thinking was with all of the adventure on the trip, why not have a little more. I flew back to Austin the next day with no problems...oh, I forgot to mention one part of the deal was that I got to fly first class. That was an unreal experence, something I never thought I would do. Definietly good times.

Very good times.

- Jordan