August Update

Hi Everyone; time for our August update.

The week after the Sturgis motorbike rally I had to work in Salt
Lake City so we took off in the car on Friday afternoon for the eight hour drive. After 6 hours we reached a place called Rock Springs, stayed there for the night and then drove on through Salt Lake to a place called Wendover on the western border of Utah where it meets Nevada. To get there we had to drive across the Bonneville salt flats where they set all the world land speed records. As you can imagine the road across the flats is incredibly flat and dead straight.
Wendover itself was a pretty ordinary place; it's claim to fame is that because part of it is in Utah and the other part in Nevada they can have casinos, a la Las Vegas. Well it is the most unlike Vegas town you will ever find and we were glad we only decided for one night.




After working the week in Salt Lake I took the opportunity to fly across to Melbourne for Jess' 21st birthday. It was a very quick trip for only a little bit of time at mum and dad's place but it was well worth it. It was great to catch up with all the family; Ben came down from Brisbane and we all had a great time. I arrived back in Gillette on Tuesday night after Gae had picked me up in Casper; worked Wednesday and Thursday and then jumped on a plane to Portland, Oregon for a four day weekend.

On Friday we picked up our hire car and took off for Mt St Helens in Washinton State. It was great to be driving through all the greenery and the magnificent fir trees.



Mt St Helens was great. We could remember back in 1980 when the volcano exploded but weren't sure what we'd see after 27 years. The drive to the mountain is about 40 miles from the interstate with 3 or 4 visitors centres along the way. As you would expect the mountain looks like it's had it's top blown off and it's easy to see the boundary of the blast area where all the trees were blown down. Many of the logs have just been left to rot away floating in the top of the lakes.
What was once a deep valley with a river in the bottom leading down from the mountain now has between 60 and 200 feet of silt and rock in it that swept down from the mountain.




We took a helicopter ride up the valley to the rim of the crater which was really great. The volcano is still active with a lot of steam rising up so you are not allowed to fly directly over the top. The mountain is actually growing back; there are two domes of earth in the crater that are growing at the rate of a dump truck every 4 seconds and in 100 years they expect the mountain will be as big as it was before the eruption.

After leaving Mt St Helens we drove south west to the Oregon coast to a little seaside town called Seaside. Because it as the labour day weekend here in the US and the weather was fanatastic the whole area was really busy. Seaside was a quaint litle place; we had been expecting something like Caloundra or Mooloolaba but everything was quite old. We still enjoyed it and it was great to walk on the beach and put our feet in the pacific. The water was freezing so there was no chance of going for a swim.
While we were there they were holding a kite buggy competition on the beach. Although there wasn't a lot of wind while we were watching we thought it looked to be a lot of fun.




From Seaside we drove down the coast staying in Lincoln City Saturday night and then back into Portland on Sunday night. The Oregon coast was very pretty, lot's of cliffs and beaches to visit and have a look.




We decided that Portland was another place we could easily live in the US; Gillette is slipping further down the list.

When we arrived back in Gillette on Monday afternoon it was 40C and now (Sunday) it has dropped to 7C. I guess that means that summer has finished and we could get snow within the next 3 or 4 weeks.

Make sure you click on the lighthouse below for some more photos of our trip.

We are having a very quite weekend at home this weekend and then off to the baseball in Denver next weekend so hopefully we'll have some photo's of Americas number one game from there.

Oregon Weekend