Part 1) Shopping in Seattle. Part 2) Talk Derby to me

Spent the day yesterday looking around Seattle, which was great. Pike Place market was like a cross between Covent Garden and the Covered Market in Oxford - flowers, fresh fruit, fish and loads of delis and cafes. We also had a look around a small museum about the Klondike gold rush in the 1890s. Seattle was in the midst of a depression at the time, but managed to successfully market itself as the gateway to the Klondike (in Alaska), attracting massive amounts of money from all the prospectors who travelled through.

This morning we got on a plane to Chicago and are feeling right at home using the underground. We went out this evening to see some roller derby, which is a brilliantly insane American-invented sport. If anyone's seen Whip It, the film Drew Barrymore directed with Ellen Page starring, you'll know what I mean. There are two teams of girls on rollerskates - one girl from each team has to try and get past all the opposing team members, who try and 'jam' her to prevent her getting through. This translates into some pretty violent maneouvres and crashes! They all have great names, including Killary Clinton, Mel Content, Athena DeCrime and Karmageddon. Pete and I agreed we'd steer well clear of the team captain of the home side, Beth Amphetamine. Apparently she's an ex-boxer, trapese artist and speed skating champion. She had muscles on her muscles and was frankly quite frightening. By the end of the evening I was debating what my roller derby name would be....

Snow shoes

Snow shoes would have been good, as we spent most of the day yesterday tramping through snow on the Mount Rainier glacier! The scenery was amazing, a mixture of snow fields, forest and alpine flowers. It was still really warm, and we'd set off just in t-shirts - went past a few people with full on packs, gaiters and snow shoes though!

I was pretty darn chuffed to have spent two nights in the cutest tree house ever. It had swing doors into a little glade and a ladder up to a tiny room. Very very cool :-)

En route to Mount Rainier we stopped off at the Mount St Helen's visitor centre. There waz some amazing footage of the 1980 eruption - it sent an ash cloud 15 miles up, which had spread around the world within 2 weeks. You can see the before and after pictures, showing how a massive chunk of the volcano just blew up, leaving a huge crater and causing floods and destruction for miles around.

Swiss family Moreton

Treehouses are an amazing thing- it is rare that the cheapest, smallest option impresses a woman so much. But Christina is extremely excited that we are staying in it! There is literally just room for a bed and nothing else- there is a little sitting area and hammock underneath.

Off into the Rainier National Park tomorrow- though hopefully not above the snowline! It is a very popular mountaineering destination in the US, as it has several glaciers and is over 14000ft.

Portland was quite an interesting place- reputably one of the greenest cities around, it had a much more industrialised centre than we expected, certainly not as nice to look around as some cities!

Eugene

I have to be honest, i've always been a bit suspicious of the name Eugene, and i've been trying to work out why. I thought it was because the murderer in Psycho was called Eugene, but no, he was called Norman. Then i thought of words starting 'eug' and the only other word in the dictionary is Eugenics, maybe that explains it.

And Eugene, Oregon is where we find ourselves this fine evening- the town's biggest claim to fame is that it is the birthplace of Nike. The town has a big river running through it and both banks have cycle/running paths which we took the chance to cycle this afternoon! It is also home to the University of Oregon and there were plenty of students crusing over the gentle rapids in big tubes today, looks like a lot of fun to me!

On to Portland tomorrow!

Can't see the wood for the trees

Humboldt Redwood State Park is home to some 100 of the 130 tallest trees in the world, and we were lucky enough to drive through today. The tallest trees are 110m tall, as high as a 30storey building, but they have roots only a few feet deep- they link roots together for strength. Seems to work quite well- they've been around for some 2000years!

Christina and I are stood next to what was the tallest tree in the world- until it fell over in 1991. Hopefully we will see the tallest in the world, Hyperion, in the Redwoods State Park tomorrow.

And the famous drive through tree was also on the way today- they made it big enough for an SUV to fit through!

Crazy temperature shifts again today, it was 52F this morning on the coast, 90F inland on the way North, and back down to 55F this afternoon on the coast. Christina is having all sorts of clothing issues!

0.6 wine to a mile

Spent a lovely day yesterday cycling around Californian wine country, north of San Francisco. There are over 400 wineries in the region and it feels a bit like Tuscany, with all the vineyards and rolling hills.

The bike hire company admonished us to 'ride sober' and spit out any wine we tasted - but what a waste would that be!! We tasted around 15 different wines at 3 different wineries; completely delicious. I think we even managed to do a reasonable job pretending we understood as the owners talked about tannins and bouquet and production methods...One of the tasting rooms was in a cave which was rather groovy.

The weather round here is perfect, around 85F - makes a nice change after the nippiness of San Francisco. We're just about to leave and head over to the coast again to rejoin Highway 1.

The Temple of Doom

The Castro and Chinatown were our destinations of choice yesterday. The Castro is a huge lesbian and gay area, made famous by Harvey Milk and the eponymous film with Sean Penn.

The houses are gorgeous, pastel-painted original Victorian as most of the area survived the great fire in 1906. It is definitely the grittier end of town as you head out and towards the Mission district, but at least the bars are cooler than downtown. The shops have signs predominantly in Spanish advertising international calling cards, and dodgy internet cafes, and discount shoes.

The cool Chinatown streets and alleys were used in the filming of Karate Kid and Indiana Jones: Temple of Doom; it is a huge area of town, the Chinese population must be massive.

Heading out to Healdsburg the temperature change is dramatic- the weather forecasts on TV list 3 temperatures on every forecast; the coast, the bay and inland- and they are about 10Celsius different! But we have a pleasant hotel from which to explore the Sonoma wine valley on bikes.

Lock up those bikes

Cycling was the order of the day, as we frequented the extremely efficient 'Blazing Saddles'..
Ended up cycling 18miles around the bay, across the bridge and back on a boat the other side from Tiberon- an upmarket town straight out of the Stepford Wives. They have NIMBY planning laws that could compete with ours; there are fields of green that would make beautiful houses!

Alcatraz was on the way back across the Bay, and though we couldn't get any tickets, we had a pretty close up view. As promised, Christina's criss-cross sandals finally achieved the desired criss-cross sunburn effect- that's not infectious!

A streetcar named desire

We're really enjoying San Francisco, it's a great city. Favourite thing so far here? It's got to be hanging off the side of a cable car as it trundles up and down the hills - definitely the most fun way of getting round a city that I've seen! They've been around since the 1870s and while there used to be lines all over the city, now there are just three. It seems to be a pretty tricky job operating them (the 'grip man'). It wasn't until 1998 that a woman finally qualified to drive one, having built up the requisite upper body strength!

We walked round some different areas of the city, and went to see the famous 'crooked street' - Lombard Street. There are a constant stream of cars coming down it - wonder if they include it on the driving test around here!

Also went to a really interesting little museum with a great collection of coin opertated games and machines from the past century. I paid 25 cents to take a look at one of the original silent movies from the early 1900s - bargain.

Home of Surf

Santa Cruz is the home of surfing as the world knows it- some Hawaiian princes came over in the 1890s and started surfing the waves on homemade boards. Jack O'Neil formed the eponymous surf shop here in the 50's and they are credited with inventing the wetsuit.

The town is cool in its own way, but it seems the boardwalk area is the same whether in Bognor, Blackpool or Santa Cruz- lots of fast food, games of dubious success rates, and teenagers.

The famous surf spot itself also seemed dubious as it was about 15metres from the rock cliffs. It seems the idea is to be surfing along the wave before you crash into the cliff. Not a beginners' spot then!

To Monterey...and beyond!

Today was filled with the odd shark, some very cute seahorses, some feeding sea otters and the odd penguin. We visited the Monterey Aquarium, which was great - there were a couple of absolutely huge tanks with some fearsome looking beasties swimming around. Also quadrupled my knowledge about sea horses - did you know that it's the males who get pregnant, and give birth to up to 1,000 babies at a go?!

We've driven further up the coast to a tiny place called Davenport, about 70 miles south of San Francisco. The weather has been lovely, blue and sunny and around 70F. There's an amazing beach with hug waves and crashing surf about 100m down a path opposite the hotel. We're still feeling the effects of our ATV experience on the sand dunes - I feel like I've gone 10 rounds with Mike Tyson!

Top down, foot down too

Citizen Kane was all about an inordinately rich fictitious newspaper magnet and his insane isolated hill top palace, but really it was all about William Randolph Hearst.

We managed to go see his palace today, Hearst Castle- a truly amazing, bizarre and unbelievable mix of architectures, folly's and everything inbetween. The guide was very effusive about the art and kept asking if anyone had any questions... all i wanted to know was what the hell was this guy doing? The could have filmed an entire Bond villain hideout scene on the place. I'm sure he was pretty messed up somehow.. I really want to watch Citizen Kane.

We drove the famous Big Sur coastline all the way up to Monterey after- the area is completely undeveloped for nearly 90miles of coastline, and there is just nothing but swooping road and rugged coast. Completely spectacular.

Monday night at the movies

Had the best of both worlds today, the heavens truly aligned!

Went to the tourist info in San Luis Obispo and decided that the historic town could wait, racing quad bikes on sand dunes was the priority. There is a huge area of enormous dunes at Pismo Beach, just down the road.

(Christina) I can tell you from a slightly more girly point of view, these sand dunes were huge, and scary! Some of them were the height of a couple of houses! They just rented you these crazy, 50mph ATVs and sent you off, so you could roam around the sand dunes. A bit like skiing off-piste, you never know when you're going to hit a vertical drop!

Pete was spinning the wheels, sending sand in all directions and speeding into the distance. I followed him like the loyal wife I am, but unfortunately hit a rather large dune at speed. Imagine a large, pointed sand dune - I flew over the top, achieved a large amount of air and yes, crash landed fairly spectacularly. Thankfully, as you can see, I lived to tell the tale. It was just a mad place, never seen anything like it!

Later on I got to live out a Grease style moment when we went to the Sunset Drive-In. It was really retro, apparently hasn't changed much for the past 40 years or so. It was great. We saw Toy Story 3, which was brilliant.

Oh yes and p.s. We did actually manage to fit in a bit of historical sightseeing in between gallivanting around. It's a really interesting town - one of the first Catholic Missions was established here in 1772.

Off to see Hearst Castle tomorrow as we drive up the coast to Monterey, along the famous Coastal highway!

Bleuuuh

Unfortunately spent the day stuck in the hotel room yesterday after some dodgy food, never pleasant to be ill on holiday - at least we had chance to think about of next steps!

Christina has managed to hit full throttle in the car, so we are on track. It makes an awesome amount of noise when you rev it, i think if i'd been driving we'd have halved the fuel consumption!

Speeding fines to date = 0, Current mpg = 20.5!

Didn't your mother ever tell you?

Well what do you know, we spend 3 weeks in the hottest and most inhospitable places in the middle of the desert. And we go somewhere cloudy, 65F, and we both get sunburn.

We went on a boat to the Channel Islands National Park. Its about 30miles off the coast and it has lots of unique species, dolphins and more! Loads of beautiful photos from these isolated islands- it was an awesome day. And we topped it off with dinner in a proper retro diner and the cinema. I'm rarely impressed by technology these days, but this diner had an original 1950's jukebox selector in every booth to choose songs from!