Seattle to Oregon

The next morning, we decided to skip breakfast so we could explore the Pike Place Market some more. Browsing all of the fresh produce and seafood started to make us hungry, so we got a table at the Pike Place Pub & Brewery, situated right on the harbor. During lunch, Jojo succeeded in persuading me to "Ride the Duck," a land and sea tour of Seattle that we had seen everywhere since we arrived in the city. After we finished sampling their homemade beer menu, we made a reservation on the Duck. We had three hours to kill before the tour, so we decided to go to the Seattle Museum of art. The focus was mainly modern art, which was disappointing.

There were multiple Andy Warhol works on display, which Jojo seemed to enjoy, but I had trouble finding the art in a multicolored Marilyn Monroe. As we left, Jojo started jumping out of her skin: It was time to "Ride the Duck."

Our captain, Davey Quacket, guided us through Seattle in a land/sea craft that looked like a machine leftover from W.W. II. He explained the origins of the city, and how it was destroyed by fire. When It was rebuilt, the city engineers decided to raise the streets ten feet, to avoid flooding in the market area. After reconstruction of the city was finished, the elevated streets were built with skylights, providing sunlight to the subterranean city that the new city was built over top of. The subterranean section of the city still functions today as a marketplace. After touring the city, Quacket took us to Lake Union, an international waterway within the city, where seaplanes landed and took off every few minutes.

We were curious to see our craft make the conversion from a land vehicle, to a boat, and were pretty impressed when Captain Quackett casually drove the craft down a boat ramp into the water, and out to sea. He made a loop around the lake, highlighting the seaplane airport, downtown Seattle, Gasworks Park (where the paintball scene from "10 Thing I Hate About You" was filmed), and Tom Hanks' house in the movie, "Sleepless in Seattle."

After the tour, we went back to hotel and regrouped before dinner. It was our last night in Seattle, and all we wanted to do was roll our sleeves up, put some bibs on, and feast on all of the fresh seafood; from the boat, to our table. We found a place, out over the water, called The Crab Pot. We ordered beers, wine, and an Alaskan Pot.

This little pot of well-seasoned heaven was overflowing with Dungeness, Snow, and King crab legs, local clams, mussels, shrimp, potatoes, and chunks of corn-on-the-cob, all covered in homemade seafood seasonings. Our waitress gave us our bibs, wooden planks and mallets, put brown paper sheets over the table, then dumped the entire pot of food right in front of us. We looked at each other for a moment with wide eyes, and smiled from ear to ear; This was Seattle. It was everything we hoped it would be, and more.

When we rolled back to our hotel room, we were too full to sleep. We ordered "Up in the Air," hoping it would calm some of the excitement leftover from our seafood feast. Our last night in Seattle slowly came to an end, as visions of King crabs and Clooney danced in our heads.

We were heading South down the Pacific Coast, through Oregon, when Jojo reminded me of a stop we had to make before we could go to California.

The Oregon Vortex is a nationally known house of mystery. The whole area was said to have some type of unexplainable force that changed the visual perception, (or body mass, according to some theories) of those who entered it. Even respected scientists and physicists, including Albert Einstein, attempted to calculate theories explaining the vortex. I was skeptical; then we walked inside.

The Mystery house was a one-room, rectangular cabin, built decades ago by miners. Exposed to the elements over the years, its foundation had crumbled at one corner, sending the cabin on a steep tilt. As we listened to our tour guide outside the cabin, my balance felt off. I ignored it. Our guide was trying to explain to the crowd how nobody in the vortex stands upright at any point. Instead, our natural reaction to the whirl of force inside the vortex is to stand, leaning towards magnetic north; making us think we are standing upright. According to the Vortex website (http://www.oregonvortex.com/), "as another person, on a level platform, recedes from you towards magnetic South, they appear taller. When they approach you, coming towards magnetic North, they become shorter. This is contrary to the laws of perception."

We walked inside the cabin. Plum lines hung from the ceiling using the laws of gravity to hang vertically level. However, when the guide placed a vertical block on a level surface, next to the hanging plum line, the line was no longer vertically level, but the block was. Inside the cabin, which was on a deceiving twelve foot tilt, I started to feel sick. When the guide rolled a glass bottle away from her, down an incline, it slowed, then rolled back to her, as if she was rolling the bottle uphill. I started to get dizzy. When she rolled a golf ball down what seemed to be, a steeply declining plank, it slowly made its way to the bottom of the board, then rolled quickly, UPHILL, back towards her.

I had to leave. Jojo stayed, trying to figure out the place with a baffled look upon her face. Through conversations within crowd, I was led to believe that there were at least three men, including myself, who seemed to have some basic knowledge of creating structures at leveled points, and were familiar with the lines and levels she was using. Each man seemed to ask the guide questions with bewildered enthusiasm; completely dumbfounded. Our description of this vortex can do almost nothing to explain the weirdness of that place. The only way a person could truly (understand?) the Oregon Vortex, is to experience it themselves. Especially when it comes to the giant orbs of light that appear in a large number of tourist's pictures. Even though I was standing outside of the cabin (but still in the vortex), on what I thought was a level surface, I still felt as if I was being pulled off balance. Jojo had given up trying to figure the cabin out, and was ready to drive to San Francisco.

On our way, we tried stopping in Portland for a D3, but the first place we went had a line out the door, and the second was closing as we entered.

We settled on a third D3; Otto's, a homemade hotdog stand across the city. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTZE_Nc7kA4) The drive was not a pleasant one, partially because we had to settle for hotdogs, but mainly because we kept getting lost.

When we finally got to eat the hotdogs, we were forced to give them 1 burp. We've boiled better dogs at home. We were going to San Francisco. . . with the scent of hotdogs in our hair.