The Pacific Northwest most definitely includes Oregon and Washington State. We are choosing to include the far north of California as well, as it felt more similar to Oregon than to San Francisco. The top of Idaho can go in as well, as our friend in Portland who was from Washington State considered the part in the Pacific time zone to be like Washington. We expected to dislike this region as people kept saying it was like England. Some of it was, but some of it was amazing. It smells great for instance. It is actually pine fresh. Nature there is also just epic. We had felt passionately in hate with trees after having to pass through so many forest filled states in the East that it got boring and suffocating, but this forest was amazing. It was bigger, smelled nicer and any bugs were too high up the giant trees bother us, so we could just enjoy their general majesty.
Here’s the video:
Our favorite city in this region was easily Portland, Oregon. It has one of the companies Chris would be most employable to in the world, Puppet Labs, and was trendy and fun while being near the aforementioned epic nature. It was a nice size, though a downside to it was it was a bit expensive, but it looked like you did get a lot for your money compared to some of the other expensive parts of the world. It is also meant to be one of the best cities in the country for biking.
Runner up goes to no one. Portland was really the only place that felt viable. Seattle has all the problems of England from all the rain to the high prices to it being really slow to get around. That said, the coffee was pretty excellent.
Honorable mention goes to the redwood forests of Northern California. We obviously aren’t going to live in a forest in the middle of nowhere, but the word epic springs to mind yet again. As we had no runner up, we will give a second honorable mention to the lovely staff of our motel in Grangeville, Idaho. We couldn’t live there due to lack of jobs in our field, but they were some of the nicest people we met on the whole trip.
