By Bill and Barbara Schaffer
Day 2 ? Discovery Bay, Wash. to Gleneden, Ore.
Few places in the contiguous 48 states are as remote as the rain forests of Washington State?s Olympic Peninsula. Our drive on day 2 of our Road Trip started from Discovery Bay proceeding West on 101 through Port Angeles to Forks, Wash., then south toward Aberdeen, Wash. Fans of the ?Twilight? books will remember Forks. (A few years ago we spent a week taking our granddaughter and her cousin on what we called the ?Twilight Tour? to see everything there was to see that was related to the popular books and movies. That included a couple of days in Forks and the surrounding area.)
On that 164-mile section of 101, we probably didn?t pass more than 100 other vehicles, and that included in the City of Forks. It?s a wonderful drive through the rain forests between Olympic Mountain peaks, which reach nearly 8,000 feet and the Pacific Ocean.
The few cars we did encounter gave us a chance to try the Chevy Cruze Diesel?s passing power which is quite impressive. The Cruze engine in our car is a 2.0-liter turbocharged clean diesel engine rated at 151 horsepower and 264-lb.ft. of ?low-end? torque. It was surprising how quickly we could pass a slower moving vehicle. The buff magazines list the 0 to 60 mph time at 8.6 seconds.
Even traffic between Aberdeen and Astoria, Oregon was light, until we drove onto the four-mile long Astoria-Megler Bridge (http://funbeach.com/local-attractions/astoria-megler-bridge/), which crosses the Columbia River into Astoria. They are busy painting the bridge, so we got to stop on this bridge, too, for a few minutes. The bridge was built in 1966 and a toll was charged for thirty years, before the toll booths were removed. It was interesting to see all the freighters anchored just off the shore from Astoria, we assume waiting to go up the Columbia River to ports in Longview, Kalama and Portland.
We finally stopped for fuel just south of Tillamook. The Cruze trip computer said we had gone 578 miles on 12.3 gallons of diesel fuel, so we?re averaging 47 mpg, so far which we think is wonderful considering we are not easy on the accelerator. The Cruze fuel tank capacity is 15.6 gallons, so we still theoretically could have gone another 150 miles. The trip computer has a function that shows the best recent fuel economy, and for one section of our drive we averaged 54.1 mpg, but that must have been when Barbara was driving.
We?re resting a second night in our Worldmark timeshare in Gleneden Beach, and then starting before dawn on Tuesday for the 540-mile drive to Windsor, California in the Napa Valley.
