So much for the scenic route!

We had the best intentions of taking the 101 around the Olympic peninsula, stopping in Forks to make fun of the vampires, in Poulsbo to see Nick and Heidi, and just taking our time on our journey from Seattle to Portland. Yeah, that didn’t happen. Instead, Mike slept until 10 while I loudly folded laundry trying to wake him up. Then we went to breakfast (which was more like lunch by that time) with Benita at Skillet Diner. The restaurant is just close enough to Benita’s house that we decided to walk, which takes longer but is so much more fun (not to mention that it allows you to order the bacon jam on your grilled cheese with slightly less guilt than if you had driven to the restaurant.) Of course, walking there means you have to walk home, and then we had to say goodbye to B and thank her for putting up with us for a few days… Anyway, long story short, at noon we were still wandering around Capitol Hill in search of several pints of Salted Caramel Ice Cream from Molly Moon’s and a hunk of dry ice to keep them frozen until we can get it home to AZ or we eat it – whichever comes first. We also got some salt licorice ice cream for Mike, which he swears is delicious but I have my doubts about…I’ll let you know how it goes.

Side note: have you ever had salted caramel ice cream? I think it may be my very favorite thing ever. Molly Moon’s is by far the best I’ve had but it’s sort of like pizza – even when it’s bad, it’s still pretty good. So if you ever see it at an ice cream shop, you should most definitely try it!

Anyway, once we escaped Seattle, we headed for Tacoma to meet up with my friend Tom from my days at the Starbucks at Westlake Center. Tom is the type of government employee who has to get clearance to go to certain areas of the world, and Puerto Peñasco is on the ‘don’t even think about it’ list, which is unfortunate, because he probably would have been very entertaining at our wedding. Instead, we got to have coffee with him in Tacoma, which is not at all the same. Anyway, it was good to catch up with him, and he gave us a couple of awesome prints of his photos (he’s a very talented amateur photographer) for a wedding present, so when we find our AZ home we’ll have something to put on the walls! Thanks Tom!

Having told Mike’s Aunt Donna and Uncle Glenn that we would be in Portland in time for dinner, we booked it out of town. We did make a stop at the state Capitol to take some pictures of the building – somehow we have managed to go through the capitol of almost every state we’ve driven through on this trip, so now it’s sort of a thing for us.

Eventually we made it to Portland, and we went to dinner with Glenn, Donna and their son Geoff at the Hub, which is this organic brewery that serves gluten free pizza. You can guess that Mike was pretty happy about that. Pizza is the thing he misses the most, with pepperoni rolls from podunk towns in West Virginia being a close second. (No, he still hasn’t forgiven me for eating that. He’s threatening to withhold all things gluten from me for a month after this trip is over as punishment for eating so many delicious things in front of him.)

Anyway, dinner was delicious and the company was wonderful. After dinner, Glenn drove us to the top of the hill to take the Portland Aerial Tram. It was pretty cool, although Geoff wasn’t a huge fan as he’s slightly afraid of heights, and apparently a metal and glass ball suspended from some rope doesn’t feel incredibly safe to him. Go figure. Anyway, our timing was good as the sun was just beginning to set, and Portland is a beautiful city. I thought it was pretty cool.

We’re in the home stretch of this honeymoon adventure of ours! Only five more days! Tonight we’re camping in Northern California, then Wednesday it’s San Francisco, Thursday in Fresno, Friday in Santa Monica, and Saturday it’s back to Arizona to rescue my parents from our rotten monkey of a dog. After that we have to find an apartment and get jobs and probably get our car fixed and be adults again, so I suppose we should try to enjoy these last few days!