Tag Archives: OR

Greetings from the Best Coast

Greetings from the [Quarantined] Coast! Hoping this finds you safe and well, and staying home to help “flatten the curve” of the virus that is suddenly everywhere at once. Here in Washington we’re sheltering in place—and as fate would have it, today I am celebrating (from home) the release date of my newest book! Greetings from the Best Coast is a companion book of postcards to my popular Best Coast book—a gift for fellow travelers or a whole packet of instant travel souvenirs.

I was hoping to be able to unveil this news in a snazzier fashion (like at one of my many now-cancelled events, thanks to the ‘rona). Still, it feels so great to see this little book in person! The book contains 32 illustrated postcards (2 each of 16 designs) with quintessentially West Coast scenes and hand-lettering. They’re perfect for bringing along on your next road trip to mail souvenirs from the road (or from the comfort of your reading nook), for sending an invitation to join you on your next adventure, or for presenting the whole book as a gift to your favorite travel companion.

Sasquatch Books, as usual, did a beautiful job of creating an appealing package, with a gorgeous hardcover (with illustrated endsheets! My nerdy heart is all aflutter) wrapped around the stack of postcards inside.

Since we are all armchair travelers right now, I am planning to mail these to friends and family around the country—as a fun memento of trips past and in hopes of being able to travel again someday in the future, when we get to the other side of this crisis.

Major thanks to the team at Sasquatch for making these postcards a reality—especially to my amazing editor Hannah Elnan, and the brilliant art director, Anna Goldstein. If you’d like your own copy, you can find it in the shop!

Today’s the day!

Today is the “book birthday” of The Best Coast: A Road Trip Atlas! After nearly three years of work and a solid decade of research, I can’t believe this day is here. I am so excited to share this labor of love with you, and I hope you’ll love it, too. With 99 hand-drawn maps, more than 400 full-color illustrations, and several hundred more illustrated icons, vignettes, and hand-lettered type treatments, it’ll give you plenty to sink your teeth into for your next road trip!

I owe a boatload of thanks to Sasquatch Books for making this book both a reality and a thing of beauty—especially to Anna Goldstein and her design team, and my longtime editor, Hannah Elnan. And thanks also to the indie bookstores and West Coast museums, restaurants, travel boutiques and souvenir shops that have championed this book—thanks to them, I can say not only can you find it “wherever books are sold,” but in all sorts of wonderful places, all up and down the Best Coast!

Happy reading, and happy travels!

UPDATE, March 2020: You can now also find signed copies in my web shop!

Beachcomber’s sketchbook

Just over a year ago, the Tailor and I met a couple of good friends for a long weekend on the Oregon Coast. Our friends live in San Francisco, so Lincoln City was almost exactly the midpoint between us. And besides, we had an ulterior motive: we wanted to search the beaches for hidden treasure.

Well, we didn’t end up finding much on the beach beyond pretty agate pebbles and a few shells, but the time spent catching up with friends, basking in the views, and filling sketchbooks was priceless.

The Best Coast

While I’ve hinted at this several times on social media, and even shown some snippets of my process along the way, mostly I’ve been sitting on my hands lately, trying my best to keep mum while I wait for time to tick by. And now the waiting is almost over, and it’s time for the big reveal of my new book!

At long last, The Best Coast: A Road Trip Atlas is almost here! This book—an entirely illustrated travel guide to the West Coast—has been a labor of love for me, spanning more than two years of work on the book itself and a solid decade of research, road trips and travel sketching. And now we’re just a little over a month away from the publication date on April 9!

I’ll be sharing a lot more here and over at my studio blog (after today, there’ll be different content in each place) in the days and weeks to come: behind-the-scenes process images, stories and sketches behind the locations featured in the book, a social media photo contest (with prizes!), and much more. And if you’re local, we’ll be throwing the official launch party right here in Tacoma:

Best Coast launch party
Wednesday, April 10, 2019
7 pm, free!
King’s Books
218 St. Helens Ave, Tacoma, WA

In the meantime, you can learn more about the book and preorder your copy on my book page! Many thanks to the team at Sasquatch Books for making this book—a dream of mine for years now—a reality! Looking forward to sharing more with you soon.

P.S. Because people always ask me, yes, preordering—as opposed to waiting until the book comes out—makes a huge difference. Books with strong preorder sales get better promotion from both the publisher and retailers, get a better ranking on huge sites like Amazon (and thus better exposure), and reach a wider audience of both customers and press outlets. So every preorder counts, and is like an extra boost of support, both for me and for your favorite retailer.

Portland palms

Now, unlike the Wagon Wheel Motel on Route 66, I haven’t stayed here, so can’t vouch for the place as a whole. But its spiffy new paint job and its place on my other favorite historic highway give it a permanent place in my heart, nonetheless.

Four-wheeled farewell

If you’ve been reading here for awhile, you’ve seen this picture before—and others like it. My car, Wild Blue, has made many appearances here over the years, because she’s as much a character in my stories as any place I’ve visited.

In fact, she’s sometimes the star—though even when she isn’t, she’s never far from my mind.

She’s even made some cameos in my studio work.

She was the first and only car I’ve ever owned (thanks to years of living in dense cities, I didn’t need to buy one until my mid-twenties), and she took me nearly everywhere. I always thought I’d drive her to the moon, but it doesn’t matter that we fell a little short. She was the beating heart of my adventures, each highway another artery feeding our little love story.

Yet all stories have to end. Back in February I was gearing up for another big solo trip—a doozy this time, with 6500 miles of mostly remote mountain and desert roads. Blue already had many costly age-related repairs coming due, and I didn’t think she had another trip like that in her. So we took one last winding local drive together, and then I put her out to pasture.

Goodbye, Blue. Hello, Silver.

This new gal and I have had plenty of time to get acquainted—after all, she got well and truly broken in this spring with that big trip (more on that next time). And she’s the first car the Tailor and I have bought together, as we want to remain a one-car household. We had to make little compromises over what we each wanted, of course, but the biggest one was the compromise I had to make with the auto industry: I had to give up my stick shift. We really wanted this model, and a manual transmission simply isn’t an option anymore for this one.

For all I had to give up, and for all the frills and furbelows that seem to accompany all new cars (though I’ll admit I love having USB ports at last)—this car has plenty of qualities that fit my personality. No GPS, for one thing—you all know how I feel about that (the Tailor and I agreed that if that had come standard, we would have paid to have it removed!). And plenty of nooks and crannies for holding all my paints and things while I sketch.

Yet while Silver is pretty and sleek and reliable and powerful, she’s not my Blue. I’ve already put close to 10,000 miles on her, but I’m still finding it hard to make the transition. Driving an automatic feels so different to me, so less engaged. And I have a lot of trouble finding her in crowded parking lots—I’m usually great at remembering where the heck I parked, but finding a silver Subaru in a sea of other silver Subarus (welcome to the Northwest) is hilariously difficult. Still, I’m sure we’ll grow to know and trust each other over time. It’s just hard to give up your first love.

Thank you, Wild Blue, for taking me here, there and back again—and for always keeping me safe along the way.

Here’s to the next quarter of a million miles, and my shiny new steed. Hi ho, Silver.

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Our best idea

Mt. Rainier National Park, WA

Tomorrow is the 100th birthday of the National Park Service. All of America seems to be celebrating right now, and rightly so. In my opinion, our wildest pockets are our true national treasures, and our national parks, as Wallace Stegner said, our best idea.

Olympic National Park, WA

So since I’ve spent a good chunk of my sketching life in national parks both close to home…

Arches National Park, UT

…and far afield…

Crater Lake National Park, OR

I figured I’d add my voice to the celebratory din, in the form of a little sketchbook retrospective.

Badlands National Park, SD

Beyond the centennial itself, I’m always up for toasting the parks. Not only do I think park rangers are the best people on earth,

Redwood National Park, CA

but I also sometimes think they’re the only thing standing between wildness and destruction.

Carlsbad Caverns National Park, NM

And anyway, I’m not exaggerating when I say I’m a total park nut myself. It’s my goal to visit every NPS property before I die, including national parks, historic sites, national monuments, everything. (Actually, I’ve crossed a goodly chunk of them off the list already—

Guadalupe Mountains National Park, TX

—and I even have the stamps to prove it.)

Olympic National Park, WA

I know I have a long path ahead of me before I reach that goal,

Grand Canyon National Park, AZ

and getting there won’t be easy.

Big Bend National Park, TX

Yet I can’t tell you how grateful I am that the opportunity exists in the first place—

Rocky Mountain National Park, CO

that so many people have fought to preserve these wild places, and won.

Saguaro National Park, AZ

Best of all is the feeling that no matter how long it might take me to get to each park with my sketchbook,

Glacier National Park, MT

I know it’ll be there waiting for me, as close to unchanged as humanly possible. Thanks to the National Park Service, the window of opportunity remains open.

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Jurassic forest

Speaking of incongruous dinosaurs, if you ever find yourself traveling up Highway 101 along the Oregon coast, you might be surprised to see a brachiosaurus head poking up through the trees. Just like the Columbia River Gorge, the Oregon rainforest isn’t a place you’ll ever find actual dinosaur fossils. Still, there’s something about the misty hillsides and impossibly tall trees that make it easy to imagine yourself standing in a primordial place.

Absolutely crabulous

Even though we don’t exactly have a lobster industry here on the West Coast, we have our fair share of tasty crustaceans—and some extra-yummy signage to go with them.

New England transplant

You wouldn’t normally think of the Pacific Northwest as covered bridge country, but we do have a few here. Southern Oregon is home to a real beauty, and the last covered bridge still standing along old Highway 99. Of course, the rainy Northwest weather and towering conifers gave it away, but otherwise, the place made me feel like I was standing in a Vermont mountain glen.