Great Alaskan Roadtrip

[Geor!]

Goddamnit, man.

[talisman]

Get my junk together and start to check out, and decide to ask the lady if they intentionally don’t give out room 217 until it is the last one left. Instead of understanding where I’m going with it, she takes it as me insulting their room. LOL I try telling her about the 237/217 thing, and she is being defensive with me, so I let it go and get out on the road. Get on the Mt. Hood Scenic Byway, and head towards Multnomah Falls. Beautiful drive. The car I’m in is a fully loaded 2013 Buick Lacrosse Luxobarge with a 303 horsepower V-6. This things dashboard looks like the damn Starship Enterprise. It literally took me 20 minutes just to get it started and out of the rental garage when I picked it up. It was delivered into my hands with 6,560 miles. I hook around back towards Portland and pass the Bonneville Dam, which is relieving some pressure. Then up to Multnomah Falls. Pretty spectacular.

[talisman]

I then get into Washington State for the first time in my life and decide to get some lunch. The first turn off I make, there is a bum with a sign talking on a cell phone. Lmao. Didn’t get a picture of that. Head towards Mt. St. Helens. Beautiful drive.

[UserX]

I was wondering when the pics would show up, looks like a fun trip.

[talisman]

Get to the Johnson Ridge Observatory and look around. There are still limbless trees all over the tops of mountainsides, standing there eerily like gods toothpicks. There is also plenty of old blown down timber laying around, and standing around it and looking at the enormity of the mountain is definitely a humbling experience. These pictures don’t do the scale any type of justice compared to seeing it in person. One of the guides I overheard talking said that the eruption was the destructive equivalent of one second of the Hiroshima bomb, going continuously every second, for 9 hours… Think on that for a while.

[talisman]

Do some backtracking, then get headed back north. Make it up to Seattle and get the car parked in a garage, then head over to do the Underground Tour. There are 2 different tours, and I’m late enough to get to do the “Underworld Tour” which instead of being a family safe history lesson, tells all the seedy past of the whore trade in Seattle. Pretty good stuff, and the Tour Guide was absolutely hilarious with the innuendos.

[talisman]

After this was done and I was loaded up on Knob Creek from the bar inside the starting point, I decided I would walk to the Space Needle, about 2 miles away. There is no better way to get to know a city than to walk its streets after 10pm on a Saturday night. The section I was in was right next to the waterfront and jam-packed with bars and characters, vendors and hustlers and bums and chicks in mini skirts and Bachelorette Parties going wild and everyone talking to everyone. I go up to the top of the Space Needle, poke around for a bit, then start walking back to the parking garage.










I’m pretty damn tired at this point, and make a couple of miscalculations about where I am. Have a few brief problems with 2 wrong parking garages, and sliding under a security gate that has been recently smashed by a car, trying to find where the hell I parked. I finally get in the car and head north out of Seattle, looking for a hotel room. It is after midnight and everywhere I am stopping is closed up or full. I’m tired and getting annoyed. I finally start dicking with the GPS unit and call around, and after calling literally over 20 hotels, can’t find anything that isn’t booked full. I pull off the highway and find an innocent enough looking parking lot as it starts to rain, and lay the seat back and throw a coat on backwards. It has been a long day.

[talisman]

Couple randoms.







First day was huge. Its taken me a few hours just to get this much of it together and written. I'll keep the rest of it going later.

[talisman]

Goddamnit, man.

?

I was wondering when the pics would show up, looks like a fun trip.

It was incredible. Wait until I get to the pictures of the Sea to Sky Highway and the AlCan.

[Treasure Chest]

Ok. That's the "boring history professor" guy that we had last time, not the hilarious "Keep you in stitches guy" that I had the last time I took the tour. I'm glad he was better for the night tour.

[talisman]

Ok. That's the "boring history professor" guy that we had last time, not the hilarious "Keep you in stitches guy" that I had the last time I took the tour. I'm glad he was better for the night tour.

He was a riot. A lot of cliches, but they were thrown in a good way.

[Treasure Chest]

He was a riot. A lot of cliches, but they were thrown in a good way.

He must've had an off day for us, because it was like having Ben Stein as a tour guide sans any semblance of dry humor.

[Frank]

more more more! I'm diggin this

[Chili]

There's a fish hatchery right near multnomah falls that has like 10' long sturgeon in holding tanks, as well as a shitton of rainbow trout. The gorge is beautiful, way nicer than anything else on my side of the cascades

I just noticed this post.. We went there last time we visited my dad. He lives across the river in Washougal.. Well, outside of town on about 10 acres. I thought I had pictures of it but their not on this computer. Here are some others:

The falls:


Another down the road:


This is on the way to my dad's house, on the Washington side:


Also on the WA side, the Columbia River:

[Chili]

See that little dot on the far left of the map, where the roads intersect? It says Castle Rock. That's where I was when it erupted.