We left the campground pretty late this morning, and continued on west to Portland. Low on fuel, again. Why don’t I learn? We left Hood River last night with a quarter tank. It would have been so easy to full up then. “Yeah, we’ll manage. We’ll get there on what we’ve got left.” My optimism is going to bite us in the ass one day. When the van was in the garage I learnt that it’s actually a 5.7 litre V8, not a 4.3 V6 as I thought. 5.7 litres! That’s crazy. It sure doesn’t feel very powerful for an engine that big. We only get 15 miles per gallon, which means 300 miles from a tank at most. We crept into a local store that sold fuel, well over the 300 mile mark. Oops. But we made it.
In Portland we had a couple of hours in a super-hip café, me getting some writing done for work and Rose doing some drawing. It’s clearly the hub for the local bike courier scene. Outside on the pavement a bunch of dudes in their trendy cut-off trousers and extravagant facial hair were swigging tea from thermos flasks and getting calls for jobs on their radios.
We thought we’d go for a healthy lunch today – a couple of doughnuts from Voodoo Doughnuts. This place must be a national legend, the queue outside was maybe 50 people long! They were pretty tasty. We also had a quick peek around the National Centre for Crafts; pottery and clothing mainly.
Then onwards into Washington! First stop; Mount St Helens National Monument. I’d read that there was a good bike ride up the southern face of the mountain so we headed that way. I hadn’t written down any details, and going by the seat of our pants we ended up at Ape Cave (I actually needed Ape Canyon, which we got to later). Ape Cave turned out to be an amazing lava tube; 3rd longest in the USA. We explored half a mile or so down the tube with my bike light. Walking on a river of solid lava through a sewer-sized tunnel, you could easily visualise this being hot and molten.
Back on the surface, we carried on a little way to Lava Canyon; again an unplanned side-trip. Always the best way; drive around a corner and see something unexpected. That’s what road tripping is about! Reminds me of a saying; “Tourists see what they go to see. Travellers see what they see”.
I’m starting to experiment with more non-perishable food, in preparation for longer trips on the boat. Tonight’s gourmet dinner was a curry with canned chicken. Worked just fine! In fact it was amazing. But food always is when you’re hungry, and our two-doughnut lunch wasn’t really setting us up for success. We have a fridge in the van – it runs off 12 volts – but as we can really only run it while we’re driving, it only gets a few hours of cooling each day. The cooler device isn’t very powerful, so it’s more of a “storage box that doesn’t get too hot” than a fridge. So far so good, nothing has gone off. It’s going to be a different story in Utah in August though … might get a solar panel that we can later transfer to the boat. That at least will mean we can run it all day.
We’re still parked just by Lava Canyon, where we’ll stay tonight. The van is all sealed up to make sure that no mozzies get in. I don’t think we’re in a mosquito hotspot here but Rose would not be best pleased if she woke up covered in bites…
The car park is in thick trees, and the moon is not yet up. There are a few stars shining in the small patches of sky between the tall firs, but most are hiding behind clouds. It’s very, very dark. It’s warm. Even though there’s a lot of snow on the slopes not far above us, we can’t be very high here. I don’t know what the altitude is though. The van is all smoky because we’ve been burning a mosquito coil inside. I can hear loads of crickets. In the distance is the rushing of the creek. Earlier we heard frogs and what sounded like jays in the forest. It’s really peaceful. No thundering trains tonight! I wonder what creatures are going to walk past before the sun comes up…
Road and Ocean 