After visiting the Tillamook Air Museum (a post dedicated to just the museum is forthcoming), we began to realize just how much territory we had to cover in the short time remaining. The map below shows how desperate we had let our situation get. The Yellow represents how far we had gone in 8 1/2 days while the dark pink illustratess how far we wanted to go in about barely 2 1/2 days.



Clearly, if we wanted to see what we had planned on seeing, we'd have to fly. And fly we did!

We made record time from Tillamook to Newport, then from Newport to Corvalis. A few thoughts from the road:

1) The Oregon coast is a scenic wonder. It pained me to speed down it without snooping around a bit...without taking little hikes down to the surf, through the rainforest...without taking a few pictures.

2) The coast range is beautiful....reminded me a little bit of the Scottish Moorlands. Huge trees everywhere.

3) The Ford Escape V6 is a remarkably capable compact SUV. It felt solid even at very high speed.

From Corvalis we screamed across the Southern Willamette Valley and into the western foothills of the Cascade Mountains. The sun was setting as we rolled into Sweet Home, where we decided to stop for the night.

Sweet Home was an acid trip from the minute we arrived to the moment we finally escaped its dark, swirling vortex. Our first misadventure was simply trying to find a room. It seemed every motel in town was inhabited by semi-permanent residents, and without vacancy. One place was especially creepy...a small religious cult had settled in for the long haul, or so it would seem. There were clothes drying on lines in front of each of the rooms, and grubby children were running naked from door to door. There also appeared to be a disproportionate number of women to men...I saw several chicks, but only a couple guys. The whole setup gave me a very Charles Manson type vibe. They actually had a room if we'd wanted it, but we thought we'd look elsewhere. We finally found a place at the western end of main street, across from the A&W.

The next morning we glanced over our maps and decided to try a scenic route that also promised to cut significant miles and minutes off the day's drive. Instead of taking Highway 20 east to Highway 22 like normal (sane?) people, we elected to take Quartzville Drive, past Green Peter Lake, then take NF-11 to Highway 22. A fine plan indeed.

The scenery along Quartzville Drive was drop dead gorgeous, but it quickly became apparent that we weren't saving any time at all. The road was winding, and the lanes became narrower and narrower as we went. Soon, the route was little more than a single paved track, only one vehicle wide, with short pullouts every few hundred yards. We climbed steeply into the Cascades where we started having to ram tall snow banks that blocked our path. About 5 short miles from highway 22, the road came to an abrupt end where an avalanche had piled trees, rocks, and snow so high that nothing could pass. We tried getting around it in 4 wheel drive, but only succeeded in getting ourselves momentarily stuck. In the end we had to turn around and retrace our path some 35 miles back to Sweet Home.


Our only consolation was that we saw a whole lot of this...

Needless to say, I was pissed, and used up most of my yearly allowance of swear words on the drive back into town. There had been no signs warning that the road was impassible, and no indication on any of our maps that NF-11 was little more than a glorified game trail.

Sumbitches!

It was lunch time when we pulled into town and we grabbed a quick bite at McDonalds. The rental was covered in mud, so, we wolfed down a couple quarter pounders with cheese and made for a carwash I'd seen earlier.

Naturally, the change machine was out of order (we were quickly learning that very little worked as it should in this place). Undaunted, though, I walked to the A&W next door. I handed the guy at the counter a five spot and asked for as many quarters as he could spare. To my request he replied, and without further explanation "We don't give change on Sunday". Suffice it to say, I spent what little remained of my annual cuss word allowance right there.

We went from one end of that ruddy back woods hole to the other looking for enough change to run the wash. Finally, a strangely lucid gas station attendant (with a full compliment of teeth t'boot) dug a few dollars worth of quarters out of his own pocket, and out of his car for us. We are forever in his debt.

We finally managed to get the Escape looking a little more presentable, and we blew out of Dodge one last time. That is, until noticing that the gas light was on some ten miles down the road! Knowing we'd never make it to Detroit (Oregon) on fumes we turned around, yet again, for Sweet Home.


At this point we were starting to feel like the universe, or at least the black hole that is Sweet Home, was conspiring against us. Sucking us in. Fortunately the fill up was uneventful and we put Sweet Home in the rear view mirror faster than you can say "Deliverance."