The Pacific Northwest is Pretty Cool (and also Full of Vampires?)

“I had a hard time coming up with a title, ok?”

After a week-long hiatus to discuss the trials and tribulations of that disappointing Stephen King story, I’m back with the long-awaited (?) part three blog post to answer the most elusive question of all; “what did I do this summer?” Well, as alluded to time (and time…) again, during a span of about eight days in the July of this year, I went to the Pacific Northwest with my mom and my brother! So that’s part of what I did this summer, anyway! To clarify, this wasn’t like the road trip down Route 66 that I had taken earlier; we weren’t living in a van, eating lukewarm spaghetti-O’s for dinner. No, this trip to the Washington state area was more akin to what most people think of as a vacation; we stayed in hotels, and flew there, and rented cars, and so on and so forth. But we traveled. A lot. We still drove hundreds of miles around the entirety (well, minus Canada) of Puget sound, went down in Oregon, drove up the coast, and more! Because my family doesn’t actually know how to take a relaxing vacation, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Let’s go step by step over what we did in the Pacific Northwest, hmm? I don’t know if people actually like these sorts of travelogues I do, or if people prefer my bizarre criticisms of random cities, but I’m gonna try and do a little bit of both this time around! Because I have a sneaking suspicion that one is definitely more fun to read than the other, but I think perhaps the other is more “important,” ultimately. So, we’ll try to meld it together and see how it all goes, perhaps. Maybe I’ll get something good out of it. Or maybe it’ll be another list of nonsense tourist attracts with accompanied snide remarks, like last time. We’ll find out! This is as new to me as it is to you, reader.

That’s not true. Obviously I know what I did on this vacation, so I know where it’s all going. And first place we’re going is Seattle! My mom, brother, and I flew in to the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport (or Seatac, which absolutely sounds like some kind of sharp boat name) for our first evening, and spent the next day wandering around the city and doing all the city things that people like to do in cities. So, being Seattle, of course the first thing we did was get overpriced, slightly above-average coffee. Because it’s Seattle. How can you not? I don’t like coffee, so I really just had an overpriced, slightly above-average sandwich instead. But following that, we wandered the city and played around on some art sculptures before eventually getting to Pike’s Place Fish Market, which was actually cooler than I expected it to be. And the best thing to know for people who haven’t been there before? That place is huge. This isn’t some random street market; the market is the street. There are like three separate levels, all stacked on top of each other, that go on for blocks and lead right down to Puget sound. There’s plenty of fish, yes, and they do throw it at you, and they do inspire novel workplace interactions, but there’s also art galleries, comic book and memorabilia stores (I got a packet of Rocky Horror Picture Show trading cards! None of which had Frank-N-Furter, sadly), and a giant brick wall covered in gum. Stores will sell you gum so that you can chew it yourself and stick it on a wall. And of course we did that, because we are all tourists at heart.

I also somehow ran into a friend of mine who had moved to the Seattle area the year prior. We weren’t planning on meeting there, and she isn’t even in Seattle most of the time, but I somehow saw her and her family at the Pike Place fish market, and that’s not even the first time I’ve randomly encountered friends and family on vacation! Apparently my family has a knack for pulling people out of the woodwork of our lives. Strange. But, anyway, we also rode the Ferris wheel in Seattle, creatively named the Seattle Big Wheel, and we went to the top of the Space Needle! Which was pretty cool, it has a great view of the city, but what a weird fucking building. There’s stuff all over on the inside about how it’s America’s Eiffel Tower, which, no, it absolutely isn’t. If anything is America’s Eiffel Tower, which I suppose is code for random giant metal art installation built for no apparent reason, it’s the St. Louis Arch (though maybe I’m biased, being from the Midwest). But the Space Needle’s still pretty neat! We tried to get to the top floor of the Seattle Public Library, too, which is supposed to have fabulous views of the city, but it was closed for COVID. Not unexpected, I suppose, we are still all in the middle of a global pandemic. But at least the Klondike Gold Rush National Historic Park was open. Thank goodness we could go into a random-ass building with zero green space that had been preserved to host a free Nation Park Service museum about the Klondike gold rush, featuring Harrison Ford as Jack London. Because I would never want to miss that.

All jokes aside, the museum’s neat. It’s well-put together. But I don’t get why it’s a National Park site. There is no park. We got more greenspace walking through the homeless encampment next to the National Park. And that’s not a joke; there was a pretty sizeable homeless population in that part of town. It’s interesting, though, how strange the duality of the city is; Seattle prides itself on being this fancy, modern tech hub, what with the Google Cloud campus across the street from our hotel, and Microsoft and several other major tech companies being a half-hour out of the city in nearby Redmond, and they pride themselves on being a pretty liberal city, too, but for all that talk, they seem to treat people experiencing homelessness just as poorly as any other city in America. Which is to say, all the popular touristy and economic hotspots in the city have been gentrified and “cleaned” of any “eye sores,” like people in need. But they didn’t actually help anyone, they just relocated them to parts of the city that were deemed “acceptable” for homelessness. The city is, from my limited time there, a lot of glitter and gleam and Silicon Valley-esque tech hubs scrubbing over the same kind of economic troubles everywhere else. But the city has a lot more green spaces than most typical American cities, so on the environmental route, they’re ahead in some ways. I didn’t dig deep enough to know more about the environmental impact of the city, and it isn’t so obvious like, say, Los Angeles’s traffic problem, or Las Vegas’s water crisis. But there’s green space, so that’s a plus.

Anyway, enough about that. After the gold rush museum, we cheered on a Land Back protest headed by indigenous Duwamish organizers, and then were invited to join said protest, so we marched with them for a little bit and did some chanting, which was pretty cool. We then did not eat dinner, and that was kind of a running theme on this entire trip, that our meals were so thoroughly flummoxed the entire time that we barely got proper dinners until the last day or two. But it was worth it, since we got to see a ton of stuff. Following the protest, we took a ferry across the Puget sound and got ice cream on Bainbridge island, which was such a quaint little area, I can only assume it will forever be far above my price range for any sort of home-buying opportunities. But that was all in the first day. It was in the second day that we started to move out of the city. Slowly, at first.

Before leaving Seattle, we also hit the Museum of Pop Culture, or something like that, which had exhibits on science fiction and fantasy, the history of LGBT+ rights movements, the rise and fall of Nirvana, an indie game exhibition, and more. They even had a temporary exhibit on horror in media, which was really, really cool. I got a picture with the original alien costume from Alien. We also went to Discovery Park, which was kind of a random park on the edge of the city that buts up to the sound. I poked a sea anemone on accident and may have killed it. Oops. But we did see gasworks park, too, which was really cool! It’s this old gas plant that got turned into a public space, and it’s really something special. It has great views of the city. And, of course, I also visited the Nintendo headquarters and stole important documents from Doug Bowser’s office, just as I told you I would do. It was great.

That was when we got to Rainier, and the bed and breakfast, the Mountain Meadows Inn, we would be staying in the for next couple of days. And that bed and breakfast was sweet! They couldn’t make food for us because, you know, global pandemic, but they did give us food we could make for ourselves, including some smores and an indoor smores cooker. Plus, it had a hot tub, and sits right in the middle of the woods. It was a beautiful place to stay and I definitely recommend it. But Mt. Rainier was even more beautiful. I don’t know how much you all know about the Pacific Northwest or the mountains therein, but I knew next to nothing going into this trip. I knew it was supposed to be rainy and foggy all the time, a la Twilight, and it has one of the northernmost rainforests on the planet, but Rainier is more like an alpine meadow that you might see in Sound of Music than it is rainforest. Huge, rolling green plains, patches and splotches of wildflowers, weather-beaten pines, and all this existing just below the snow-capped glacial peak of an active volcano. Yeah, despite being a rugged icescape just a few thousand feet above the visitor center, Mt. Rainier is actually an active volcano, and very likely to explode within the next century in a fashion similar to Mt. St. Helens. So, uh, Mt. Rainier National Park may someday become Mt. Rainier National Crater. Get your visits in soon. Because the views are worth it.

We hiked the skyline trail, which is apparently not recommended by park rangers, but then again when has my family ever listened to suggestions? We also saw the Grove of the Patriarchs, where we had to cross a suspension bridge to see some big-ass trees, and that was pretty neat. Spoiler alert, we’d see a lot more trees later, but these ones were especially large. Speaking of trees, though, we saw a lot of logging on this trip; there were logging haulers constantly near us on the highway, and we passed more than one lumber mill. It makes sense, the state being covered in forest and all, but it was a little heartbreaking to see acres and acres of land surrounding the highway that had been clear-cut for logging. Maybe that’s the area’s biggest environmental sin; the clear-cut logging practices. I mean, trees are renewable, and most of the companies are probably beholden to some sort of police regulations requiring them to replant trees and ensure healthy forests, not just for the environment but also so they can keep logging them. I know, logically, that we all need paper. I’m a writer, I know this pretty damn well. So it’s kind of hard for me to harp on the logging industry. But we all know that companies are really only out to make a quick buck, and enforcement about forest restoration probably isn’t great. Plus, those “restored” logging forests usually lack the biodiversity present in higher-quality natural areas. So while it’s hard to see the scars of logging, there are people out there are trying to protect the woods, too. The actual sustainability of the logging industry as it currently stands is questionable most of the time, but it is better that most other industries. But that doesn’t make it any easier to see fields of stumps on the side of the road.

But, that’s a topic for another day. We saw the historic visitor center in Rainier one morning, but after that we left Mt. Rainier National Park and drove down south, out towards Mt. St. Helens National Volcanic Monument. There isn’t actually a lot of hiking you can do at Mt. St. Helens, unless you’re prepared to hike all the way up to the crater ridge, because most of the site is protected wilderness. We did a short hike there, though, and saw the mountain from a distance; we also saw the valleys that had been filled in when the eruption occurred back in 1980. It was kind of weird to see V-shaped valleys that suddenly flattened out about halfway down the wall because they were full of thousands of tons of rock and mud. But, hey, we did learn about this one guy who was asked to evacuate pre-eruption but refused to leave his dozen cats behind. So, uh, that’s a thing that happened. By the way, Mt. St. Helens is also in Ska County, which is pretty awesome. Also, my friend Melanie recommends that you visit the Ape Cave Lava Tube. We didn’t get there, but maybe someday.

Following that, though, we drove down to Portland, inspiration for that sketch comedy tv show Portlandia and nothing else I know of. I don’t really understand Portland, honestly, but maybe I got a poor impression of it while I was there. I hear all this stuff about “keep Portland weird” or whatever, and how cool of a city it is, but mostly it just kind of seemed like any old mid-sized American city. Like Milwaukee, or something. Portland just kind of… exists. I don’t know? Maybe this is a combination of our timing, the pandemic, and maybe-or-maybe-not protesting-turned-rioting (I know nothing about that besides that it the news media made it seem like Portland was on fire for months), but Portland kind of felt like a shell of a city. Like this was a place where people live and work but not anymore. Almost as if the city were recovering from a war, maybe? I don’t know; someone there told us that 30% of downtown businesses had left since the pandemic started. Is that accurate? Is that higher than the national average? I have no clue. All I know is that Portland felt shell-shocked in the downtown area, we witnessed a hate crime (which, thankfully, ended peacefully), and it’s impossible to find anything to eat past 7PM. But that last part is true of just about everywhere, it seems.

What we really saw in Portland, though, was Powell’s City of Books. That place, though. Oh, that place. It’s like the holy grail of book stores. Three floors, an entire city block of showfloor, everything organized and catalogued digitally, it was insane. I bought like twelve books there, two of which I hadn’t been able to find in any other bookstores. It was so great. I could have spent hours there. Oh, yeah, and we also stopped at some place called Voodoo Doughnut, which had some interesting flavors, and tried to go to Washington Park, but it was so over-crowded we could barely find parking. So we mostly skipped that, except for the mansion overlooking the city, and a small bird sanctuary. Those were both pretty neat. After that, we drove out to the cost, through Tillamook, where singer-songwriter Todd Snider was imprisoned briefly (maybe?), and drove up the Oregon coast. We spent the night in Astoria (no relation), a quaint seaside town that my mom was convinced was full of vampires who wanted us dead, Lost Boys style.

Maybe it was because we got there when the sun had already disappeared behind a literal wall of fog out to sea, and the clouds had rolled in overhead, and our hotel bellhop told my mom his literal life story (including some rather private details), and we had to drive over a hill in the middle of town and past a cemetery to find any food to eat. I thought it was a cute town. My mom did not. But either way, we didn’t spend long there, because the next day was Olympic National Park, probably my favorite part of the trip! I love the idea of a temperate rainforest on the foggy northwest coast, and Olympic did not disappoint. Oh, we did see Kurt Cobain’s memorial in Aberdeen first, which is cool if you like Nirvana, I guess. Just kidding, it was pretty neat. But Olympic was way cooler, in my opinion. We got to hike through these crazy canopies of trees, where mosses hang from every branch and the sun is obscured entirely by layers of green up above. The different colors of green were unbelievable. And we were only there for a handful of hours to hike! The Hoh rainforest, as it’s called, is unlike any other natural area I’ve been to (except the tropical rainforests in Costa Rica, which I visited when I was like twelve, but you get the idea). It looks like a regular forest on the outside, kind of like the Great Smoky Mountains, but on the inside, it’s so different. Mosses, ferns, trees I’ve never seen before in my life, and so much more.

And the views! We drove up Hurricane Ridge, to the top of an overlook to see the rest of the mountains, and it was phenomenal. You can see the ecosystem change around you as you drive up, basically from just above sea level to over 6,000 feet up. The temperate rainforest gives way to coniferous trees gives way to alpine meadow and wind-stunted pines, and then you get around the bend and you’re slammed with this overview of dozens of snow-capped mountains, and my first thought was, wait a minute I didn’t know the mountains were tall out here too, and then you realize that there are actual glaciers covering these mountains. And it’s just, oh it’s so cool. Highly recommend it, even if you can’t get any hiking in, just to drive around a bit. We met a very friendly (actually, rather too friendly) deer on top of hurricane ridge. He’s in an instagram pic of mine now.

So that was incredible. But maybe the greatest views on the trip were had at La Push beach, in Forks, Washington. Yes, the same Forks Washington that hosted Bella Thorne and Edward Sullen, or whatever their names are. I don’t know, I never read the books or saw the movies (except for the last one, for some reason). The vampire romance doesn’t do anything for me, especially since Buffy did it first. But, anyway, La Push is this crazy rocky spit of land that has these giant rock spires sticking out of the water, with connections by low tide and separations at high tide, I think. There’s an island out there, and a little cove, and caves, and trees, and it’s just so hard to properly describe, especially because we were there in the fog and the whole thing felt just like “this is what the Pacific Northwest is supposed to be.” It was kind of magical, honestly. Here’s a photo, which does it much better justice.

It was very cool. But, really, after that, it was kind of the end of the line. We did a few other things, like the Marymere falls hike in Olympic (which I also recommend), and Ediz Hook in Port Angeles (it was kind of ok, but there were lots of birds so I appreciate that), and Dungeness Spit (again, just ok, but it’s a huge sandy stretch of beach, and if you’ve got a whole day, I’m sure you could find some pretty cool washed-up sea critters there. Like Steven Tyler!). We flew back to Chicago then, and it was an amazing trip. While it may not have been as extensive a sightseeing extravaganza as, say, Route 66, it was a different kind of trip, in that it was a more detailed, focused exploration of one particular area. I’m so glad that I got to explore the Pacific Northwest with my mom and my brother in this way, because it was a super fun time, and I’m now convinced that I’m going to live there someday. And I kind of mean it, too! I’d love to live in a coastal region like that, maybe on the Olympic Peninsula or on the sound somewhere. It’s such a beautiful place, with incredibly varied ecology and hundreds of hiking trails to explore. Plus, it’s rainy and cold a lot of the time, which is my favorite weather! It’s like the perfect place for me.

So maybe someday I really live out there. But for now, I have to be content with the limited amount of time there. But what a time it was. From Seattle, to Mt. Rainier, to Mt. St. Helens, to weirdo Portland, to vampire-filled Astoria, to the Olympic National Forest and its rainforests and rocks, we packed in quite a bit in just about a week. That’s the common denominator between my family, it seems; we like to get as much done as we possibly can. And I love that, and I loved this trip, and I’m so glad I got that time with my mom and my brother. Just like I said before, I’ll treasure this one of rest of my days, and hope someday to get out there again. Because hot damn, what a place it is. And there’s still even more to see.

And there’s still even more to tell you about! Hopefully soon I’ll tell you all about my next (and last) summer vacation! But I’m also going to a wedding this weekend, so maybe not! I’ll have to see how much time I have. As always, stay tuned!