By Connor

Even though Jess and I had already started camping and visiting friends on the road, it still hadn’t felt like we had formally started our big road trip yet. 

Although we had moved entirely out of our house, we were still in Washington, and something about that made it feel as if we were still in a sort of “prologue”, I guess, to the real thing. 

That soon changed though!

After our time camping at Deception Pass came to an end, we drove the 2 hours back to West Seattle and made one last stop at our storage unit to drop off the final items we had decided to cut from our travel cargo (albeit reluctantly). If I remember correctly, this included our small projector and portable screen kit, the vintage coffee percolator and moka pot, and some more books. 

After driving around with all that stuff, it became clear to us very quickly just how valuable space was in the car, in the Thule on the roof, and in the rear cargo basket I had installed a month prior. Driving for hours in a cramped car sucks – plus we were starting to feel bad for Aviva, who had been squished into her little corner in the backseat by piles of bags and other supplies.

But once our last few things were dropped off at the unit, along with a travel laundry hamper I left by accident… we immediately set out for our next stop: Portland, Oregon.

Our actual destination in Oregon was Tillamook – a quiet little town full of cows and scenic views of pine-covered hills, as well as the renowned Tillamook dairy factory (a must-see if you ever pass through there, no joke).

Jessica has family out there, and each year they gather in Tillamook for a reunion – going on 30+ years now! But we weren’t sure if we had a 5+ hour drive in us, so instead of driving straight to Tillamook we opted to book a night in a motel in Portland and pick up our journey the next day.

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We’ve made the drive to Tillamook many times before – ever since I first moved out to Seattle back in 2014. It was stunning to me then, and it was stunning to us now, 12 years later. It’s a long drive but far from boring, especially for us who only ever get out to this part of the PNW every once in a while. 

Initially it’s nothing special: large concrete highways and clusters of shopping malls. But in not too long the drab gray interstate gives way to long, winding roads that curve between huge, endless rows of dark green pine trees, lush marshes and wetlands, and hills that erupt so suddenly out of the landscape that long ago I, as a naive mid-westerner, initially mistook them for mountains.

Jess and I filled the time easily with small talk and jokes as we usually do, but we also took note of all the striking biomes we drove past.

After all, one of the main objectives of this trip was for Jess and I to work together on a project that would combine our respective skills and hopefully rekindle our creative passion: a 2D point-and-click adventure game set in the Pacific Northwest.

What had started just weeks before as a loose collection of ideas and plot points had since become more of an organized concept, with a protagonist, main conflict, and setting. 

So, as we drove past all of these dark forests, abandoned farmhouses, and roadside diners, we kept spitballing ideas for all the different places our game protagonist could explore on her journey to solve a mystery we had yet to come up with.

I could envision her tromping through the swampy marshes we crossed over, hunting for a bog witch the locals claimed lived out there, or hiking along a dirt trail recording the sounds of bird calls, trying to find that one elusive bird she needs to complete her birdwatching journal.

We were so lost in our imagining that before we knew it we were crossing the bridge over the Columbia River, and my phone dinged on the dashboard as a small notification popped up saying “WELCOME TO OREGON.”

It was dark by the time we arrived, but we soon found our motel, checked in, and settled into the small, intricately patterned bedsheets for the night.

We had officially left Washington, and as we turned out the lights and rested our heads on the cheap pillows, remarked to ourselves that it finally felt as if the road trip we’d been planning for weeks had now truly begun.