The Oregon Expedition

Back when I was a wee young lad, I'd email my friends en masse of my goings during my vacations which I guess they may or may not have found it annoying. But now I have a blog so everyone can read at their leisure without me spamming their inboxes. Instead, I will now clog their Facebook news feed.

DAY 1 (July 1)
What a better way to celebrate Canada Day than going out of the country? We left Victoria via the MV Coho and entered Port Angeles at 12. We had a lovely lunch of McDonalds for lunch and proceeded to drive our way to Astoria, Oregon. Along the way, I spotted: 15 sketchy fireworks stands 8 deserted expresso shacks and the place where I first ate beef jerky
We entered Astoria around 5ish and proceeded to take up residence in a Comfort Suites Inn. And I must say this hotel room I'm sitting in is incredibly classy for a chain hotel room. It's so classy, I'm not even going to bother explaining what it looks like. But anyhow, we left to go eat dinner and I had the MOST AMAZING STEAK I'VE EVER HAD IN MY LIFE EVER at the Baked Alaskan. That's right folks, the Baked Alaskan, gets the coveted "Michael Situ Seal of Approval and Reccomendation" so whenever you're in Astoria, check them up!
When I eat at a restaurant, I expect to dine at a culinary level above what I usually eat. Unfortunately, my parent's are incredibly competent in cooking so they usually are parallel and on par to what most restaurant's serve or even higher dare I say. It's really rare where I find a restaurant that is truly amazing.
But don't worry, I proceeded to crap my pants when we decided to climb the Astoria Column, a giant tower situated above the town. Did I mention I'm deathly afraid of heights, well we climbed inside a concrete tube and ended up way above ground level so I practically died climbing up.

this was taken with my back to the wall of the tower, not by the railing

Whenever I get near heights, I suddenly start imagining all these gruesome ways I fall off and explode into a million pieces on the ground below. I'm fine in enclosed spaces like buildings high up or planes but I don't do open air well.

getting some use out of my panoramic thing on my camera

DAY 2 (July 2)
I just realized that my days correspond with the day of the month, funny how that works out.
So apparently everyone in Oregon parks like me, and I park like the asian amongst asians, which is really bad. I guess whenever we drive around, my bad driving just forms a radius of influence and makes everyone park wonky.
And another thing, what is up with all these espresso shacks? I mean wherever I go, there are like these 1 room shacks that make espressos and they are everywhere...out in the boonies, in the middle of cities, in rural villages, I mean do farmers just wake up and go for a nice espresso in the morning??

Anyhow, I'll get back on track, woke up, left Astoria and ended up at a small time at the sea side called Seaside. I see the Americans are very literally and original. What better way to go to the beach than in rainy weather?? Looks like the weather from Victoria followed us down to Oregon because it was raining while we walked around. Downtown Seaside is literally a 6 block rectangle so we walked it and went on our merry way.

my brother and I pull a Lewis and Clark

We stopped for lunch at McDonalds again and I got a 20pc Chicken Nugget meal, the infamous meal that Trevor kept on talking about everytime we passed a McDonalds when I went to DCON for Key Club.
We made a stop at Cannon Beach, an even smaller town/village/hamlet that is famous for...its beach, yeah you guessed it! Well the beach wouldn't be that special if it weren't for the giant 200 foot rock just off shore, called Haystack Rock. So yeah we wandered around downtown Cannon Beach which was like a 4 block square so that took even less time.

omg, a giant rock

Then we booked it to Tillamook, the site of its world famous Cheese factory. Apparently ice cream is a subset of cheese because they served some pretty damn good ice cream there too. If you've ever watched Looney Toons and saw the factories characters got chased around in, that is pretty much the factory at Tillamook. They had this funky looking spiral packaging thing that came over top of a big block of cheese and for all I know dwarves wrapped up the cheese in airtight package because that's what came out after 5 seconds.
I also saw the flavour Mint Chocolate Chip...*cough* Unicolour *cough* (Yeah I know, that's a temporary name but still)
We then proceeded to Lincoln City, the birthplace of Abraham Lincoln, vampire hunter expert. He apparently endorses outlet malls because we stayed there to shop for 3 hours. I mean, that's pretty much the only thing tourists do when they go to Lincoln City, well apart from seeing the silver axe Abe used to kill many of his prey.
After that we hit up Newport and that is currently where I'm residing.
According to my calculations and projections, I'll be home around thursday or friday which means I get to experience the 4th of July in America...and I've probably passed 50 fireworks tents so this should be interesting...

DAY 3 (July 3)
So looking back at my previous entries, I realize that I'm making these a bit large, so I'll try to tone it down, that being said, I'm wasting space right now.

Today started off in Newport, we walked through the historic district, which is basically a street on the harbour edge. The entire district stank of fish but it was a fishing town.

isn't he cute???

After that, we blasted off to Florence...Oregon, not Italy.
You know your town is kinda in the boonies when your A&W still does that old fashioned thing where you drive up to the restaurant, order from your car and they bring your food to your car with a tray that hooks onto your window. Or if you order inside the restaurant, they bring your burgers to your table.

rocking it old school

Anyhow after lunch in Florence, we moved on to the meaty part of the day. We went to Sandland Adventures.
Now if you're wondering where Sandland comes from, there is a desert just outside of Florence...yeah a desert. So Sandland, provides tours of the sand dunes via dune buggies. Now if you're a senior citizen, you go for the slow riding giant tour bus-esque buggie. You could literally ride a bike faster than it...or at least I'm guessing because I'm young and hip and exciting so I went on the super fast one. That one will for sure put some hair on your chest. I was placed in the front seat so I was sucking sand the entire time...AND IT WAS AWESOME. The driver really knew his stuff, he tackled giant dunes like it was nothing.
If you're ever going to the Oregon coast, make sure you check out Sandland Adventures in Florence, Oregon, you won't regret it.

desert anyone?

After Florence, we booked it to Woodburn, Oregon, the site of a giant outlet mall where we've stopped for the day. You can assume, that I did some shopping. Tomorrow we conquer Portland.

If you're wondering how we get from place to place so fast, it's because my dad likes to travel somewhere near the land speed record and we practically fly everywhere

I've been noticing some signs everywhere I've gone so far on the coast that say: Oregon Coast Bike Route. That gets me thinking about how my life is pretty dull and boring. I mean leaving my house is considered an exciting day. So one day, I hope to bike the Oregon Coast Bike Route because if I don't do it now while I'm young, I'm probably never going to get the chance. Toss that onto the bucket list.

Another thing I realized on this trip is how beautiful the world is. I mean you don't see sights like these around Victoria, it's amazing how beautiful it is out here and how little humanity has touched it. Standing atop high locations, I can see how little we've disturbed the land and its hard to think that despite how little we've developed the land, we're still causing climate change or damaging ecosystems.

isn't it beautiful?

DAY 4 (July 4)
Happy America Day! or Independence Day!
Even as I sit down and type this out, everyone and their grandma are lighting off fireworks and its not even dark yet. I can't wait for the rest of this night...
I guess all those fireworks tents that we passed by are finally showing their colours...literally.
So the day started off in Woodburn and that's all it did at Woodburn because we were out of there before you could say 'Good Morning'
We hit Portland and visited the Japanese Gardens. It was so nice and peaceful in there and when it's nice and peaceful, I like to think deep, introspective thoughts. I was thinking so much that I walked into a tree. My brother and I then proceeded to disturb the tranquility of the park by banging every single gong we could find at the gift shop, right before we read the sign that said "Please respect the tranquility of the gardens"...whoops.

peaceful and tranquil...until we came along

Next door to the Japanese Gardens is their Rose Garden. The bloody thing is like the size of Buchart Gardens (ok maybe that's a stretch but still). There are so many different types of roses there, and its free admission too!
 After the nice beauty of nature, we hit up downtown Portland and walked around a bit. The downtown is really nice and clean. Apparently all the buskers have been killed off and replaced with ghetto drummers. Basically it's a drummer who is hitting a bunch of plastic buckets and metal rings and making funky beats. We passed like 5 of them in the short time we were there and there were no other buskers.

acoustic drumming at its pinnacle of evolution

After that we hopped back into the car and drove all the way into Seattle just in time to see the Pike Place Market close up. So we'll have to try again tomorrow morning. We ended up at a seafood restaurant at the Seattle waterfront. I don't know if I was in the right area or what but I didn't see a lot of people in american colours waiting for fireworks. Of course, I could be in the wrong section of town but whatever.

Now I might sound like a hippie by the way I describe the splendour of  nature but in addition to loving the sight of unspoiled natural scenes, I also love seeing modern cities with highways stacked on top of each other with a nice rugged skyline. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy nature and if its within my ability to do so, I will be environmentally conscious but the ability for humanity to build giant skyscrapers is pretty friggin awesome.


DAY 5 (July 5)
As I type this, I'm sitting on the BC ferries ride home shaking because the boat is trembling.

I didn't get any sleep between the chainsaw snoring of my dad and the boom of fireworks. So I struggled over to the Pike Street Market and my entire life was made. I found a legit and real keffiyeh scarf (or as I lovingly refer to as my arabic desert scarf etc.) at a little Afghan store. My entire trip was made, I'm set for life.
Anyhow, the Pike Street Market is a gigantic maze of vendors that sell food, fish, trinkets, clothes and just about everything in between that is sellable at a market. There was even an ocarina vendor and she had replicas of the Ocarina of Time and was playing the Song of Time...like a boss.

looks legit..

So the first real Starbucks also started at Pike Street so of course, my dad hit that up and got his 50th cup of morning coffee that day.

definitely legit

There are actually no big name stores like American Eagle or stuff like that, only local vendors, cafes, bakeries and stores so it provides a nice environment for tourists.

looked more crowded in person

After spending 2 hours or so at the Pike Street Market, we proceeded to the Space Needle. Turns out the Space Needle is in a compound that also contains a bunch of other tourist attractions like the EMP. However, we were getting tired of living the tourist life and the lineup for tickets to get to the Space Needle was probably longer than the Needle itself and that's not counting the line for the elevators to the top so we just ate lunch at a nearby Thai restaurant and headed back to the car.

well it looked nice

However along the way, we cut across the KOMO head quarter's courtyard square and a news chopper flew by to the helipad and blew dust everywhere. It also blew my jacket back so I looked like a badass. Just felt I needed to put that in.

Anyhow we were heading back to Vancouver via the Pacific Track X-Crossing (because honestly, the Peach Arch is overrated and takes waaaay to long) and the traffic heading into Vancouver was so long that we just decided that we'd head straight to the ferry instead of to Richmond (as true Asians would)
and now here I am...

Overall I'd say the trip was very fun. I got to do some things I'd never do at Victoria, I got some sick new stuff and a couple of souvenirs and a ton of photos.

By the way, fun fact, it is illegal to pump your own gas at gas stations in Oregon. Yup...