My redeye flight to Boston, originally scheduled to depart at 11:51pm, is no delayed to 1:41am. So I have quite a bit of time on my hands right now.

Returning the rental car was easy. I clocked 2,288 miles from Palm Springs down to San Diego and then up to Seattle.

Seattle’s airport is poorly organized and in desperate need of a renovation. But at least there’s free wifi.

As I drove out of the city to the airport, it hit me that my trip is basically over. I have done a lot. I skied Tahoe. I walked San Francisco. I drank my way through Napa and Sonoma. I hiked Joshua Tree. I got dinner in Mexico. I drove the historic 101 through Southern California from San Diego to the Bay Area, cruising through LA, Malibu, and Santa Barbara. I took some detours in Solvang and Grants Pass. I drove the winding roads of Big Sur and paid $6.60 per gallon for gas. I spent two nights in a cabin in the forest, a 0.25 mile hike from the road with no cell service and no internet access. I biked the 17 Mile Drive in Monterey. I survived several solo hikes in Big Sur, Point Reyes, and the Redwoods despite signs warning me of bears and mountain lions. As the weather turned colder and rainier, I reflected during the long solo journey from San Francisco to Portland. I saw many great sunsets. I stayed in a Yurt with no running water for three nights and was subsequently blown away by the hugeness of Seattle. I ate ice cream (almost) every day.

For my west coast adventure, I tried to jam three types of trip into one: solo driving the pacific coast highway, spending time with friends and family, and exploring nature. With any one on its own, three weeks would have been sufficient, rather than the five and a half that I took. Though it sometimes felt choppy to transition between these types of travel, packing all three into one trip allowed me to fill these five plus weeks easily.

As I prepare to head to Boston, I have a sense of excitement. Despite the fun I have had, I am ready to go home. With this sort of travel, I often feel aimless, always going from one thing to the next with little focus. At home I can feel settled. It’s still another two weeks until I return to work, but I am looking forward to that as well. I haven’t been committed to anything here on the west coast for more than a few days. Being settled in a routine at home means I can dedicate myself to longer endeavors, work being one of them.

Through all of this, the best part of the trip has been reconnecting with friends, spending time with family, and meeting new people. In these posts, I haven’t talked too much about how I spent my time with friends and family. These things don’t translate too well into words and they wouldn’t make much sense to an outsider even if they did. So if we crossed paths during my travel, thank you for sharing your time with me. I enjoyed it more than anything else on this trip.

To end this post, I share several things that I have learned during my travels:

• AT&T doesn’t have great coverage on the pacific coast.
• Boston doesn’t have good Mexican food, but Central and Southern California have great Mexican food.
• Los Angeles is big.
• The coastal mountains and forests are beautiful.
• Sharing dessert is a good way to make friends.
• Produce is significantly better in Southern California up through the SF Bay Area. My diet got notably worse north of Marin County.
• Star Wars soundtracks are excellent musical companions while driving the coastal highway.
• Bed and Breakfasts are better than hotels, but sometimes the isolation of a hotel can be good.
• Checking the weather forecast in the Pacific Northwest in April is generally an exercise in futility. On any given day it will likely be cloudy and rain for a bit. Always have a raincoat.
• Driving for more than four hours in a day is exhausting.

It is here. The last day of my trip. Tonight I fly home at midnight.

My day in Seattle has so far been pretty low key. I slept until about 9:30. I filled up the car’s gas tank. I got a cappuccino. I ate a huge spring salad at a vegetarian restaurant. I wandered the Washington Park Arboretum and Volunteer Park. For my last ice cream, I chose Sweet Alchemy Ice Creamery in the University District. I wandered the University Bookstore and bought a book that caught my eye first at Powell’s in Portland. As has happened to me several times since I got to Seattle, there was light rain and I forgot my raincoat and umbrella.

Tonight, I am making dinner with several college friends for a student group before I head to the airport. As catching up with friends has been the best part of my trip, it’s a fitting end to my west coast travels.

Every Easter, one of my friends throws a Hats on Cats Easter party. This tradition was started after she found the book Tiny Hats on Cats at a thrift store. Basically, it’s a crafts event that terrifies her two cats, but they are rewarded for their troubles with ham.

In total about seven people showed up for the event. There was plenty of food: hot cross buns, cookies, salad, asparagus (five bundles!), vegetable quiche, colcannon (mashed potatoes with kale and leeks), deviled eggs, berries, almond cake, and ham. The first movie of Easter Parade was mostly background noise, but people became more engrossed when we put on Kingsman (the second-best Christmas movie). We ended up making six hats, two of which were my creation: a party hat and a pope hat. I will be taking home the pope hat for Aayla.

After the party, we went to Frankie and Jo’s for vegan ice cream, my penultimate ice cream for the trip. I’ve been doing quite well on my effort to eat one ice cream per day, but more on that later.

I’ve noticed that west coast drivers are significantly different from east coast drivers. I can summarize as follows:

West coast drivers are bad drivers. East coast drivers are assholes.

Upon first driving in California I noticed that cars were doing, frankly, dumb things. For instance, one car was at a light and wanted to move to the left turn lane. The car was behind to many cars to get to the lane, so it just drove up onto the sidewalk until it could get in the left turn lane.

The drivers here are also very afraid of pedestrians. They won’t even enter the intersection until all pedestrians have cleared the crosswalk and no others are nearby. Compare this to Boston, where cars edge forward until they see the first possible opening where they then floor it, weaving through the pedestrians.

In Seattle, especially, I’ve found, the drivers are very timid. While they’re not quite at the point of stopping at a green light to double check that the intersection is clear, it’s close.

Upon making it to the Pacific Northwest, drivers begun to use the center turn lanes not just to turn out of the road but also to turn and merge onto the road. I’d not seen this behavior before. Several times, I thought a car taking a left turn onto the road was going to hit me. But no, it stopped in the center turn lane and waited for an opening. Weird. This is probably safer and more expedient, but I’d never seen it before.

Overall, being a masshole means that driving on the west coast is extremely easy, though at times frustrating because everyone is too slow and cautious.

Of other note, California has tons of Tesla and Prius cars. They’re everywhere. But few have bumper stickers. Once passing into the Pacific Northwest, that trend dissipates.

I expect this post was very uninteresting for anyone to read. As my trip comes to a close, I’m trying to shed what little readership I have. Of course.

After a quick sail on Lake Union, I headed north of the University of Washington to meet up with a different college friend, who I will be staying with until my flight home on Monday night. It’s a bit nice to get away from the hustle and bustle of downtown, though I also greatly enjoyed my time in the downtown area.

This afternoon we walked all around the neighborhoods here, including Ravenna Park, Kerry Park, and Green Lake Park, where my friend ran into three of her co-workers. As makes for a good afternoon, I had a cappuccino, croissant, and gelato. After a thai food dinner, we stopped by a grocery store to pick up food for her annual “Hats on Cats” Easter party tomorrow.

I’m pretty tired. It’s bedtime now. I will post cat pictures tomorrow.

As I begin the last week of my trip, I notice that my mind is getting very saturated from seeing new places. Just before departing Portland, I walked around the Mississippi neighborhood, and I noticed that my travel curiosity had dipped. I didn’t really want to keep walking around. I didn’t want to take the scenic route to Seattle—I just wanted to drive the fastest route. After traveling for five weeks, I needed a break from seeing new sights and exploring new places. It had lost its novelty, at least for the time being.

Right after exiting a taxidermy shop Paxton Gate (where the staff were very eager to sell me anything), I returned the car to head to my final destination. I’m in Seattle for five nights, visiting some good college friends that I haven’t seen in a while. Here it is nice to relax with people that I know.

Yesterday, nonetheless, was an action-packed day. I don’t have too many photos, because I am also pretty tired of taking pictures.

We wandered Pike Place Market and the first Starbucks store, as well as the Olympic Sculpture Park.

We visited Discovery Park and walked around for a few hours.

We browsed the Seattle Public Library and saw the Red Hall on the fourth floor.

We did the Underworld Tour, where we visited the basements and underground areas of Pioneer Square. Before the fires in the early 20th century and subsequent rebuilding higher to create a functional sewage system, it was street level. The regular underground tour had sold out for the day, so we took the underworld tour. It goes the to same places, but it describes the seedier aspects of Seattle’s history. It’s a 21+ tour. In short, there was a lot of prostitution, murder, and scamming.

Depending on where you work, this post may not be safe for work. Well, the links, at the very least.

After my first day in Portland, on the ride back to the yurt, we passed by a small purple drive-up coffee shack on the side of the road. Zach pointed to it and told me that they make great coffee and that he and Nicole go there all the time.

The next morning, seeking coffee and being too afraid to use their coffee machine (that has been in a yurt with no running water since at least October), I asked whether I should go to the nearby purple coffee shack. Zach said yes, to not look them up on Google since they aren’t on the map, and that I should tell the barista that the “yurt people say hi”.

So off I go towards the city, to the purple espresso shack. A drive-in only, there were no other cars on the lot, save a Chevy Malibu that I assume belongs to the barista. Pulling up to the window and seeing the menu, I realize that something is not what I am expecting. The name of the enterprise is Sweet Seductions Espresso (formerly known as Mocharama until last week), and they serve special drinks such as the Three Legged Monkey, Eager Beaver, and Sugar Daddy. You can “ask your barista to make it an ALL NIGHTER” for an additional $1.10, which I assumed was another shot of espresso. There was also a sign for “Red Bull infusions”, which I declined to ask about.

A few years ago, when lost my nightly Wikipedia black hole, I came across the bikini barista page. It’s a concept that developed in the Pacific Northwest, not far from Seattle. In the years that passed, I had forgotten that they can be identified by the small, drive-thru only building. Also known as a sexpresso or bareista, it’s basically what you would expect from a drive-thru coffeehouse, except the baristas are attractive young women dressed in bikinis (or less, in some locations on “topless Tuesdays”).

A few seconds after I pulled up, a barista approached the window. Erika was not wearing a bikini quite as risqué as in the facebook photo. But yes, she was wearing a bikini, simple black with the letters “coffee” or “barista” (I don’t exactly remember) written on the bottom piece. And yes, the window cuts off fairly low just around the thighs, for what I assume are obvious business reasons.

“Hello. What can I get for you?”

“I need three coffees, please. A cappuccino, a latte, and a drip coffee.”

Me being someone who always runs cool, I thought it must be terribly cold to work in a shack in Portland while wearing a bikini. I know I’d be cold. I resisted the temptation to ask whether she was cold, for again, what I hope are obvious reasons here. But it’s probably telling about me that at the forefront of my thoughts were “aren’t you cold wearing that in this weather?”.

As she prepared my coffees, I mentioned, “the yurt people say hello.”

“What?”

“The yurt people. They live nearby. They say that they come here all the time and they wanted me to tell you hello.”

She gave me a blank stare. “Oh. I don’t work here very much.”

I returned the blank stare. “Actually, I am pretty sure my friends have never been here but that they wanted me to tell a complete stranger that two other complete strangers say hello. They’re like that.”

She then disappeared behind the counter for a minute to get a cardboard cup holder for the coffees. She handed me my three coffees, I paid, and drove off.

When I got back to the yurt, Zach and Nicole were not trying to hard to hide their smirks. “So how was it?” asked Zach.

“I wasn’t expecting sexpresso for breakfast.”

They both started laughing and asked me about my experience. As I expected, neither of them had ever been to the place, so they had no idea. Some of their questions included:

• Was the barista cute? Yes
• Did you give her your number? No
• Would you give her your number? No
• How busy was the place? No one else was there
• Are you going to go back? Probably not

And so on. Thus started my day.

Of note: the coffee was pretty good.

Happy now, Zach?

A friend told me that very good water in east Portland has caused several distilleries to spring up in that area. I don’t know what good water means, but I’ll take it as an excuse to go whiskey tasting.

We chose to go to Westward Whiskey, where our host Nathaniel gave us a great show. He wore a light button down shirt with giraffes all over it. His scruffy dreads complemented his extremely jubilant affect, as he danced to the music playing in the distillery while describing to us the different spirits.

I opted for the four whiskey tasting, while Zach and Nicole split the spirit tasting and cocktail tasting. I got their classic American single malt whiskey, stout whiskey, rum barrel whiskey, and cask strength (120 proof) whiskey. They were all good.

For dinner we went to Enat Kitchen for Ethiopian food.

After getting back to the yurt, Nicole setup the convection oven that arrived yesterday. She made the first food ever to be cooked in the yurt: chocolate chip cookies. So much yurt progress!

Today I did all sorts of things Portland, one of them being visiting Voodoo Doughnut. They had all sorts of cake, unfilled raised, and filled raised donuts. The line was nearly out the door, so I had some time to make my selection: vicious hibiscus. It’s an unfilled raised donuts with a hibiscus glaze and chocolate sprinkles. The donut was great and not too greasy.

It’s clear that they take great pride in their work as donut slingers. They have two slogans. “The magic is in the hole”, describing how magically delicious the donuts are. The other, “good things come in pink boxes”, describes the colorful pink boxes that hold a dozen donuts. Here, of course, the donuts are the good things. What a fun, happy, family-friendly establishment. Don’t think too hard about it.