Following two weeks of solo travel (Phil in Sapporo and Seoul, and I, in Switzerland), we reunited in San Francisco (photos here) at our friends’ Kevin and Robin’s. Phil had already spent a few days there, and our plan at the time – with whole long list of places to see and hikes to take − was to spend eight weeks working out west while undertaking longer road trips in National Parks. But, as has been the case a few times during these past months, the work-part of “work & travel” forced us to change plans.
Working on the West Coast is complicated if your colleagues are on Swiss time. Zurich is 9 hours ahead of SFO, so if we started our workdays at 8 am, we had pretty much already missed the day. The sense of always “being a bit behind” started to annoy me, and even though we both switched to starting work at 4.30 a.m., we realized quickly that relocation would be necessary as soon as possible.
BUT, still wanting to enjoy a little bit of the West (and visit a few people), we did spend two wonderful weeks on that side of the country. We hit the road with the smallest available rental car (typically, American “small” was a bit of an understatement!), heading north along the beautiful California coast past wineries, stopping first to visit the Redwood National and State Parks. Known for its truly gigantic trees (some higher than 100 meters, and hundreds of years old, photos here), we felt like we’d dropped into a Spielberg movie set. The many shades of green, glistening mosses, and walls of fern seemed almost unreal. Surprisingly, the average “trail” ranged around half a mile (which is not all that much in km either), so for real exercise, we found a 12-mile trail that took us from dense forest landscape to beach, and even saw a herd of elk there. Phil’s first encounter with these majestic animals!
After coastal California, we decided to head inland, taking a faster route up north towards Portland. In Oregon, we discovered is that it’s illegal to pump your own gas; there is always an attendant ready to do it for you. I later read up on this odd law, put in place in 1951 during the time of full-service gas stations − apparently a lot more likely to explode − and found out that disregarding the law carried a fine of USD 500. We never walked on the wild side in that regard!
We may well have missed the beautiful parts of Northern California and Southern Oregon, but weren’t impressed much by the rural, downtrodden look we saw in many of the little towns there. The drive was certainly memorable for other reasons, though: the white crosses reading “Jesus Saves” along the highway, the confederate flags we spotted quite often, and the only radio station we could access being one for religious country music. While we wouldn’t have minded the music too much (the songs were good, and I can easily ignore rather uninventive thank-you-god lyrics), there seemed to be a religious sermon after every three songs, along with a lot of Christian-oriented advertisements. I learned, for example, about “Christian healthcare,” a kind of insurance concept that offers “good rates for good Christians,” but doesn’t cover birth control or abortions. Our highlight of that day came in form of a huge billboard: “After communism, we welcome the new dictator Obama.” I’d love to meet the person who came up with that witty slogan.
Portland (photos here), our next destination, couldn’t have been more different: very liberal and extremely “organic.” We enjoyed finding residential streets lined with private little vegetable gardens, and didn’t feel like we’d arrived in the largest city of the state at all. This definitely felt like a place for us, and we had some wonderful friends to visit there.
We spent the first few days with Joanna and Paulo (friends we met via Couchsurfing in Hawaii), enjoying a cool “novoperuvian” meal, taking walks in parks with their wonderful dog Zoe Moo, watching a movie at “The Living Room,” a special cinema which served delicious lattes once you were seated, going to the Farmer’s Market, and getting to know the city’s booming food cart culture.
Afterwards, we visited Steve, a friend we met in Thailand in 2009. It was fun to catch up, and hear what he’d been up to. Together with some of his friends, we visited an organic brewers’ festival (Portland is quite the Beervana, with micro-distilleries galore), and enjoyed hearing about his current business venture, a medical marijuana dispensary. Since Oregon is voting on the recreational use of marijuana later this year, this may well be a promising concept. Anyway, we came away determined to invest in marijuana stocks (yes, they actually exist!).
