Autumn In The NorthWest Trip - Day Three

Day three, the day in which we had a home base and in theory had planned for a pretty simple day, yet I still managed to spend most of driving...

Started out the day getting harassed by the breakfast lady, bright and early. She made my waffles and dispensed abuse. In a good, friendly way, but still. It was pretty early in the morning, thanks to Lindsay. The breakfast at the Motel was pretty generic. All of the usual suspects for a continental breakfast at a chain. Bagels, Muffins, Hard Boiled Eggs, Bad Coffee, Keyser Soze.

After that, we headed North to check out a few of the towns that way. There's a little town called Vader that we thought looked intriguing and even further up is another Walgreens, in the small town of Chehalis, so we thought it'd be a good idea to see how far that would be to commute and whether the town was too close to the craziness of Seattle.

We fell instantly in love with Vader. It's a little village off to the side of the road, really more of a couple roads than any real cohesive unit. And the roads are fabulous. Lined with thick, gold and red trees, thick ferns, quaint buildings - many rotting away to moss and spongy wood. It had a lot of the details that we liked about Rainier so much. Isolated and quiet, pretty reasonably priced, yet within driving distance of both Longview and Chehalis.

Beyond Vader, down the same tree-lined path was a surprise. Ryderwood. What appears to be a really quiet place at the end of a long, winding road turned out to be a really quiet place at the end of the road filled exclusively with old people! Ryderwood is a 55+ retirement community, nestled away in the forest. While I kind of question socking away our elderly down a twisting road a good distance for them to travel for food and for medical assistance to reach them, the place was really charming. Mostly single level places, not many larger than a one bedroom, and all along the streets, healthy, happy looking retirees were out walking their little doggies and chatting.

Chehalis was tiny, much smaller than I'd expected of a place with a Walgreens, but had a lot of appeal. Nice, older houses and a cute downtown. Wasn't much to see, really but we did decide that we could live there happily. We stopped at a fruit stand selling some ridiculously colorful fall produce and asked the girl there where we could find some good pizza for lunch. In between adjusting something in the crotch reigion of her pants and selling us some huge apples, she sent us up the road a bit to Centralia.

The slightly butch fruitstand girl gave good directions and it didn't take us long to reach the place, a pizza joint in what appeared to have been a bar or something earlier, maybe a mexican restaurant. They served pretty passable 'za, though they used too much corn meal or whatever that grainy stuff is they put on the bottom of pizza to keep it from sticking. They also served gelato, made onsite, which was pretty great.



Sadly, I'm gonna have to split this post, I'd planned to make it all in one go, but our washer broke and we had to spend half of the morning running around to get some laundry done. Also, lazy!