Dave's Pacific Northwest Coaster Tour

July 13-22, 1999

This year I included a lot more of the off-hand in-transit kind of stuff in the park reports, but there are some other little elements worth noting.

The Trip Out

The MD-80 is a rotten aircraft. It is nothing more than a glorified DC-9, and if you get stuck in the back as I did, you have an engine sceaming in your ear and blocking the view out the window for the whole trip. It's tolerable for short hops, but to go all the way across the country, it is just too small and too crowded. Speaking of crowded, my trip out was a 1-stop flight from Columbus to Portland via St. Louis. In 1996 I flew on another airline, in a Boeing aircraft (I think it was a 737) from Cincinnati to Portland (1,977 miles) in about three hours; from St. Louis to Portland (1,716 miles) by MD-80 is just over four hours. Ick! Anyway, both legs of the trip out were overcrowded. Every seat had somebody in it, plus there were lap babies. At least they weren't screaming lap babies. I swear, if the FAA would allow it, this airline would have strap-hangers standing in the aisle and blocking the beverage cart.

Also, the St. Louis airport terminal is one of the crummiest airport terminals I have ever been in. I thought Columbus and Pittsburgh were bad. St. Louis is worse than either of those.

Rental Cars

My brother and sister-in-law met me at the airport. They really didn't need to do that as I was renting a car, but it was useful to have someone guide me through the maze of Portland streets. I rented a car which turned out to be a little red Subaru wagon. Once I got out of Portland I started to notice that the Subaru Outback wagon seems to be the unofficial preferred car of the Pacific Northwest. So I blended right in. The car has some neat features such as the seat height adjustment, the working air conditioning, lots of storage compartments, stuff like that. It also has its annoying features, like a windshield wiper control where I expect to find a gearshift, and a little "feature" where I couldn't shift out of park without stomping on the brake. I found that to be annoying just because someone else can't figure out that the vehicle might move when you shift gears.....Anyway, in a little more than a week I put about 2,000 miles on this Radio Flyer. I think I prefer a sedan, where I can lock my stuff in the trunk and leave the passenger compartment windows open.

Volatile prices, flammable liquids

Everything costs more out there than it does here. I put gas in my car before I left, and it cost me $1.039/gallon. And I thought that was terribly expensive. In Portland, you are lucky if you can find any station charging less than $1.50/gallon. Yikes! And you aren't allowed to pump it yourself. Well, hey, if I'm going to pay that much there'd better be a pump jockey! Even so, it still isn't what I would call 'full service.'

Relations

		My brother was very nice, putting me up in his house for several nights. He doesn't really have the room, but it was fine for me. They all (my brother and sister-in-law) had to work hard during my vacation, and it doesn't help that they just moved and have been hosting guests almost continuously ever since. But they were able to give me some useful travel tips and places to go in and around Portland. It's nice to have relatives when you travel. From left to right, that's Cara, Chris, and Cara's sister Holly, who was also visiting during my stay.

The Pace of Life

I did find that the Northwest is a lot more laid-back than I am used to. At traffic lights it was useful because my reaction time is faster than literally anyone else on the road. Beautiful countryside, but I don't think it is the kind of place I would want to live.

Landscapes

Speaking of beautiful countryside, I think I mentioned driving from Seattle to Spokane on IR-90, and moving from forest to desert just as the sun came up. Coming back from Spokane to Portland was considerably more scenic, as much of the drive was along the Columbia River. I did think it was interesting when I saw an anti-littering sign along US-395. To the left were amber waves of grain. Ahead of me was black asphalt. To the right was purple brush on brown soil. The wording on the sign? "Keep Washington Green!". Obviously it wasn't working! Probably a signage decision made by someone in Olympia who had never been East of Mt. Rainier.

Speaking of Mt. Rainier, I didn't get up close to that one, but I detoured from IR-84 and went down to Mount Hood. Got as far up as the Timberline Lodge. They must have had a pretty significant winter, or summer has been unusually cool. When I was last there in 1996, it was the end of June and the snowpack started a couple hundred feet up the mountain from the lodge; here it was the end of July, and the snow was still three feet deep right up to the lodge's back door. There is an aerial tramway that goes up closer to the top of the mountain, and it does operate in the summer, but not as late in the day as I was visiting...in fact I got up to the lodge just about a half-hour before it closed to all but overnight guests.

Caution: Bad joke

It was as I was driving in IR-84 along the Columbia River that I noticed a barge that got my attention. Painted on the side of the barge was a sign noting that it was operated by a fish hatchery. The sign indicated that the barge was "JUVENILE FISH TRANSPORTATION." I read that and immediately realized that the barge should have been painted yellow. It is, after all, basically a school bus! [Footnote 1]

Motels

On the subject of accommodations...I'd like to specifically note that the K&E Motor Inn in Edmonds, Washington turned out to be a nice place at a perfectly reasonable price, just off of IR-5. Nothing spectacular, but a perfectly adequate, clean room at a reasonable price. Also, the Super-8 motel right off of IR-90 at Exit 272 just West of Spokane scored some bonus points with me because not only does it have a swimming pool, that pool is open all night. Usually when I go to a motel that has a pool it does me no good at all because the pool is closed when I want to use it...in the middle of the night just before I go to bed. This place had a pool and hot tub and it did me a world of good, particularly since my feet hurt like crazy at this point in the trip. There is something to be said for wearing comfortable shoes that aren't worn out when visiting parks!

Park Apparel and Hours

The surprising thing about the parks in the Northwest is that none of them (except Silverwood) sells T-shirts, and almost all of them close early. In fact, it seems that just about everything closes early. Around here, the earliest any of the parks closes is 9:00pm, and that's the waterparks. The big parks stay open until at least 10:00pm, often until midnight. Ths business of closing parks at 7:00pm is alien to me!

Going Coastal		The Coaster Theater in Cannon Beach, OR. As soon as I saw it I just had to take the picture!
	It's hard to fathom how far inland Portland really is. But it is about 90 miles to the ocean. I know that because I went there...to Cannon Beach...on my last day in Portland. I had to get back early because my hosts had planned to have dinner with me, but it was a nice drive through the forest. It just looks like the ocean should be closer. Once I got there, what I found was a huge sand beach, reportedly five miles long, and hundreds of feet from the dirt to the water. Why do they build the beach so far away from the ocean? Maybe I should have rented one of those funny little recumbent bicycles. I guess there must be a big difference between low tide (when I visited) and high tide. Once I got out to the water, my next thought was that such a nice beach is really wasted on water that is this cold. It's a good thing I wasn't planning to go swimming; I'd have been really bummed out. By comparison, on a trip to BGW a couple of years ago I drove on out to Virginia Beach...which admittedly is about eight degrees further South...and stuck my toes into the Atlantic. I remember being surprised at how warm it was especially since it was late October. Of course I wasn't surprised at how cool the Pacific was, particularly since I darned near froze...with the air conditioning off...the night I spent in Seattle. Okay, so it was only about 50 degrees...to put it in perspective, our low temperature yesterday (July 31, 1999) was 75 degrees Farenheit and our high was officially 96 degrees (though parts of town hit 103 degrees). It's just that it is unexpected to see such a perfect beach accompanying water so inhospitable.

Bad public transit planning

When I returned to Portland from Mount Hood, I came into town on US-26, which runs right through Portland just a few blocks north of my brother's house. What I noticed was that through Gresham there is a light-rail line running down the middle of the street. For the first time I saw first-hand some of the things I'd only read about on Kim Pedersen's web page. Having just been in Seattle a few days earlier I found myself wondering how many billions of dollars this eyesore cost, and logistically how much better it would have been if they had used an overhead railway, preferrably a monorail. This isn't the forum for such public transit advocacy, but I suggest a look at http://www.monorails.org for a pretty good argument against the kind of light rail I saw in Gresham and Portland.

Back in the air...

Going home was uneventful, and it was nice that the flights were not so overcrowded, since it was again more $&!* MD-80's. Slow, noisy, crowded, cramped. I made my return trip on an overnight flight, which was itself interesting. I found I couldn't sleep on the airplane (I can't sleep in a moving car, either) but it did give me a chance to work on these trip reports. Although I did break another hinge on the Psion while driving from Portland to Seattle, so many of my notes were taken on paper (no!) instead of on the computer...so the trip reports were still delayed unreasonably. Ah, well, I finally replaced the palmtop with a later, faster, and hopefully more durable model. We shall see.....

Back to normal...

My Dad met me at the airport in Columbus, and he was nice enough to bring me my own car. Interesting, when I first sat down to drive home, one of the first things I did was to reach for the phantom gearshift on the transmission tunnel. After repeatedly trying to use the windshield wiper control in the Radio Flyer as a gearshift. I guess 2,000 miles in a vehicle that really isn't so bad (unlike the previous two rental cars I had) does strange things to the brain...........

It was a good trip. It wasn't quite the timing I wanted, and it would have been nice to bend time and space a bit more. But Edmonton, Missoula, Santa Clara, Stateline, and Salt Lake City are all too far from Portland. It is nice to get further out than the usual Pennsylvania trip for a change, and to visit some of these parks that I don't get to read about all the time on rec.roller-coaster. But it's good to be home again. Two days after I got back I spent the evening at Wyandot Lake, and two days after that I went to Cedar Point. Yes, indeed, it was very good to be home again.

In the course of the trip I...

• flew 4 segments on 3 different aircraft
• rented 1 little red wagon
• stayed in 2 motel rooms
• visited three states and one Canadian province
• met two r.r-c correspondents
• spent 5 nights on my brother's floor
• drove 2,000 miles
• bought 5 tanks of gas
• visited 7 amusement parks, 1 city park, and 1 mall
• rode 3 antique carousels
• rode 12 roller coasters
• rode 1 monorail
• visited the top of 1 observation tower

And my track record now stands at...

Northwest Coaster Tour '99 index

Next park visit: Stricker's Grove

Trip Reports 1999

Back to Dave's page

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

Footnote 1: (This one is for the Canadians) A group of fish is called a...what?

--DCAjr.