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Well, I seem to have made it back from Portland in one piece, despite the best efforts of deer and fog last night, and Minnesota and Wisconsin and their snow this morning (never, ever am I moving north of here). I have a giant-long, tl;dr recap entry I'm working on, but it's going to take me forever to finish, so in the meantime, have some pretty pictures, mostly of Cape Kiwanda.
Ah, Oregon. So lovely (though I'm not the biggest fan of the almost omni-present damp). I'm definitely going to have to go back, though when I do I'm going to miss my native guides a lot. They were, after all, the entire point of me visiting in the first place, and without them I probably would've found a way to get myself washed out to sea, or fallen off some topography or accidentally been indentured to a food cart or something.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
zolac_no_miko, look_alive, and shichahn: you guys are awesome and I love you. So here is a picture of everyone looking appropriately epic. ♥s and also HNUUUURGH BORK BORK BORK.
Ah, Oregon. So lovely (though I'm not the biggest fan of the almost omni-present damp). I'm definitely going to have to go back, though when I do I'm going to miss my native guides a lot. They were, after all, the entire point of me visiting in the first place, and without them I probably would've found a way to get myself washed out to sea, or fallen off some topography or accidentally been indentured to a food cart or something.
zolac_no_miko, look_alive, and shichahn: you guys are awesome and I love you. So here is a picture of everyone looking appropriately epic. ♥s and also HNUUUURGH BORK BORK BORK.
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Awwwww, love you too! ♥ ♥ Glad you made it home safely. We miss you already! It was super fun hanging out with you and showing you around. "Omni-present damp", heh, I thought the weather was relatively nice! XD; ...Thursday could've been drier. Ah, well, next time you'll have to check out some of the three quarters of the state that is desert. There are many nice things over there! Extinct volcanic craters and epic obsidian flows and lava tubes and sagebrush and jackrabbits and fossils and painted hills and mustangs and antelope and ghost towns and buttes and pine trees that smell like vanilla.
I love that picture of the three of us, all at different heights. Also the coast north and south of Cape Kiwanda, guh, DRAMA SKY IS DRAMATIC.
...Bork!
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Agh! How are there still parts of Oregon that I really definitely need to come see? (Maybe I should've just ignored my flight out...) Desert! Ghost towns!! You guys had better take pictures when you go on that adventure. In the meantime I will try to find useful interesting parts of Illinois so I don't feel so much like I live in a place completely devoid of... things. (Darnit, Chicago, why are you the only interesting thing within 200 miles of here?)
Wait... why do the pine trees smell like vanilla?
I took so many pictures of that north and south view, and the sky kept changing the nature of its drama. It's probably why my batteries died, come to think of it. (Photographic restraint, someday I will learn it.)
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Dar and I think that perhaps the sea lions are just really huge fans of BJORK.
I love the Northwest, it's just like that. THERE IS SO MUCH OF OREGON, IT IS LARGE AND FULL OF THINGS. There are still vast parts of the state I need to see. We will definitely take pictures when we go on our desert adventure.
Haha, they just do smell like vanilla. They're called Jeffrey Pines... they're closely related and almost identical to the more common and well known Ponderosa Pine. The only major differences are the pine cones are less prickly, and when you stick your face in the tree bark, instead of that turpentine, Pine-Sol, pine smell, they smell like ohmigod mmmmmm vanilla. They are the Best. Tree. EVER. They grow around the West, on the dry side of the Cascades, in the high desert. I've found them in Nevada, too.
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Next time, we can bring a set of speakers and a copy of Homogenic
Do they mix in with the Ponderosas? Because I'm picturing a sort of pine scratch-and-sniff adventure. Also, you just reminded me that I forgot to ask an authority about the pinecone mice.
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I see us on the dock holding up a boombox like in that one movie. Maybe then they won't bite us.
Well, hey, that's easily fixed, I will fix that right now.
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It was so fun having you out here! And yeah, given that you came in spring, I think the weather was as nice as we could have asked for. If only we'd had time to see the high desert, and the caves, and the canyon, and the obsidian flow... and so on. This state is only just average-sized but there are so many things in it. It's no wonder that for most of my childhood we never even left Oregon when we went on vacations.
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I am so very jealous of Oregon right now. I wish I could've stayed longer. Even if you guys did manage to discover a way to kill me, I would not regret it!
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WELL there are actually lots of variations but I think the one I heard first is that there was a fire in the meadow, and all the animals ran/flew to get away from it but the mouse wasn't fast enough to run all the way so he found a big fir tree and ran up it and hid in a cone but it was kind of small so his feet and tail stuck out. And when the fire had passed he couldn't wriggle his way back out of the cone, so he's still stuck there. Poor mouse.
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THANK YOU, yes, I showed her a Douglas fir cone while we were on the 4T trail and I showed her the mousey tails and I remembered that there was a legend but the only part I could remember was the punchline.
Also. ...That was a good story. ♥
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...What the hell is happening in that icon? XD
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I'm not entirely sure, but I enjoy it anyway. For now, I proclaim it to be a pair of scenes in which they discover a corpse jumping out of their refrigerator and upsetting the tea.
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TOPOGRAPHY!
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Re: TOPOGRAPHY!
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Re: TOPOGRAPHY!
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Re: TOPOGRAPHY!
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Re: TOPOGRAPHY!
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