Road Trip! A Trip on the Road! (Patreon)

I tricked my friend Clare into flying across the country (from Maryland!) to go on a week-long road trip with me even though I am For Reals A Bad Driver!

She won't be making that mistake again any time soon!

On October 10th we departed from Portland to Eugene to the Terwilliger Cougar Hot Springs back through Eugene again to Waldport to Tillamook (Cheese factory!) to Astoria up across the state line into Seattle, Washington, and then back down into Oregon again, arriving back in Portland on October 14th.

Post-soak at the Terwilliger Cougar Hot Springs, we took this picture with some rude inscriptions that we thought were funny, but it would probably be dumb of me to post them online so here is the sanitized version for the internet. If you want to see them, you gotta go in person.

CHEESE FACTORY. I only had the most modest amount of diarrhea after neglecting to take one of my Lactaid pills before gorging myself on their free cheese samples. (Mutual followers of Danielle Corsetto's Patreon may recall the time my Lactaid pills and I were the star of a journal comic strip over there.)

The Wreck of the Iredale was slightly underwhelming, I'm reluctant to admit. I mean, don't get me wrong! The backstory is super interesting! Generally I love this kind of shit (Man's hubris rendered naught but humbled ruins by the unrelenting march of time and the elements) but the tide was in so we were waaaay far back on the beach and it was just so small and far away.

The World's Largest Oyster is a tiny bit confusing because it's a sculpture of only the top half of a shell. Like, if you're gunna make the world's largest fake oyster, why wouldn't you make the top and bottom shells so it's a complete package?

I was absolutely delighted to discover that Ada's Technical Books and Cafe in Seattle, WA selected Let's Talk About It as a staff pick, in addition to carrying a small collection of the Drawn to Sex books! Check out that glowing write-up 🥲

The next handful of Seattleites that make it over to Ada's can get their mitts on some freshly signed and sketched-in books 😘 Juuuuuuust sayin'!

I took so many more photos than I can share here, but to wrap up this post here are parts of a mural I found in Seattle by Stasia Burrington, an artist whose work I love! (Plus a bonus picture of me with decommissioned dock legs in Astoria?)

We laughed, we cried (well, I got teary-eyed once. That counts, right?), we saw but a fraction of the beauty that the Pacific Northwest has to offer, and, for better and for worse, Clare and I made some memories during our week on the road ("The worse" is my driving. I'm so sorry, Clare).

Let's do it again next year!