On our way back up the coast from Hayward to Portland, Hanna and I celebrated our first wedding anniversary (a few calendar days early) at the Sylvia Beach Hotel — one of my favorite retreat spots on the West Coast.

It probably tells you all you need to know about my relative level of irredeemable nerdiness that it was in the Alice Walker room at the Sylvia Beach Hotel the summer after my 21st birthday, on a solo road trip vacation, that I enjoyed my first “hard” liquor (a Smirnoff Ice — I know, right? So daring!).

If memory serves, it put me to sleep.

This was the morning view from our bedroom window this time around.

We had less than twenty-four hours in Nye Beach, but we definitely want to go back. Particularly given the friendly company of hotel cat Shelley.

Sylvia Beach hotel is a book-themed locale with each bedroom named and decorated after a particular author. We were in the Emily Dickinson room. On the third floor is a cozy library space with a kitchenette for coffee and tea and lots of chairs with glorious ocean views.

In the morning after our night over, we soon hit the road for Portland — but not before stopping at Carl’s Coffee for, well, coffee and Books on Beach for a great selection of higglety-pigglety books. Including a number of H.P. Lovecraft collections that Hanna was particularly delighted to find.

The store was a converted tea shop, and this was their “waiting to be shelved” system.

Through most of adolescence, it was a pretty specific dream of mine to end up living on the Oregon Coast running an independent/used bookstore like this in one of the tiny towns along Route 101. I’d sell books to the tourists in the summer and the locals in the winter, filling the long periods between wintertime customers (or the days when the storms blowing in off the ocean made going outside a formidable option) hunkered over my notebooks writing novels and drinking tea in front of a crackling fire.

As you can tell, even then I had no head for business.

We were sorry to leave, and we’re both looking forward to going back!

Hanna and I just returned from Connecticut last night, where we enjoyed a brief overnight stay in Storrs so Hanna could deliver a conference paper on late 18th & early 19th century English travel narratives of Ireland, and then yesterday had lunch with friends. If only travel were less expensive, we’d do it more often!

Meanwhile, here are some photos from the wedding leg of our west coast trip.

We were in Hayward, California, to participate in the wedding of Chloe’s parents: now Diana and Collin Thormoto.

The night before the wedding, we held the rehearsal on the back patio of Collin’s parents’ home.

We had to calm down nervous Pastor Dan, who was thrown off-guard by the super-organized bride and groom.

Hanna, one of the three wedding attendants, got to practice her paces on the arm of Collin’s brother David.

The wedding was on a Monday in Tilden Park at the Brazilian Room. Despite being September, the afternoon was brutally hot and we had to keep everyone as cool as possible before the ceremony!

The wedding had a bunch of awesome nerdy touches, from the TARDIS cake topper and Sting cake knife to the Star Wars processional music and Lord of the Rings-themed reception tables. You can see lots of beautiful photographs by the professional photographer here.

The wedding “cake” was actually a tower of cupcakes catered by James and the Giant Cupcake, brought in and arranged by these to enthusiastic women (one of whom was wearing a cupcake on her head!).

While not officially part of the wedding party, I was asked to help out and invited to sit at the head table (Bag End) with my own most fabulous spouse. The skirt I wore was sewn for the occasion by my colleague Andrea, who moonlights as a costumier.

(If you squint you can see our bridesmaids gifts — gorgeous silver necklaces!)

Less than a week after this extravaganza, Hanna and I got to celebrate our own first anniversary while the newly minted wife and husband were off on their honeymoon on Kauai. We silently wished them many happy returns of the day — and then snuggled up under the comforter and fell back asleep!

Next up, redwoods and ocean views … we take in a bit of the Oregon Coast before catching our flight back to Boston.

Leaving Portland, we drove down past Mt. Hood and through the Warm Springs reservation, home of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, to the city of Bend in central Oregon.

In 1984 my maternal grandparents retired to Bend, where we visited them throughout my childhood. This past May, my grandmother passed away there, and Tumelo Creek in the photograph above is where my grandfather, mother, and aunt, scattered her ashes.

We also visited the public library where my grandma volunteered for many years. She was responsible for selecting and mailing books to far-flung readers who were unable to visit the library in person very often (or at all). In ranching territory, this was not an insignificant group of people! She developed correspondence relationships with many of them, and was particularly proud of her ability to introduce her readers to new authors, occasionally sneaking in something they professed disinterest for. I remember one man, particularly, who refused to read women authors — until my grandmother got him hooked on the mystery writer P.D. James!

We stayed at the hotel we nearly always stayed in when I was a child, but to which I hadn’t been in over a decade: The Bend Riverside Inn & Suites. My mother had given us some money from her inheritance from my grandmother so we splurged on two nights in literally riverside accommodation on the Deschutes.

We ate well, lunching with my grandpa at the Victorian Cafe and discovering a coffee favorite of the trip, thump coffee.

thump had wooden shingles for customers to draw on, which they then hung up in the rafters — great decor! Hanna and I each contributed one to the collection.

We left Bend after a two-night stay and drove south to Ashland. Hanna had never been to Crater Lake, so we took a detour and drove through the park. It was incredibly foggy, but there were still amazing views!

The incoming clouds, portending fog at higher elevations.

Ashland — as long-time readers of this blog may remember — is the town near where the Oregon Extension program is located (about which I wrote my thesis). We actually stayed at the Greensprings Inn, twenty miles up in the mountains.

It was gloriously dark and quiet. We would have stayed longer, but we had a wedding to attend!

The next morning we had breakfast at the Greenleaf and merged back onto the I-5.