To Medford!

Miles driven: Aprox. 660
Hours in car: 14ish
Books purchased: (only) 2

We hit the road a little late, but by 9 we had a full
tank of gas and were ready to go. Mom and dad were nice enough to let us borrow the GPS for the trip, so combined with our maps, we were confident we'd be there with no problems...

until it told us to get off the freeway onto Coffin Road (that should have been our first signal not to listen) and then tried to make us off road next to, but not on, the freeway. The British voice yelled at us to "continue on unpaved road" until i figured out how to shut her up.

Luckily, it didn't take too long for us to figure out it was set to gas saver mode instead of quickest route, and after a brief detour in Kennewick, we continued on our way.

Our goal was to take a leisurely drive, and that was a success. The drive can definitely be done in around 10 hours, but we stopped at a dam (that was HUGE, and so cool to see). It clearly wasn't anywhere near capacity, but the amount of water rushing through it was insane. Most of it was gated off and locked, but we found an open gate to get closer to the dam. It was made with these huge stone pyramid things that were around 8 feet tall, and a little intimidating to stand next to. We also stopped at the Sam Hill Stonehenge WWI memorial...
I had no idea that a real-size replica of Stonehenge existed in the middle of Washington!
Basically, the man who built it visited Stonehenge when they still thought it had been used for human sacrifices. He thought it was an appropriate war memorial, because despite all of the advances in technology and civilization since Stonehenge was built, we are still making sacrifices on the altar of war (to paraphrase). It was amazing to really see how big everything was...I tried to capture it in my pictures, but the idea that people, without the help of machines, moved stones that epic is a little mind-blowing.We also got to stop at Powell's Books in Portland! Basically, I found my heaven. I could easily spend DAYS in that store, and I wanted everything I picked up. I did manage to narrow it down to just two, and I got to embarrass Ian by making him take a picture of me in front of the sign.We finally pulled in to Medford, and had a fun and eventful night. Jewls won a hat at the bar we went to (which was really cool...three or four buildings all share a patio, and there was live music last night).We have a big weekend planned with Jewls the Tour Guide (she basically handed us an itinerary when we got in), but we're planning on spending the rest of the day exploring Medford after enjoying a lazy morning.