day 29 Port Angeles to Salem, Oregon
june 29

waking up in the Olympics was glorious in spite of a nightmare about being interrupted constantly while i was trying to read a poem. the day dawned bright and the sky was bluer than blue and i thought: THIS is really what June ought to be about. sadly, the month slipped by without a lot of real June-ish-ness. so much beauty but, come on now - SO much rain!

putting up the tent in the dark was a cool challenge and Andrew and i both felt vaguely smug about handling it with such aplomb. it wasn't until morning that we saw a plaque beside our site called BLOW-DOWN describing how 92 enormous trees had toppled in the campground (fallen "like toothpicks) during a storm in february of 1979.

i had a mission to visit not one but two women i've known through an internet writing forum for a year and a half (through NaNoWriMo - National Novel Writing Month) but had never met in the flesh. both were within spitting distance of the I-5 so Andrew and i could fly-in, make a surgical strike for a hug and a chat then get back on the road to make our miles.
lovely Sheryl was a fast farm experience in Toledo with dogs and horses and barns and a husband who likes to race cars. laughing Ellen (we call her Nelly) was a town experience (Vancouver, WA) and she and her husband treated us to dinner and we laughed over home-grown hamburgers then took a photo under the Burgerville sign.
apparently her grandson, Brady, is sure i'd flunk 4th grade due to my complete disregard for capitalization, puctuation and sentence completion (hi Brady!).

i picked a campground in oregon that seemed an easy place to make by nightfall and 26 miles outside Salem, we figured it would be uncrowded on a monday night.
HA!
the day that began in towering rugged beauty ended in a ghetto campground with tentsites stacked up one on top of the next, cookie cutter sardine cans, fire pits smoking so much it was like a scene out of Dickens, sooty urchins riding bicycles beneath the street lamps.

while setting up the tent, it became clear that our neighbors were not only loud but also drunk and unlikely to modify their tone or volume so we walked our big dome to another part of the campground. it reminded me of an amazing movie i saw years ago
called THE KNACK with Rita Tushingham in which she and a man have to move a bed. much funnier than it felt in the campground.