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.