4 days on one Highway

Wow what a week, so Joe and I had a great time traveling down the coast and doing the whole roadtrip thing for the past 5 days. Personally my highlight was being able to see Kyle hard at work, but there was lots of other stuff that went on. I don't have a whole lot of time, but you can look at my facebook photo albumns to get a feel for what went on the whole trip.

Here's a real quick review of what we did:

Monday night we started with a trip to downtown Seattle and the space needle, explored downtown and caught up. I got pulled over for making a MI left turn but no ticket (first time I’d been pulled over in almost 3 years if I remember right)

Tuesday we rode the train to see mom and dad and Kandace and Kyle and went out to dinner with them and caught up. The train ride was beautiful and seeing the family was great too.

Wednesday Dad hooked us up with a great car rental and we started our drive down the coast. We stopped at Cape Meares and Cape Lookout and a couple of other places along the way. We ate shark and fish in Pacific City and then camped south of Waldport on the beach.

Thursday we drove further down the coast, stayed on the highway 101 most of the way, we stopped at a few places to get souvenirs and fresh jelly and stuff. then we made it into CA and tried to keep close to the coast. We drove through the redwood national parks and saw Paul Bunyon and Babe the big blue ox. We missed our turn to get on the 1 and ended up 40 miles off track, so we had to drive the craziest road through the redwood forest back to the coast and the forests we were driving through were filled with smoke from nearby forest fires. We continues to drive these crazy curvy roads along the coast in CA were NO ONE lived and ended up in some tiny small-town BBQ roadhouse for dinner, it was really good. Then we managed to find our way through the darkness across the cliffs and past the occasional cliffside cow to northern San Francisco where we stayed at this scary looking motel for the night.

Friday we crossed the golden gate bridge, drove to San Jose ate eggrolls with Kyle his companion and a great investigator and then went back to SF. We tried to go see Alkatraz, but they were sold out of tickets and we didn't want to go on a lame boat tour so we ate at Bubba Gump on the pier.

Saturday we got off to an early start and drove down to Santa Barbara. There we started driving down the PCH (Pacific Coast Highway) and stopped at a lot of beautiful vistas along the way. We laid out on the beach in Santa Barbara, had dinner in Malibu, walked the pier in Santa Monica and saw all sorts of street shows and crazy people in downtown Santa Monica/LA. We found a hotel to crash in by the airport and got some much needed rest that night.

Sunday morning we packed up dropped off the car and went our separate ways at the airport. Lines were ridiculously long at LAX and the only reason Joe didn't miss his flight apparently was because it got delayed. I made mine, but it was leaving 45 mins after his. I flew Virgin America, which is a newer airline with super fancy gadgets and entertainment systems at every seat. They had chat rooms for everyone on the flight and I played doom from my seat as well as watched live ESPN via satellite and a few on demand shows. I could have paid $.99 for an episode or two of the office, but was fine with the free selections they had. They also have radio stations, music, movies, food ordering, shopping, WWW, multiplayer games for the passengers and a ton of other stuff that was pretty cool. I got home to Seattle and it’s like 80+ degrees here, nice.