Ah Eugene!  

We have heard such wonderful things about Eugene Oregon.  “The vibe is awesome.”  “The Farmer’s Market is AWESOME.”  The climbing is AWE-SOME.” “The ____is FRICKIN’ AWESOME!!”  And yet, we saw none of it…

What we did see was a 4 block area that Matt’s cousin Sally lives in.  She built her house and it is -you guessed it: AWESOME!!   ;-)  We had a blast with her just hunkered down at her house enjoying the company.

And when I say hunkered down at her house… what I mean is that we basically lived in her shower.  Let me paint a picture of her shower for you (since I didn’t take one-‘cuuuuz that’d be weird, right?).  When you step into her bathroom the first thing you notice is that the grey Marmoleum flooring is warm under foot.  The built in heaters insure that you’ll never step on a cold spot (except that one damn spot that only Sally notices).  The main room of the bath area holds an over-sized tub and the privy is set off and has a door for additional privacy.  But, nice as all that is, the shower is where the money’s at!

This is one of those “walk-in” types; you know the ones with no shower doors.  When you step into the space there is a bench on your left with towels that will hang above it.  Make your way to the right and you enter HEAVEN!  Starting from the top down: directly above you there is a rain shower head that dumps down on the top of your head.  You know the type, that makes you feel like you are in a tropical rainforest.  She also has a “traditional” shower head coming out of the side of one of the walls.  Then there are 4 body jets squirting you in the sides (or tummy and back depending on how you turn).  The whole experience is MAGNIFICENT!!  So good in fact that we hardly had a reason to leave her neighborhood.

We are often invited into our friends and families homes to sleep when we are in town and we politely decline.  We love our bed and we want to sleep in it each night.  But we will never pass up an opportunity to use a house shower.  The continuous hot water is more than a dream come true and the space is what dreams are made of.    My motto is usually “our bed, your shower”.  :)  Sally’s shower took this to a whole new level though.

Not to mention that we had a really great place to park right up the street from her house.  She lives in a newer ‘hood and there were plans to make the ‘hood bigger than it currently is.  There streets are laid out and there are street signs, but only lots of land for sale.  There are no homes for a large chunk of this community.  So we cruised up an empty street and parked under a street light by the nicely sized corner lot #26 and “lived” there for a week or so.  The dogs could run freely and it was pretty quite up there.

We did find a couple reasons to head out of Sally’s shower and into Eugene.  Food was one, company was another.  Sally took us to a couple of her fav restaurants and they were solid.  We also had a really cool 3 way while we were in Eugene.  (CALM DOWN!)  We met up with 2 other RV’ing couples.  We have known Ayo & Yair from Our Take on Freedom for some time now and have had some fun adventures with them, but Oregon provided us opportunity to meet up with Nina and Paul from Wheeling It.  Matt took a hike with Nina and Ayo and a couple days later we were all able to get together for dinner.  I love when paths cross in our travels and you are able to grab someone else and share some moments.

Eugene was not the only part of Oregon that we took pleasure in seeing.  In fact, after leaving Samimmish and Mama D, we drove around the Olympic Peninsula and then made our way down the entire coast of WA and OR.  Here are some photo highlights:

The sunsets were out of this world!

X’s and O’s

Breezy.