15.04.2012 – 15.04.2012  10 °C

We left our lovely hosts, Dave and Shelly this morning after brekky and started our drive back down the Washington coast to Seattle to swap over our rent-a-car. The drive was fairly uneventful and we got to Seattle mid morning. Our new rent-a-car was a Chevy Impala… nice and big with plenty of room. For the first real time this trip I got behind the wheel and we started driving out of the Seattle area.

We didn’t go far before we decided to find somewhere to stop and grab a cuppa and maybe see if we could buy some of the goodies we need for this trip (camp stove, plastic plates etc). We struggled to find the goodies but we did find a cheap book shop that sold a good map book and we found a cuppa! We also managed to drive around the SeaTac airport at least 3 times when we tried to get back to the motorway! Don’t you just love it when you keep missing your exits!!

Our drive today was down to Portland in Oregon. The drive was pretty specky with us driving passed all of the big NW volcanos, Mt Rainier and Mt St Helens. This part of the world actually reminds me a bit of southern Scotland, lots of fir trees and green grass!

We stopped for lunch somewhere between Seattle and Portland and at our stop we found ourselves a Walmart to buy all of our goodies. 180 dollars and 40 min later we exited the shop with a full trolley of camping ‘stuff’ right for the rest of our trip- so from now on its camping, ‘motel’ style!!

Straight after lunch we swapped drivers (I’ve got a cold and wasn’t feeling spectacular) and D immediately noticed a shaking in the front end of the car. I hadn’t noticed the shaking but it got more and more pronounced the further we drove. Eventually, we stopped the car and rang the rental car agency and told them we would need to swap cars in Portland as something was wrong with the front end of the car. Luckily, this was not an issue and as we drove into Portland we made a detour to the airport and swapped over cars (back to a Nissan Maxima, the same car we had in San Diego).

We arrived at our digs just before dinner to our first night out camping, ‘motel’ style. Tonight’s menu was sausages and veges…. First thing we realised is that our electric hotplate that we had bought gets really hot so we had to move our cooking into the bathroom floor to ensure that we didn’t damage any of the furniture in the room! It was pretty amusing to see D squatting on the floor turning the snags!

Tomorrow we’re going to drive along part of the Oregon Trail (that follows the Columbia River) and turn down towards Crater Lake National Park

Song of the Day– The Who, I can see for miles