The summer of 2001 a friend invited me to housesit his basement apartment in Portland. So I took a greyhound out there and stayed. His place was the basement of a Victorian near the Belmont district. After a few weeks we drove up to Olympic NP and camped there for 2 or 3 weeks. After that we were short of cash so we found the Sol Duc hot springs resort just inside the park and asked about jobs. They had some and hired us on the spot. They have employee housing there including meals. Our pad was an old sauna converted into a bedroom. I was a dishwasher and he was a pool maintenance tech for the hot springs pools. Sol Duc is very cool; Olympic NP is very cool. I totally recommend it to anyone who's going west of Seattle. I met a Russian girl there and we ended up driving down the coast. We finished working at Sol Duc in October of 01 and Michelle had a 1977 Subaru wagon, so we took off heading south. We stayed one night at my friend's apartment in Portland and then continued south into Humboldt. We camped one night at Hippie Beach there and then got into Sausalito that evening. We parked above Fort Barry, in a hilltop stand of eucalyptus between Sausalito and the GG Bridge to try to sleep in the car, but were only there a few minutes before Coast Guard cops from the CG station down below came up and chased us away. This was only about 5 weeks after the 9/11 thing, so these Coast Guardsmen were still up in arms about local security. We ended up driving down into Sausalito and parking there to sleep. We spent the next day checking out Sausalito and then continued down Highway 1. Passed through Salinas, Morro Bay, and then headed east from Paso Robles to Kingman, AZ. Drove all night and spent the next day driving up towards Durango through Monument Valley. Stopped in Durango. Michelle took her car to Telluride and moved there to work. Irina and I went to Canyonlands National Park and camped there for a couple days, then hitchhiked to Durango and caught a greyhound to DC. She caught a bus to NYC and flew back to Russia. I rode the metro around for a few hours then slept at the Washington monument. In the morning a park ranger woke me up and chased me off. So I went to the Pentagon and the staff there gave me a tour after I showed them my military ID. It had not been repaired yet. There were plywood sheets nailed up over a lot of the hallways. Ground Zero, the central break area, was cool and wild. The Guard Bureau got me a flight back to Colorado from Andrews AFB. They took me to Andrews to wait for my flight the next morning and showed me where the campground was, really close to the flightline! An airman gave me $20 to eat with. Everybody was really nice. I flew into Colorado Spring on Halloween and explored Tejon street, which is the downtown bar district, for a couple hours with all the people in costumes. Then I slept under the slide at the kiddie playground at Acacia Park. The next night I slept at the Red Cross shelter, and then the next day took a Greyhound back to Durango.
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