Once properly in California, the real redwood country begins.

First, we turned off the highway onto Newton B Drury Scenic Parkway, which is in Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park. There, we found a tiny little trailhead and went for a short hike among the giants.

The evening sun made everything look golden.

And along the scenic parkway, we also encountered a family of deer. They were completely uninterested in us, though, not even one could be bothered to look up for the camera. Arrogant creatures.

From the scenic parkway, we continued to Redwood National and State Parks, where we drove on a narrow, winding road up to Lady Bird Johnson Grove.

This is how cool I look in my hiking outfit.

Did I tell you I like trees?

I have a similar picture of me, “meditating” on the top of The Devil’s Molar outside of La Paz, Bolivia. I’ll have to make a collection of it.

Seriously, I would not have been surprised if a dinosaur suddenly appeared in the undergrowth.

I have to say, if someone asked my advice and only had time to go to one redwood location, the Lady Bird Johnson Grove would be it.

Did I tell you that the California redwoods are huge? Here, all that incessant practicing of parallel parking that my dear driving school teacher Ivan put me through really payed off. I made it through, without a single scratch on our Toyota Camry.

Hanna, on the other hand, didn’t dare to try.

Hanna’s first steps on Californian soil was on this tiny rest stop.

A short drive later, we reached the Kalmath River Overlook and got this even more beautiful view of the northern Californian coast.

Friday (8/6), we started early and drove down the coast from Port Orford toward the Californian border. And I’ve seriously never seen a more rough and wild coast in my life. The pure drama was actually a traffic hazard, it was so hard to keep your eyes on the road.

Cape Sebastian State Park had some really odd-looking trees.

But the view from the cape was uncomparable.

Whalehead Beach in Samuel H Boardman State Park – perfect place to eat our fresh Oregon cherries.

We ate lunch at a Mexican place in Brookings, just north of the Californian border. It wasn’t a big place, but apparently, you could still buy guns at the pawn shop.

7/6: The first American motel that Hanna and I ever stayed at was called Sea Crest Motel, situated in Port Orford, Oregon. It also turned out to be the nicest.

The bed was so beautifully made, and the view from the window was stunning, high upp on the cliffs looking out on the ocean.

We went for a short evening walk, just after sunset, and I found one of my beloved tsunami warning signs.

As I was balancing on the rail in front of the sign, I saw something move in the bushes next to it. I told Hanna that it probably was a fox, and she took a few steps closer to check. But just as quickly, she started walking away from there again and when I came after her, she said that it was a person eating chips. Lying next to a tree, in a ditch by the highway. Hanna was laughing, but she also had a really scared look on her face.

So, just to make sure, we quickly walked back to the motel and crawled into our queen sized bed and watched a terrible, but oh so amusing American gossip tv show. The US is so funny. They are not allowed to say fuck on TV, but they can so many mean things about celebrities that I seriously can’t understand how anyone would want to become a celebrity in America.

We reached to ocean and the coastal highway 101 at Florence. I think it’s really funny, how many small towns and even cities in the US are named after European cities, and even countries. From what I’ve read, it’s mostly because the first settlers at the place that eventually turned into a city named their new homes after their old homes in the old world. So, we have Florence and Waterloo and Lebanon and really, the settlers must have had better imaginations than to think that the name wouldn’t become confusing once the settlements started growing. But no.

So, just outside of Florence, Oregon, lies a small park called Darlingtonia Wayside. The only attraction there is the small bog where the insect eating, extremely oddlooking flower Darlingtonia californica grows. It’s endemic to the southern Oregon and northern California coast, so it’s quite special. Just look at it!

Well, the park had a couple of pretty trees too.

Further south lies the Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area. It’s an area of sand dunes stretching along almost all of Oregon’s southern coast, which makes it the largest seaside dune area in the States. And the dunes get pretty big too. Nothing compared to the dunes in the Namib, but still. Hanna found them impressive. We chose to walk part of the John Dellenbeck trail, which is where the really big dunes are.

There are also wild rhododendrons growing just next to the sand dunes. I didn’t know that rhododendrons could be wild. Stupid of me. Everything must have been wild at one point or another. These rhododendrons where huge.

We stopped to eat a very late lunch/early dinner of delicious fish n’ chips (the deliciousness might be atleast partly due to our extreme hunger) in Brandon. After eating our fill (and getting the rest of our meal in a doggybag), we went for a stroll in the town. And what a town. It felt like it had completely been built for the tourists. So cute, but completely empty!

No, those kinds of places kind of spook me. I prefer the dirty ones where people actually live.

Oh, but I do like traffic signs.

This is just outside the tiny village of Denmark. And looking at it, the name doesn’t feel that far fetched. Hills, grass and cows. Add a couple of pigs and a blond guy drinking beer for breakfast, and you would have like a small piece of that funny country, accidentally separated by an ocean and a continent from it’s motherland.

So, finally, when the sun was just about to set, we reached Port Orford, where we had decided to spend the night. And the moment I stepped out of the car, the fresh ocean breeze hit me with the smell of salt and seaweed and eternity. Sure, mountains are cool and cities can be awesome – but nothing beats the ocean.

7/6: But we didn’t have the time to stay with the wackoes and hippies in Eugene. The road was calling.

From Eugene we drove straight west toward the coast. Pretty soon, the landscape changed from slihtly hilly to seriously mountaineous. The road crawled in the valley, between trees and cliffs and the occational rushing springs. And in the middle of this wilderness, we came upon the cutest little diner.

The Gingerbread Restaurant. Perfect place for a midday pie and coffee.

Hanna’s pie was delicious, lemon meringue. Mine was kine of weird, strawberry something, it mostly just tasted sweet. But I only took it because Hanna wanted to try both, so it was okay.

The diner, though, and especially the waitress, were the cutest. Gingerbread really was a suitable name, built as it was with sturdy wooden logs and decorated with gingerbread cookies. Like something out of a Grimm fairytale. They must have a thing for their Germanic heritage in Oregon.

Leslie told us that Eugene is the hippie town in Oregon. And seriously, the number of buddhist flags and odd street art in this town turned out to be uncountable. When we arrived on Wednesday night (6/6), we drove past several garden parties full of people with dreadlocks and tie-died shirts. The smell of weed was distinct in the air.

Even our hostel looked like a yoga retreat center.

Eugene is also the town of University of Oregon. We didn’t get to see very much of that more serious side of the city, though. This place just seemes overcrowded with wackoes and free-thinkers.

I’m telling you. Eugene, Oregon, crazy!

6/6: Our second stop on our first day of driving was Silver Falls Park. We arrived late in the afternoon and got to see the trees and the beautiful waterfalls in the setting sun.

You could even walk behind the big waterfall. Kind of scary, but so cool.

Awesome tree, right?

The vitsippa from Oregon.

It turned out to be the perfect evening walk. After the easy hike, we could return to the car all refreshed and drive the last stretch to Eugene, where we had two hostel dormitory beds waiting for us.

6/6: And so, finally, were we on our way. For some reason, we decided I should drive the first stretch, out of Portland and onto the freeway and beyond. I was terrified, my heart was beating like a drum, loud in my ears. But really, it didn’t turn out that bad. We got on the freeway, drove there for half an hour or so and then got off again. No biggie. Because we were headed to Mount Angel.

When we were taking about which route we should take to get from Portland to San Francisco, most people told us to go along the coast. But we wanted to see some countryside too, not only beaches, so we decided to spend our first day driving along berry fields and Christmas tree plantations in the Willamette valley just south of Portland.

In the middle of this idyllic landscape lies Mount Angel. And in Mount Angel, they have an abbey. And the abbey has a library that just happens to be designed by the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto. So the guidebook told us. Being the Finnish human geography nerds that we are (Hanna studies city planning at Stockholm university), we just had to see this. And it turned out to be a nice, if odd, slight detour on our drive south.

The abbey in itself was cute, but nothing special.

But it was situated on a hill, which gave it an amazing view. And the day was so warm and lovely, perfect for a visit at the tranquility of an abbey.

Th wierd thing was the abbey museum. It was full of stuffed animals, some of them monstrously misformed (like a calf with two heads), an exhibition of stones and clothes from the nineteenth century.

An odd start on our roadtrip, indeed.

And so, the library. I must say, I wasn’t surprised. It looked just like an Aalto.

And they were apparently proud of it too.

It was a beautiful library. I could easily have spent my days there, reading and doing research. Too bad all the books were about god.

For lunch, we had real American burgers, me with a chocolate milkshake, down in the village. Then we went for a short walk.

Seriously, Mount Angel might be the oddest town I’ve ever visited. The architecture was so extreme, as if they wanted to create an old German country village that actually never has existed. Because houses simply cannot look like that! They even had postcards that claimed that they had the ‘best October fest celebrations west of Munich’.

But I liked this house, a bit outside of the city. I like the way these westcoast Americans paint their houses in all the craziest colours and combinations. Isn’t the turquoise and the lilac together with the yellow and pink of the roses just lovely?