Every Saturday morning we get islanders to share their experiences with a destination with our listeners. We also get the best in travel advice and news and a chance for UK tourist destinations to sell themsleves in two minutes flat!

Roger Hawk from Newells travel on the benefits of booking holidays in advance 

Janice from Scarborough tourism has two minutes to sell not only Scarborough but Whitby as well in this weeks Wish You Were Here

Travel writer Godfrey Hall talks to Chris about his love of islands and his favourite places

Amy Slack has recently returned from a roam around Panama, Costa Rica and Nicuragua. She had an amazing experience with turtles and lived on an organic farm. Click here to hear Amy talk on our travel show at 11am on June 14th.

Click here for part 2 of Amy's chat with Keri

Click here for part 1.

Click here for part 2.

Click here for the third and final part.

Jamie Fletcher talks about The Faeroes and you can hear the Faeroes Tourist Board here too.

Jane Hurd talks about La Graciosa, a small island near Lanzarotte

Jane Hurd talks about La Graciosa, a small island near Lanzarotte Part 3

Amy Slack on Pakistan and K2

Barbara Simpson on The Rockies and Alaska

Richard and Jane Chiverton on South Africa

Terry Ward on Manteo and The Outer Banks, North Carolina, USA

Oregon and Northern California: Driving down the coast from Seattle towards Oregon there is some spectacular scenery – woods, creeks, rocky ravines and rivers and miles of wilderness.  You can drive for an hour or more between towns. You could be on the most northerly tip of Scotland. There are, however, warnings in tourist guides about bears. In fact, you do realise how lucky we are in Scilly when you list the natural predators and phenomena that can finish you off in this part of the world. If the bears don’t get you, sharks could. There was a report about a guy being fatally attacked off Southern California the week I was there that has made the TV news. They were putting warnings out to discourage people from swimming in that area. If someone had been mauled by a shark you wouldn’t get me out of the beach car park, frankly, but I guess that when nature’s perils surround you, you get a bit blasé. This week in Eureka, a place I visited, there was an earthquake measuring 4 on the Richter Scale. If we get a minor one, like the Lincolnshire quake, that rattles a few teacups and someone’s Panda Cola fizzes up, it is national news in the UK. And then there are tsunamis. It has been 2 years since I was on the West Coast last time and everywhere you look there are now signs pointing out the tsunami evacuation routes. If the earthquake happens under the sea, residents of low lying areas from Washington State down to California will have minutes to get to higher land. At least we’ll have a few hours warning if that chunk of the Canaries falls in and sends a wave towards Scilly. I guess the new tsunami warning signs have been placed since the events in the Indian Ocean and after the US’s poor response to Hurricane Katrina. It does make you feel a little uneasy if you are given a ground floor room in an hotel with a beach view.  Here’s a tip for the paranoid. I did read somewhere that you should never stay in an hotel room on the sixth floor or higher as modern fire fighting gear cannot reach that high. So, if the worst comes to the worse and you’re in California where they have tidal waves and bush fires it’s a toss up between being grilled or drowned. Maybe next time I should hedge my bets and go for the fifth floor. Where I risk being lightly poached. On the West Coast of Oregon there are a string of faded seaside resorts. They reminded me of the towns on the East Coast of England. They’ve seen better days and are in obvious decline.  Every town in America needs a claim to fame. There was one place near Santa Barbara that was claiming to be the split pea capital of the world! Well who is going to argue? I doubt anyone would split hairs over it. Long Beach in Oregon is a low rise, kiss-me quick hat and candy floss sort of place claims to have the world’s longest beach. You can drive straight onto it. This is something that is quite common in the USA. You park right next to your deckchairs!There’s not much to see here except tacky holiday trinkets and souvenirs. You know the sort. Comedy postcards entirely black with the hilarious caption “Long Beach at night”.Give it a miss.

An hour or so down the road was a real find. Across the world’s largest cantilever bridge is Astoria. It was named after the Astors who paid for it. It was once a run down fishing and logging town and port inhabited by Scandinavians. When the fish became less important the place died. But Astoria has reinvented itself as an arts enclave. It is one of those alternative Totnes-like places. A small town with a lot of arts, music and community events going on. There are lots of good places to eat and I found a great Italian and a good seafood restaurant.  There are still some empty shops and a collection of charity shops. But unlike many small town places in the USA, you don’t see addicts of the terrifying crystal meth drugs wandering around in a menacing way.  Shocking as it sounds that is a common  sight, sadly, in many of the places I have been to. Astoria is good. 

 Astoria Column The Astoria Column is just what it sounds like a large column, standing high above the town.

  Astoria tram 

For a few dollars you can go for a ride around the town on a tramline. The trip signs say that the journey lasts an hour. I have no idea how they stretch a trip out for that amount of time but it looks like fun.

 I stayed at the Hotel Elliot which was a great discovery.

 http://www.hotelelliott.com  

It is an authentic Art Deco 1930s hotel although the rooms have been upgraded for all mod cons like underfloor bathroom heating, wifi and comfy boutique hotel style beds. Wifi has become an obsession with me when choosing hotels. It helps when you are writing travel blogs for websites! I think that our Radio Scilly Tarbert Hotel adverts are to blame! The rooms, like most American ones, are very affordable by UK standards. You can stay in luxury for around the same rate that we’d fork out to stay at a Travelodge at a motorway service station. There are lots of well restored and maintained period features to the hotel. The lift was a proper wooden panelled job!

 There is also a wine bar in the basement where, on a weekend night, you can gain a taste of some of the really nice wines that are produced in Oregon. We normally only hear about the Californian wines so if you get the chance, try a Zinfandel from Oregon or Washington. It was very good.

 It had been snowing quite heavily so I wasn’t able to get too close to the Mount St Helens volcano. The roads had been closed off because this is proper snow. You are thousands of feet up here and I also note the lack of crash barriers. I’m such a Brit abroad. Health and Safety comes first!  I’m not that bothered about only getting to 10 miles from the summit. You can see it well from a distance. The volcano is still active. I went to the Mount St Helens visitors centre which offers a good overview of the days leading up to the massive eruption in 1980 and provides a 15 minute video explanation of how unprepared the officials were for the mudflows and resulting devastation. There is also a gift shop which, I am pleased to say, didn’t include any tacky volcano-related merchandise. I was expecting a glowing volcano-shaped plastic ash tray at the very least. The volcano doesn’t look like the ones that kids draw in school. Over 1000 feet of the mountain were blown away including the snow capped dome. I wanted to take pics of the mountain you see at the start of Paramount movies! Sadly I’m 28 years too late. There was plenty of warning before the 1980 eruptions. Lots of quakes and smoke for days before. The video show the centre has on show features a guy called Harry Truman who lived alongside a lake under the summit called Spirit Lake. He refused to leave during the mandatory evacuation, despite begging letters from school kids. He said he had always lived there and was going nowhere. The blast wiped him, his home and the lake off the map. In fact everything within 15km of the big blast was obliterated and eerie signs show the extend of the blast zone as you get nearer the mountain. 

The big problem that followed the eruption was the mudflow and flooding after the snowdome melted. Huge areas of forest, homes and bridges were obliterated in the massive wall of gunge that wiped out anything in its way. There are new containment walls designed to hold back extra water flow downstream should it happen again.

 The lava flow scorched its way across the landscape too and you can see its path today. The Visitor Centre also has stunning photographs of towns in the area that were deluged by ash. I was impressed at how much sand had been deposited on cars and the road around Porthcressa during the recent storm but that was noting compared to the ash which rained down and created darkness in the middle of the day, forcing street lights to automatically light. The heavy ash brought down many buildings that couldn’t take its weight, too. Cheaply built structures just crumbled when their roofs gave way. There were lots of other side effects that I hope they will be prepared for next time.The town of Longview ran out of water as the dammed lakes around the mountain provided its supply. The mudflow and debris grounded many ships in the deep tidal fjord- like waterways along the coast. In some areas 15 feet was added to the seabed. It will happen again and I don’t know how people can live here knowing that. There are lots of volcanoes in the area that could wreak havoc at any moment. The biggest threat is Mount Rainier. It is a major worry because, for some reason, its mudflows will be more devastating, apparently. Seattle is within its path of potential destruction. And Seattle gets earthquakes. And it is of risk of tsunamis. How much do you reckon home insurance is there? 

On the road back to Astoria from Mount St Helens/ Longview there are some quaint villages all with antique shops and gift and craft centres, one of which is Cathlamet. 

 Leaving Astoria and driving South down the coast towards Newport, Oregon, there are some amazing views of rocky cliffs, secluded bays and beaches encircled by pine trees and mountains. The beaches becomes sandy here, so it is prettier. It is still pretty isolated, though.  There are plenty of luxurious houses perched on clifftops. The sort of place where Sharon Stone lived in that movie where she was doing people over with an icepick. They all look like something from Channel 4’s “Grand Designs” All built out of wood and glass. One of the upmarket beach resorts is Cannon Beach. It is a pleasant village with a good choice of quality gift and craft stores and lots of well-heeled estate agents. The town is most famous for its rather large rocks on the beautiful, sandy beach.  

 Down the coast there’s not a huge deal to write about but lots of nice scenery.Tillamook is a grim, functional place that is home to one of the USA’s most visited attractions- the cheese plant. I kid you not. It is home to the world famous Tillamook cheese. I had never heard of it either. There’s also some kind of zeppelin museum. Around 10 miles away is the pretty Cape Meares State park. More tight, bend and rocky roads . You could quite easily film a car commercial here that shows the vehicle’s ability to brake when a boulder rolls down the hill or a deer pops out. Oceanside is a tiny hamlet with a great café where I had an oysterburger. Yes, it was a burger made from oysters and cost 3 quid! It was great. 

Arcata. I have been to Arcata before. It is a small university town build around a plaza. It is very left-wing and proud of it. When I was there last in 2006 the local council voted to impeach president Bush. That’s gutsy of them. To put it into Scilly terms, its like Christine Savill proposing that the Council demands Gordon Brown is sacked. Actually, that would just be a case of joining the queue. What Arcata did with Bush was bigger. It didn’t get them anywhere but boosted the hotel trade as TV reporters descended on the place. Being a university town there are lots of trendy clothes shops, people on skateboards and some good, cheap eats. Arcata, along with Eureka and Garberville are in Humbolt County. It is said to be the biggest hemp producing area in the world. As I sit on the Scillonian sailing home and writing this I am wearing a hemp shirt bought there. Hemp is sustainable and, I have to say, quite comfy. This thick outerwear shirt seems to breathe. I wore it in LA where it was 100F without discomfort and felt warm in the 50F coolness of Penzance quay today. There is another side to the growing of hemp. And Arcata has that Amsterdam smell about it. Maybe best to avoid the Chocolate Brownies in the Coffee shops. Eureka is a few minutes down the coast from Arcata. The town name should have an exclamation mark, I feel. Eureka features a collection of beautiful wooden buildings. It is strange that the Americans refer to buildings that you see in Eureka as Victorian. I guess it is easier way to describe anything period from the latter part of the 1800s. She was on the throne for ages whereas presidents last no more than 8 years so there’d be a lot of periods to remember if each president had put their name to a period of building style. I like Eureka. It has the chain stores and low rise sprawl of car repair garages, diners and cheap motels like many cities. But the downtown area is traditional, full of bookshops and craft shops and a good museum. I went there on my last visit here in 2006. The tour guide was brilliant. A little old lady volunteer. She wanted to show me how the native American Indians have been ripped off and how they are trying to keep their culture and traditions alive. She was very apologetic for what the Americans had done to the original residents.  

In fact Californians are obsessed with offputting signeage. Many restaurants display a plaque warning you that some of the ingredients of food on the premises can potentially cause cancer. Bon appetit!

30 minutes down the road from Eureka is the “Victorian” town of Ferndale. It is straight out of “The Waltons”. It is just one street and looks like a movie set but it is genuine.

Ferndale "Gingerbread" Houses

Ferndale Main Street The area inland  is famous for the massive redwoods. You can take scenic tour off the 101 Highway ( the major arterial road along the coast) to drive through one of them. The height of the trees creates obscures the sun and it felt odd to walk in the chilly, moist atmosphere of the forest where minutes before I was standing in the blazing sunshine. You can get an idea of the size of the redwoods by seeing how they towered over my hire car. 

Continuing down the California coast and around 3 hours south of Eureka is the beautiful small town of Mendocino. It is home to San Francisco yuppies in the Summer and at weekends but maintains a small village feel without being pretentious. Gosh, doesn’t that last sentence sound pretentious? There are small water towers or old windmill towers dotted around the town which create a distinctive look to the place. There are only two pubs, Dicks Place, which is a bit rough-and-ready and an Irish pub. The Irish pub was good but unlike any real pub that I have been to in Ireland. The menu offered a mix of Asian and Thai foods - not something you’ll find served up with a pint of Murphy's in a bar in Kilkenny, is it? 

Mendocino

 Mendocino has been used a filming location many times over the years. East of Eden and Overboard are two of the films made here. You can get a map listing around 30 movies and their locations at the tourist information centre. One of the most famous buildings is the Blair House. It was the home of Angela Lansbury’s character Jessica Fletcher in “Murder She Wrote” and I had to take a picture of it to keep Morag happy  as she loves trashy daytime TV crime shows like that. 

  The Redwoods

This scary sign warns about the ever present risk of doom and disaster!

Liechtenstein:

Keri went on a visit to the beautiful but small European country of Liechtenstein for our travel show in 2008.

He was guided around the country with Henriette Huber.

Click to play or download part one of the programme.

Click to hear part two

Click to hear part three

Click to hear part four