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The pandemic and other centrifugal force hammered our chances at a 30th wedding anniversary that was anything other than mild stress and deferred disappointment.
We made up for it this year. We brought some healing ... after all, what Oregonian waits more than a decade for a visit to the coast?
Last Thursday, buoyed on the goodwill of a friend or two and with a Brown Eyed Girl who knows from budgeting, we made new memories.
From sea level to 4000 feet.
From the waves to the volcano.
Hither we hence.
The journey of a thousand words starts at home, and home is Portland. I don't get in as many skyline shots as I used to, and there have been many more changes. That big slate colored variegated thing in front of my beloved Wells Fargo Tower, for instance. This is our new County Courthouse.
It's about as exciting a design as a legal form.
The Brown Eyed Girl chose the start of the route and let whim take over after that. It was US 26, our Sunset Highway, that would be our route out. And it was an uneventful and mundane drive as we won free of the west-side suburban belt, eventually to emerge into the rolling farmland west and north of Hillsboro.
West of Banks one passes through dilute communities with names like Timber and Manning and you're now in backcountry NW Oregon -- the one with all them hills and all them trees.
Transiting Oregon's Coast Range on a road trip is something everyone should do, I think. No matter what witticisms I might drop, it's an easy way to feel far away from everything and your road trip becomes a quite conversation with not only your travelling companions, but the world outside your car.
Unlike the other main routes west from the Valley, the Sunset Highway route has a little treat. Everyone knows about the Vista Ridge Tunnel, back in the city, but not everyone thinks of this one:
This is a tunnel that was built in the mid-1940s (I've no idea how they got round this hill before then). It was, at the time, known as the Sunset Tunnel. In the winter of 1999, however, we had remarkably heavy rain and the tunnel was looking as though its structural integrity was questionable.
ODOT sent a maintenance super, a man named Dennis Edwards, out to inspect, and while in the tunnel, it made good on its promise, collapsing on him and killing him.
In respect of his memory, they named it for him: it's officially the Dennis L. Edwards Tunnel. it has a button to mash, there on the lower right, which will set the lights on that sign over the top of the portal to flashing on behalf of bicyclists who will want you to know they are in there.
Otherwise, tunnel traffic goes on as ever, with all motorists honking loudly while going through it, because that's what you do in a tunnel.
Our destination, guided partly by whim and partly by desire, was to be Cannon Beach.
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