Despite that early introduction, for many years a mate and I had talked about doing The Great American Road Trip. We didn’t really know what that was, exactly, but we knew we wanted to do it. Somewhere along the line one of us picked up a copy of Road Trip USA<\/a>, a guide to touring the US away from the Interstates, and it became a sort of talisman for the next few years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We’d talked about doing the old Route 66 forever, but for reasons that escape me now we eventually decided that Route 101 would be a better choice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It totally was.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Now the thing with a trip like this — at least as far as my mate and I were concerned — is that it was all about the clich\u00e9s. When you’ve been watching road trip movies and US television as long as we had, well, there were a lot of classic moments that we had to recreate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For that reason, we’d originally planned to buy a classic car from the After looking at the prices, discovering the insurance hassles, and knowing we’d need to sell it in just a day or two at the end, we realised it’d be about the same money, and a lot less grief, to just hire a new Mustang convertible<\/a> instead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Once we In the spirit of all great road trips, our preparation was awesomely inadequate. We had guidebooks for half of the states we wanted to cover, and a couple of basic driving maps that didn’t even include Arizona. <\/p>\n\n\n\n We’d mapped out a few of the major highlights we wanted to see, and that was the extent of it. Perfect planning, in other words, for three weeks and 3500 miles of driving a rental car in a foreign country on the wrong side of the road.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We picked up the car at Seattle Airport. After a couple of laps around the parking lot trying not to run into other vehicles, and cuing up the first cliche of the trip (“Born in the USA<\/a>” on the car stereo), it was time to hit the road north.<\/p>\n\n\n\n North, you say? No, we weren’t lost after the first turn — we’d just decided to take a tour of the Boeing Factory in Everett before we headed off. There’s only one word to describe this place: HUGE<\/strong>. Seriously huge. It’s the largest building in the world by volume, and it shows. I’m not a plane geek at all, but it was a seriously impressive tour.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The following day we started the trip for real in a typical Seattle drizzle, quickly clearing traffic on the I-5 en-route to our first stop. Mount St Helens<\/strong> had been threatening to erupt for several days but the visitor centre was still open at that point, so we had to take the detour to check it out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n With all the mist and smoke in the area, plus scarred landscape from the massive eruption in 1980, it was an eerie countryside to drive through. Not eerie enough to prevent a local cop from emerging from the bushes to give us our first (and last) speeding ticket of the trip, however. Four miles an hour over the speed limit, with nobody else in sight. Hmm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We crossed state lines and joined Highway 101 for the first time, staying that night in a little town called Seaside<\/strong>. It was indeed beside the sea, which was far and Find discounted hotels in Seaside<\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n The next day we continued south, and other than a stop in Tillamook to take a tour of the cheese factory (yeah, seriously…), we seemed to spend a lot of time looking at wood. As it were.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There are lots of trees in Oregon, apparently, and most of them seemed to be on the backs of the trucks in front of us. There was a brief comedy interlude, however, as we debated whether to stop at one of the tiny townships along the route. After all, it was pretty tempting to say that we’d spent the night in Beaver.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After a long day staring at logs and a short night being stared at by locals, we decided perhaps a change of scene was called for. In other words, we were both keen to find somewhere to go for a beer that didn’t resemble a scene from Deliverance<\/a><\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Rather than stopping at Newport, then, with a hasty look at the map we turned inland and continued on to Eugene<\/strong>, a university town with a funny name.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Find discounted hotels in Eugene<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n It was mid-week, and as we wandered from one empty pub to another that evening, we wondered if we’d taken a couple of hundred mile detour for no good reason. With the infamous call of ‘we’ll just try one more place and call it a night’, however, we finally discovered the bar where every student in the town was hanging out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It was packed. The music was pumping. The beer was flowing. It was a fantastic place to end the evening. And … I totally can’t remember the name of it. Sorry about that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We stayed on the I-5 the following day, with a leisurely top-down cruise through the mountains to Grants Pass<\/strong>, a surprisingly bustling little place. The weather was lovely, the views were equally as good, and it just generally seemed to be a really nice town to stop for the day. And so we did.<\/p>\n\n\n\nWashington<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"Mount](\"https:\/\/whatsdavedoing.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/01\/Mount-St-Helens-view-1000x750.jpg\")
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![\"Redwoods](\"https:\/\/whatsdavedoing.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/01\/Redwoods-road-1000x750.jpg\")
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