Oregan Coast

So I made it to Seattle, and picked up my convertible.  It is a Mitsubishi Eclipse Spider, which isn't exactly what I was hoping for but hopefully will do the job.  I decided to stay the night in Seattle and begin my odyssey to LA tomorrow morning.  I pretty much had the afternoon, so I headed to the Space Needle (which was a block from where I am staying) and checked out the EMP museum, which houses music and pop culture exhibits.  They had a major exhibit on Nirvarna which was very good.  They also had a small Battlestar Galactica exhibit which was also neat.
I then caught the monorail into downtown and walked around.  I found the second Starbucks (but now the oldest), and was going to get a coffee, but the line was out the door, so I walked 200m down the road to another.  I also took in the Underground tour which gave a history of Seattle, which was a walking tour through the old ground level shops is now the basement after they raised the street level.  It was very well presented.  I had intended on going out, but I wad tired, and was going to hit the road early, so I called it a night.

Today I got up at six and made an early getaway.  I left Seattle and made my way south to Olympia, then east to Aberdeen on the coast and also where I would join the US101 highway.  Aberdeen is the home of Nirvarna.  I managed breakfast in a really dingy diner, not exactly what I have been looking for, so the hunt for the true American diner continued.  It is an incredibly depressing logging town, pretty much just saw mills and slums.  This was a pretty common theme until I was well into Oregan.  Astoria on the Oregan side of the Columbia river was kinda neat.  It had weird tower on the top of a hill which gave some pretty cool views of the town, bridges and rivers.

The drive through northern Oregan was pretty varied.  The 101 took me through heaps of towns that seemed to have different purposes.  Be it Agriculture, tourism, logging, port town, etc.  From that perspective it was interesting, if not very scenic. Eventually the road turned magnificent.  Just before the surf town of Florence.  Rolling hills, right along the rugged coast.  I had a good three or four hours before dusk, and given I didn't want to miss any of the coast line, I didn't tarry too long finding accommodation, which I found in Bandon.  Before Bandon however I stopped a couple of times, once in Lincoln, which was the most touristy town I had found, and then at a state park in the middle of the Oregan dunes, which is 100's of square kilometers of sand dunes which was very neat.  It would have ben good to have had more time here to do some walking, but it was not to be.