Losing Steam — Katie Spence

Hi friends! It’s been a few days since we checked in, and to be honest, it’s been a bit of a challenging and exhausting few days.

We left Canada bound for Portland on Saturday morning. We were excited about the prospect of a slightly shorter drive, so we took a bit of time to get ready in the morning. When we got to the border we wound up hitting about an hour and a half long wait to get to the checkpoint, which we were not stoked on. We’d only crossed the border three times at this point, and last year it was in the middle of nowhere Montana, so we completely didn’t account for the possibility of being caught up there. It was definitely a little momentum killer. When we finally got to the checkpoint though things went smoothly. The border patrol agent was actually the first one to acknowledge G’s presence in all of our venturing and he was v charmed by our boy, I just know it.

We avoided stopping too much along the way, breezing past Seattle in hopes of making up for the time we lost at the border and getting to Portland in time for the Tech game. Guess I breezed a little bit too fast because just as we were about to hit the stateline I got pulled over for speeding 🙃

I’ve been pulled over for speeding twice in my life, but wasn’t ticketed for it either time (praise be). The last time I was pulled over for it was around 8 years ago though, so you can imagine how well I handled it. I didn’t cry (did both other times) but I did feel super dumb and annoyed. I didn’t drive at all in Canada, so coming to western Washington’s 65mph speed limit when I was used to the 80mph minimum/you’re lucky if you see another car roads in Montana I guess I had a bit of a hard time adjusting.

The cop did cut me a break, citing me only for 10 over, and now I guess I’ve finally experienced an adulthood rite of passage. To be totally honest, I consider it pretty good luck that with one and a half cross-country trips down we hadn’t been pulled over at all up until that point.

After not budging above 65 all the way down to Portland, we arrived to rain in the early evening. We actually wound up staying in a barn just south of the city, which was extremely cool. I think after the day we had though, we were a little too beat to appreciate it. We headed into the city to watch the tech game, then back to the barn to crash.

It was grey and rainy the next morning, and after a lot of debate of weather and time, we decided to nix almost everything nature-y we’d planned to do in the area. I really wanted to check out columbia river gorge, mt. hood, the oregon coast, thor’s well, and a bunch of other stuff. Honestly though, I think after the amount of effort we put into the hike only to get very little out of it, we were a little hesitant to take the risk of losing valuable time to see things if the weather was going to be too bad to do anything. It was definitely upsetting; I don’t have too many plans to come back to this area, especially not with all of the resources we have now, so to not utilize that opportunity definitely takes it out of me. But we agreed we’d at least stop at this rope swing swimming hole I found in northern California and moved on.

We stopped over in Eugene to check out the ducks stadium. Can confirm they got that good Nike money — the campus is lovely and it definitely feels like they have everything. We watched the Eagles lose another close one, and after delaying a little bit, continued south. I was very exhausted and slept most of the drive; as a result we wound up skipping the rope swing too. We got to our extremely mediocre airbnb in Vallejo late at night and crashed without ever really seeing the Pacific.

The next morning Dyl woke up with a cold and we headed out for yet another long drive. Instead of going directly to Vegas, we detoured through Sequoia and King’s Canyon National Parks. We got in for free 99 by flashing our national parks pass from last year which was #cash. We had G with us obviously, who wasn’t welcome on the trails and probably would’ve peed on many a hundred year old tree, so we only spent a short time there. We didn’t even really fully venture into Sequoia, but we did catch a couple sequoia trees so that was good enough for us. Cranking up the “Escaping NXIVM” podcast by cbc (10/10 highly recommend) we trucked it out to Vegas.

As I personally am a ~*vegas person*~ I was totally fine getting in late. We checked into our second questionable airbnb in two nights and immediately dipped out to the strip for some gambling (we lost) and fried chicken (we won). Even though it was a holiday, it was a Monday in Vegas so things weren’t too crazy out. We had a good time, stuck to a small segment of the trip, and were back asleep by 3! The next morning we were off to Albuquerque, but that’s a story for the next post 😇