Redwood National Park, the Oregon Coast, Seattle

So, in case you didn't read through Eric's entire post the other day, we are engaged! It was very romantic, the ring is beautiful, and we are so excited! Can't wait to get back to Boston so I can start all that fun wedding planning that I have seen my friends go through lately.

We are still having a great time - I am just going to pretend that the drive from Napa to Eureka, CA didn't happen. We were somehow magically transported and the horrible drive through the mountains late at night with fog just was some sort of nightmare.

When we woke up the next morning everything was better. We slept in a little bit in Eureka, and then got started up the coast. It was a pretty short, and very beautiful drive up to Redwood National Park. Eric keeps telling me that the redwoods are much taller while the sequoias are much thicker. Well, they both looked pretty tall and wide to me, but I can see that the redwoods maybe are taller. We got out to take a couple very short hikes and walking through those old-growth forests produced an awe totally different than any other form of awe the sights on this trip have previously inspired. There was fear too... it is hard to imagine that the Grand Canyon could be destroyed (although of course it could), but it is pretty easy to imagine a timber company coming in with a chainsaw and felling a tree or two.


Rebecca feels guilty about destroying nature

The rest of the drive up the Oregon coast was also very scenic, although it is extremely misty up there, so we could see the ocean a lot, but it was always various (quite pretty) shades of gray and purple. Then, almost much as soon as we arrived at our camping destination it cleared up. So we were treated to a gorgeous sunset over clear seas (well, actually, over a Howard Johnson in a parking lot ... the campsite was not exactly as described on the internet). And we saw sea lions! We stalked them for at least 30 minutes trying to get a closer look, but all we could see was the tops of their heads as they swam.


The Oregon coast is like nothing else we'd ever seen

The next day we drove up to Seattle. We had been hoping to stop in Portland and check out the city, but there was some bad traffic and we had a teensy bit of car trouble (turned out to be nothing, don't worry). So we went straight to Seattle where we ate huge mountains of food with Derek, Mike, and their friends Matt and Logan. Then we got a behind-the-scenes tour of WIZARDS OF THE COAST (where most of these guys work), which will make some of you insanely jealous and will make some of you shrug quizzically. I know Eric will be cruising their jobs website in the coming months. It was great to hang out with Derek and Mike, who we haven't seen for months, and was fun to meet some new people too.

We somehow managed to not take a single picture while in Seattle, so you all will have to make do with this horrible/awesome sign that we saw many times on the Oregon coast:



Your best chance of surviving a tsunami is running into a cliff apparently