Catching Up, Again...

Alright, so finally an update! The past week has been quite eventful and we’ve covered a lot of country. I have been having too much fun to sit down and write lately, but now we are east bound on I-40 so I have no excuse not to catch this up. Here it goes….
The Ride from Idaho to Yakima
Monday morning we got up early and started driving. We never even got out of the bus before hitting the road, as we were trying to get to Yakima as fast as possible to hang out with Andy. Cricker drove while I packed up the sleeping bags and moved everything back in place behind the back seat. The drive out of Idaho and into eastern Washington was very enjoyable and there was a noticeable change in scenery. The landscape changed from hilly with lush vegetation to a more arid climate. There were vineyards and orchards all around us and it reminded me a lot of central California. I also began to notice huge fields of hops. The hops are grown using a network of elevated cables and grow vertically along strings. (90% of the world’s hops are grown in the Yakima Valley so they were everywhere!)
Yakima
We rolled into Yakima about noon and found Andy at his place. He gave us a tour of the house and then we went down the street to his favorite taco truck on the corner. We ordered tacos and some interesting taco sandwich thing (Sorry Andy I forget what you called it). The place was a bit greasy and I got a kick out of the “indoor eating area” which was basically an old school bus on blocks. The tacos were great and the sandwich thing was very filling. (This was our first taste of west coast Mexican food, and we have eaten it almost daily for the past week!) After lunch we were taken on a whirlwind tour of Yakima and we drove out the interstate to where he works and he showed us around the shop. We spent the rest of the evening getting dinner and hanging out at a local coffee shop and uploading pictures to the trip album. Our next destination was about three hours away in Tacoma, Washington so we decided to camp in Andy’s driveway for the night and headed out the next morning.
Tacoma
We got on the road about mid morning and headed west on highway 12 towards Tacoma. The drive across White Pass was beautiful and as we headed up the mountain it began to snow on us. The snow and fog was so dense we never got to see Mt. Rainier. We called my cousin Levi, who is stationed at Ft. Lewis and he said he would meet us at REI in Tacoma. We met up there and spent about three hours checking the store out and I spent way too much money! (I picked up a first aid kit though, which I felt was an essential buy!) He took us to his favorite BBQ spot there, a place called Famous Dave’s. It wasn’t Carolina BBQ, but it was delicious nonetheless. Somehow he managed to pay for dinner (Thanks Again!) and then he took us on the base to show us his barracks and introduce us to some of his compadres. We hung out there for an hour or two and tried on some of their combat gear, which was way to freakin heavy to be running around God Knows Where in! Kudos to you guys though….I can see how you stay in shape. I got a quick shower while we were there, courtesy of Uncle Sam and we headed back to the bus. We snapped a few pictures first with Levi though, and got “pulled over” by a parking lot security guard with a headlamp for “suspicious activity.” Haha so we had a good laugh and were back on I-5 headed toward Portland. We drove until we were about 45 minutes from the Oregon border and then called it a night. We caught a few hours sleep at a rest stop and then were back on the road.

The ride to Oregon and down the coast on 101
We stayed on I-5 through Portland and then picked up highway 18 which took us over to the coast and put us on 101 south. The drive along the Oregon Coast was something I had always wanted to do and it fully lived up to my expectations. The highway runs right along the coast for the most part and rolls gently up the mountains and down to the beaches. The coast line there is different from anything I had seen before, with the mountains being right on the shore and the cliffs dropping into the ocean. The water itself is deep blue, it’s hard to give the whole scene an accurate depiction but the pictures turned out pretty well.
The drive through the redwoods and down the coast
We drove all day Wednesday and made it across the border into California. We wanted to camp in the Redwoods but it was after dark when we finally got there and we couldn’t seem to locate the campground so we continued down the coast to Crescent City, where we posted up in the Walmart parking lot for a few hours.
Thursday we woke up before nine and were on the road quickly. Within an hour we found ourselves in a grove of redwoods that we couldn’t even see the tops of unless we leaned out the window! It was an awesome sight. We took several photo opportunities in the redwoods and had fun getting some unique pictures in the big trees. We stopped in Leggett, California because there were signs up for a tree that could be driven through. They charge five bucks to go through it and we were smack out of cash so we tore the bus apart for change and had just enough to pay without using pennies! The lady taking our money had a good laugh at us. The tree itself was huge but the bus was a little too big to fit through the hole, so we took the box off the top and convinced some bystanders to get in and weigh the shocks down so it would squeeze through. The top still scraped but we made it with me hanging on the front bumper and a few passengers! We made some really cool pictures there and a guy with a Polaroid camera took our picture and gave us the prints. We cruised on down the coast and were trying to make it across the Golden Gate bridge before sunset, but the sun went down and the fog rolled in the bay before we made it. When we finally got there and crossed the bridge, we found out they charge six dollars toll. Neither one of us had a single dollar on us so we asked the toll collector what we should do. She told us since we had out of state plates she would just wave us on, so that was a nice break!
Santa Cruz with Brady
We finally made it to Santa Cruz about 11 pm and met our cousin Brady on the campus of UC Santa Cruz where he goes to school. He was working late on a lab so we snagged the key to his house and crossed town to get some shut eye. We found his place and passed out pretty much right away, he didn’t even wake us up when he got home later.
This catches the trip up to Thursday night. We spent the next several days in California and finally left about 4pm on Tuesday. We are currently about 100 miles from the New Mexico Border on I-40 heading east. The bus is running well, just hemorrhaging a substantial amount of oil now. We are taking it easy, not doing much above 60 mph, so we aren’t sure at what point we will make it back to Franklin County. I apologize again for the long delay in posting and I promise I’ll get it all caught up before tomorrow! Thanks for tuning in!