GOING TO OREGON

We left early on Sunday morning, heading south to Oregon.  We are aiming to get to the center of the eclipse shadow, just south of Salem.  It sounded like lots of people were headed for Eastern Oregon.  We opted for the west side because there are more roads and options.

We left at 3:50am

First stop, Starbucks in Tukwila

Next stop, picking up granddaughter, Hailey (8 yo) in Rochester.

We arrived in Clackamus at about 7:30am - there was no traffic to speak of.  We didn't know what to expect.  There was a lot of talk about massive migrations and traffic backups - that's why we left so early.  Clackamus is the closest place I could find a hotel five months ago.  They were either sold out everywhere or way overpriced.  We still had to pay $175 for this room, twice what it would normally cost.  We couldn't check in until 3pm, so we had some time to kill.

Well, what's there to do in Clackamus?  Not much...

We went for a walk at close by 3 Creeks Natural Area.  

On the way back out, we came upon a movie set.  They were filming a low budget alien spacecraft crash site.  We stayed and watched for a while (we didn't have anything else to do).  It was interesting.  They are a local group of guys that make these films and post them on youtube under the name Skargoz. 

Those are some of the parts of the spaceship crash in the background.

We watched the actors as they played the panicked astronauts running from the aliens.

With not much else to do, we went to the local mall and went to the movies.  Darrell and Hailey saw Despicable Me 3 (Darrell says he got a good nap in), while I went to see Dark Tower (being a big fan of Stephen King's Dark Tower series I was a little disappointed - this movie has little to do with the books, but it's okay as a stand alone story - why do they do things like this?).

After the movies, we went to Fred Meyer to buy a thermometer for tomorrow then we drove around for a bit (there's not much to see in Clackamus) and finally checked into the room at 3pm.  Once settled in we went out for dinner at Red Robin, then back to the room for an early turn-in - gotta get up early tomorrow, too!