Oregon

From Rockaway bay, we continued our drive down the coast and into the university town of Corvallis. It was pretty sleepy at this time of year - all the students go home for vacation, but I had a nice tour around the campus (home to the Beavers, or 'Beavs' as they're known), plus Kevin's self-described ghetto home.

Pictured is the 'Beer Pong room', a place specially designated to play a drinking game that requires you to throw ping pong balls into each others cups. As the photo shows, the room is pretty trashed, with holes and graffiti all over the walls. This is pretty representative of the whole place (12 students sharing a single floor and kitchen of an old fraternity house). But it's close to the uni and well priced.

We also managed a night in Kevin's home town, Eugene, staying with his Dad and Dad's flatmate in their wonderful log house. They were great company and had me in stitches all night, plus they had an outside hot-tub, which was the perfect place to do some mid-winter star gazing.


After a quick lunch with Kevin's Mum the next day, we headed up to the south of Washington state (near Stevenson?) to stay at a holiday cabin belonging to Kevin's aunt. The cabin was right in the middle of the woods, in an area full of amazing gorges and great scenery.




There had been a little snow already, but we received much more during the night, which meant we had to scrape the car before we could get started - a novel experience for me! Another outside hot-tub meant we could watch the falling snow on my final night in North America. The following day we made the final long drive up through Seattle and Vancouver for my flight to Riga via London.