Our Trip through Oregon

by Madeleine Kando


Traveling has been my middle name for most of my childhood and my teenage years. From my native Hungary, via Paris and Amsterdam, through London and Madrid, I finally landed in this gigantic country called America. I am not sure why I chose the US as my last landing strip. I don’t think I chose it, really. I just wanted to leave where I was at the time. You know, thinking: ‘I need a break from my life. I need a vacation. I have this green card anyway, thanks to my older brother’s sponsorship, who was already an American citizen, so why not give the New World a try?

Which I did, thinking that going on a cross country trip for a few months and getting a taste of America would satisfy the remnants of my need for wanderlust. Then I could go back to my life in Amsterdam. I landed on the East Coast, again not really knowing why, except that it felt a lot more like Europe than other parts of America.

All of this is so long ago, it almost feels like someone else’s life. Then I got married and the cross-country trip morphed into a honeymoon. I stayed put for decades. I love that expression ‘staying put’. I stayed put so I could raise a family, deploy a career, and I became completely embedded in my new country. I knew I had the biggest back yard anyone could wish for, just in case my wanderlust started to tug at my sleeves again.

I had had my share of traveling through Europe, but it is a different cup of tea altogether. Many countries are the size of postage stamps and before the Schengen Agreement, it was a big deal to travel to other countries. Visas, permits, drivers’ licenses etc. Here you can drive through your backyard for days, weeks, and still not have to speak another language or even know which state you are in. In the tiniest nooks and crannies of this vast country, you can fuel up on a MacDonald or a Starbucks coffee. No matter which motel you land in, be it in Missouri or Wyoming, you can always look forward to the same watery coffee and soggy breakfast sausages (it wasn’t hard for me to give those up, after I became vegan).

I am more than old enough to remember the Howard Johnson roadside restaurants serving that same watery coffee, soggy breakfast sausages and home fries. Who could ask for more? The HoJo’s followed you like the moon at night. No matter how far you traveled, they were there. This country is custom made for traveling.

So let me take you with me on my trip to Oregon.

Off to San Francisco
There was a time in my life when I would have thought nothing of hitch-hiking cross country, but now I was glad to pay for extra leg room on our flight to San Francisco. Packed like sardines in a smelly can, I was counting the hours until we would land and the flight could be catalogued as just another bad memory.

We would stay in the city by the Bay for a short week, enjoy the company of my seven-year old grandson Marshall and his parents and then explore Oregon with my husband Hans. Funny how distances seem to grow the farther out West you go. In Europe you have decent, bite sized kilometers. Here in New England, kilometers have expanded to miles, but distances are still reasonably digestible. It is when you find yourself in California, the third largest state in the country, that you realize you were living in a bubble. It is the distances on the East Coast that are the exception. The rest of the country is unimaginably large. I felt like an ant living on the surface of a balloon that was inflating. It got bigger and bigger and I got smaller and smaller.

Why Oregon you might wonder? Why not Wyoming or Kansas? That’s the problem with America, it’s so darned big! And for people like my husband and I, who are really really bad at planning and making choices, the options are overwhelming. But we chose Oregon to kill two birds with one stone: visit family in San Francisco and going on a road trip in an unexplored corner of this vast backyard.

Guerneville
We left chilly San Francisco early in the morning, in our rented Nissan Altima. The suspension was so low that it felt like we were scraping the asphalt with your behind, so I placed a comforter on the passenger seat. I didn’t feel comfortable looking like a midget peering over the dashboard.

It took us an hour to get out of the city, until we reached the mist-enveloped Golden Gate Bridge. Then, onto the 101 up to Santa Rosa in Napa Valley, where we crossed over to Jenner on the coast. Old memories came flooding back as we stopped for lunch in Guerneville. It is in this forested, redwood area that our family came together from all over the world, to spread my mother’s ashes a few years back. We even ate at the same restaurant, where an unsmiling waitress served us the same slices of stale French bread.

We followed the winding Russian River to the coast, where it turns into a large estuary. There were hundreds of silver coated Pacific Harbor seals sunbathing on the sand banks, their loud barking intermingled with the higher pitched plaintive cries of the seal pups.

Now, the Pacific coast presented itself in all its glory. This is what we flew thousands of miles to see and it was everything that we hoped for. The North Coast is not what the Beach Boys are singing about. No palm trees here. No wide beaches with white sand. Huge rocks covered with white bird poop jut out of the blue, glistening water. It is a jagged, rough looking shoreline with high cliffs. The waves slam against the black rocks and you don’t see any surfers . It is visually stunning.

Route 1, also known as the Pacific Coast Highway, hugs the shoreline closely in most places. You can overdose on its beauty for days and days. Its entire length is 700 miles, the distance between Kopenhagen and Paris.

How did California manage to keep its coast line so beautiful? In the early 70’s there was talk of expanding the Pacific Coast Route 1 to a four-lane highway, damming all the waterways and establishing nuclear power plants all along the coast. Californians went to the ballot and in 1972 the California Coastal Act was enacted. This protected the coastline from development in perpetuity. For the past 45 years that part of the coast has not changed and probably will not change much in the future. The thousands of acres of golden covered hills along route 1 are privately owned ranches. Have these two factors, the people’s will and capitalism, created a happy marriage that saved the California coast? I don’t know. But the state did something right, that’s for sure.

Mendocino
We took the long, winding road up to Mendocino, beautiful ranch land on the right, the blue ocean on the left, the beaches steep down below. We passed small settlements like Timber Cove and Fort Ross, but mostly it was an orgy of visual delight.

It took us a few wrong turns to find our hotel in Mendocino. The main building, that looked like it had been teleported from a small town in New England, was full of old stuff and old people. The hotel had actually been a brothel in the late 19th century for a while.

We were assigned a room in one of the cottages that surrounds the main building, equally filled with antique furniture, laced curtains and brass beds. But what was more amazing were the black and white photographs of severe looking men and women, some wearing top hats and bonnets. Right above our bed hung the image of a woman who looked especially unhappy and stern. We concluded that she must have been the Madam of the House.

Mendocino is a charming, quiet little affair, almost deserted. Until you realize that only a century ago, it was full of brothels, bars and rough and tumble loggers who had to be ready to risk their lives climbing the giant redwoods to get at a height small enough in diameter to be cut. Since logging began in the 1850s, 95% of old-growth coast redwoods have been cut down. Incredibly, all along our trip through West Oregon, we saw huge trucks carrying redwood logs to the still active mills.

We followed Route 1, through Fort Bragg, Mendocino’s ugly stepsister. Unlike the pristine franchise-free stretch from San Francisco to Mendocino, driving through Fort Bragg felt like taking a cold shower. The idyllic scenery makes the town look all the more tacky. It is as if there is no need to spend money on making a town attractive, when there is so much beauty available for free.

Avenue of the Giants
Above Fort Bragg, the road moves inland and we took refuge among the trees flying by, as we gobbled up miles. We were headed for the Avenue of the Giants, an original stretch of Route 101 which is now a scenic byway renamed the Humboldt State Park. I had seen redwoods before, but these guys are really enormous. It is humbling to stand at the foot of a tree that was already sprouting in the days of the Roman Empire. There is even a privately owned drive-through tree for which you must pay a fee, true American style.

Oregon is one huge forest, if you ask me. Driving through millions of trees, one wonders if there is anything else in the world. It is an exhilarating experience trying to keep up with the twists and turns of the mountain roads, but when you get stuck behind an enormous RV on the steep uphill stretches, you count the miles before a passing lane appears, then floor the gas and hope that you make it past the behemoth before the lane merges again.

Lava Fields
On our way to Bend from Eugene, we went through the McKenzie Pass. Vast stands of dead, trees lined the steep winding road, small baby ones half burnt, large dead ones with bleached bark as white as ghosts, some with scorched trunks and a tuft of green at the top.

Then, suddenly we were driving through black petrified lava fields, with the snow capped ‘Three Sisters’ in the distance. It felt like we had entered a post-apocalyptic movie. Between the last Ice Age and about 7,000 years ago, a bunch of volcanoes erupted violently and spewed all this stuff over an area the size of Rhode Island! It is good to remember that central Oregon is all about volcanoes, some of them still active. There is an observation point, built of black lava rocks, like a medieval castle, where we had a 360 degree view of lava fields going to the horizon in every direction.

Smith Rock State Park
Our next visual was Smith Rock State Park. It looks like something out of Lawrence of Arabia, desert like, with huge cliffs made of yellow rock pointing to the sky. It is packed with hikers and rock climbers, who come from all over the world to take on the challenge of these totally vertical faces. It is so odd to see old folks, with their walking sticks and oversized sun hats puff along the horizontal ‘River trail’, then look up and watch experienced climbers hang like flies on the faces of the blindingly white cliffs. I have done some rock climbing in my days, but some of these climbs are not for the novice.


We couldn’t find a place to stay near Crater Lake, so we settled for the Rocky Point RV Resort, thinking that we would sleep in a cabin. The word ‘resort’ has the allure of some measure of comfort, so we were hopeful.

A long forested road led us to a dusty, depressing RV park. We had booked a ‘fully furnished’ RV, not a cabin, the lady said. We were escorted to the back of the ‘resort’, where we had to squeeze our way between our fully furnished accommodations and a wall of dirt to get in. An old, dilapidated RV camper with stained seats, a formica table and a box spring covered with a foam pad as old as I am, would be our home for that night. We went for dinner in the resort restaurant which, admittedly had a beautiful view of the river, with loons, row boats and a few canoes. The food was so bad, I had to send it back.

At dawn, we fled the ‘resort’ like rabbits. The ride to Crater Lake went through the Upper Klamath Basin, pasture land dotted with jet black cattle, with a mountain range in the hazy distance. It looked like BLM land, but is actually owned by a local rancher family, honored in the local press for its long history of raising cattle. I later found out, they specialize in Wagyu, a Japanese beef cattle breed, that is black all over. I wish they had honored the thousands of animals that sacrificed their lives to make this ranch such a success story.

We passed through the historic Fort Klamath, a military outpost on the Oregon Trail. It is now a ghost town. Everything is boarded up, including the only motel in town. The only thing that seems to still have some sign of life is the museum.

Crater Lake
We entered the Crater Lake park early and had breakfast near the fireplace inside the large building at the entrance. The Lake is so beautiful it almost hurts your eyes. It is a deep blue and as smooth as ice and we were told that it is one of the cleanest lakes in the country because it is so cold and so deep. The crater was formed around 7,000 years ago when the volcano Mount Mazama collapsed.

Mount Shasta
Our final stop was the highest peak of the Cascade Mountain range: Mount Shasta. We could already see it towering on the horizon, when we reached Klamath Falls. We found a charming B&B in McCloud, a small town near the mountain, clean, very old fashioned. It felt like we were back in Vermont. To celebrate the end of our short adventure we had a very expensive dinner. The food was average but the waiter, a friendly, tall and skinny Oregonian with a chiseled face, knew everything about the local beers, which made my husband very happy.

In the morning, we drove up the mountain. Dense, enormous pine trees lined the road, like soldiers closing rank to protect their sacred master. We were hoping to reach the tree line, but the road was closed beyond the Bunny Flat Trailhead, where we hiked an old horse trail and took a million pictures of the snow covered giant.

As I write this essay in the comfort of my middle class existence, in the quiet suburbs of Boston, I am doing the trip all over again. The problem is, I realize how many things we missed. You see, most sane couples plan before they go on a trip. We do it afterwards, in the form of ‘what if we had gone there’?

So now we have to go back and do all the things we haven’t done. As to the question of whether my thirst for wanderlust has been satiated? I knew this already of course: traveling makes you want to travel more. It's like sugar, the more you eat it, the more you crave it. leave comment here