Brookings - McMinnville

Alright. so we're in Brookings, OR. without a tire. pulled it off in the freezing rain. cause that's how we roll.
so we go to the Les Schwab, which is a pretty cool company from what I can tell. only in 5 states, all on the west coast/north western area. free coffee and popcorn, which is always handy. a lot of free services if you've bought a tire from them. they'll check a ton of stuff on your car for free. and the same prices whether you're in a small town or the middle of a big city. not bad.
anyway, we replace the tire. or rather, buy a new one. more money out of the budget. oh well. the plan for the day is the drive to Lincoln City, a good 6 hours drive or so. we've wasted a good bit of the day with the tire stuff, but I still want to make it. so we drive, pretty boring really, up the coast. there's various creaks and pops that have been coming from the car for some time, so I plan to get it checked out in Portland. assuming it makes it that far.
we get about 4 hours into it and it's already dark, I'm very tired, but I still want to make it. about 30 minutes before we get to Lincoln City, we hit Newport. I had to stop for gas, and Mary-Beth suggested we check some hotel priced around there, just to see if we shouldn't stay there instead of Lincoln City. normally I'd just keep driving, but I'd started seeing No Vacancy signs for the first time our entire trip. so we stopped at a few places, asked prices. I was gonna keep driving unless I happen to find a place for $35-$50, which is what I was going to pay in Lincoln City, assuming we got a room. so, we came across the Newport Inn, or something like that. the price was good, like $40 or something, tho the clerk was kinda creepy. so I decided to just go with it, I was tired. this was a mistake, tho it didn't turn out horrible. the room ended up being pretty ratty, the furniture was on wheels, the door had some iffy locks. only place we stayed the night the entire trip that I didn't feel good about. but I went with it anyway, tho I did block the door. ;)
anyway, ended up ok, got up in the morning and left, went to Lincoln City, got the guys at Les Schwab there to look at my tire, and make sure it was ok. (after all, the last one didn't really have a reason to explode, so I don't know if there's any rubbing going on.) they said it was fine, but they had to drive it into the garage to check it, and heard all my popping and grinding noises. they said it was my tire end on the front right tire, and the bearings on the front left. the tire end wasn't the end of the world, needed to be fixed, but I could drive on it if I had to. the other had to be fixed right away tho. bad trouble if it went out. so. they didn't have the parts, but I got them to look up the closest store that did, and on my way to Portland. the drive to Portland was only like 2 hours, but about halfway there was McMinnville, which had the parts I needed. so I had to go there to get it fixed. great.
while we were in Lincoln City, we visited several places I had read about and wanted to go. both involved glass. the first was a glass blowing shop, where they blew these globes of glass, and made them different colors and sized, etc etc. it was pretty cool, at least for me. we watched that for quite a while. then on the way out of town we went to Confusion, a glass fusion shop. that's different the glass blowing, glass fusion is just fusing glass. molding sheets of glass into shapes, and joining things together, etc. the lady there gave us a tour of the store, and showed us what she did. we got 2 free glass icicles for a Christmas tree, and got to learn how fuse glass. she didn't actually fuse any while we were there, but explained it all, and showed us everything there. it was pretty cool.
from there we went to McMinnville, where I had reserved a room in Hotel Oregon. it was a chance thing, looked pretty cool on the website, and had cheap rooms. so I chose that over a chain. turned out to be one of the best decisions of the trip. more on that next post.