there is a big egg. it's in the town of winlock, washington -- just south of chehalis. if she ever goes there, I would love to hear about it.

I feel sorry for you east coasters. more on the egg, from the web: HISTORY OF WINLOCK, WASHINGTON 1921 - In November the new Johnson school was completed.The first Parent Teacher Association (PTA) was organized.Mrs. R.W. Fletcher was the first president. On Aug 13, the completion of the first concrete road.To celebrate, Winlock started "Winlock Poultry and Egg Day." 1922 - On Feb 2, the old school on the hill burned down. 1923 - On Oct 23, the Pacific Highway bridge over the Columbia river at Vancouver was completed and opened. Winlock wasrepresented in the celebration with a huge egg, mounted ona truck. 1925 - First hot lunches in school. WINLOCK FFA CHAPTER HOME PAGE From the town with the GIANT EGG! Comes the STATE POULTRY TEAM!!! Congratulations to the team for attaining 8th in the Nation and to Sarah for Being the 10th highest individual! Member Count!! 82 :) A Little about the FFA: The National FFA Creed The FFA Motto FFA Colors and Official Dress Please visit some of these exciting links:

How large is this egg? There is a large chicken in the town of Petaluma, about 30 miles north of San Francisco. I used to sit on it as a child. Around 1875, Lyman Byce, a canadian turned petaluman, invented the incubator. By 1917 Petaluma was the undisputed world leader in the chicken and egg industry. Petaluma was declared the "Egg Basket of the World," and existed for many years as the center of the Chicken Universe. For nearly two decades after that there was more money deposited in Petaluma banks, per capita, than any other town on Earth. The giant chicken resides just inside the Petaluma Fairground gates.

not only can I not find the dimensions of the winlock egg (pictured by itself so one cannot get an idea of scale on winlock high school's ap chem/bio class' annoying geocities page), but I found that the town of mentone, indiana, makes the same claim ( see?). and I spent a lot of time at work today looking. damn.

oh. I thought I mentioned this. winlock and mentone each claim that that city is home to the WORLD'S LARGEST EGG. now I really must know.

i think i like the one in winlock better. it's unadorned, thus giving it more of a true egg appearance. cyst, why don't you go to winlock? why must i be subjected to this? you're only an hour further than me! sheesh... actually, once i get a free weekend, that might actually be fun.

what you should do, now that you're almost as close to oregon as seattle, is take a saturday trip to portland or astoria and stop in winlock to see the egg. I would love to see the egg except now I'm living in kiev, ukraine.

a very good excuse to go to portland is if you have some big purchase to make, like a fancy bike or camping equipment or something, because then you can save the 8% or whatever sales tax.

wait, weren't you living in seattle about three weeks ago? i'm so confused. i'll keep you posted on the egg, maybe i will go there when i get my tax return.

cyst and nate, just wanted to let you know that i may be making a valentine's day visit to winlock. i will be sure to measure the egg. stay tuned for more details. i will also be looking for my friend katy's father's house that he grew up in. it is a two room shack that is now completely covered in blackberries.

is his father's old house in winlock? wow. this is so exciting! maybe if the town has an info center, you could ask about the size of the egg there. if the town has an old drugstore, you should look for a postcard there. if you spend a whole day in sw washington, you should also visit the mt. st. helens visitor center. and eat pie at a diner.

you'll probably never need to stop in centralia since you're just 20 miles north of there, but if you do, the best coffee is at andree's, the dutch cafe on the west side of the freeway. but their bathroom, whose door is outside, is gross. you're much better off sneaking into the mcdonald's across the street to use the facilities. the closest mcdonald's door is the front door, but it's always busy so they'll never notice that you don't purchase. also, there is a side door on the other side of the building by the bathrooms. the bathrooms are heavy-duty. the walls are tile and the doors are steel. only a short wait, and always clean.

This could be the start of The Bathroom Project, documenting the state of public restrooms across the continent.

i have a facination with public restrooms. in my opinion, the best public restroom in the US north west is along hwy 97 in oregon. i forget the exact location, but i think it is north of bend, north of redmond... it's in the high desert. we stopped in there one morning. we had 'breakfasted' at about 11pm in Lewiston (WA? ID?) eating subway sandwiches with extra jalapenos. by the time we got to this restroom we were high as high can be and it was high time to drop those sandwiches off. the restroom is a lone building in the middle of no where. you look around and it is just flat nothing, a restroom, a drinking fountain, more flat nothing. inside you find the typical big painted brick, cement floor and polished metal mirrors of an state run rest station restroom. there are two urinals and two stalls (but only one stall door, at the time.) I quickly grabbed the stall with the door, my buddy grabbed the other one (there was no waiting for either of us.) in typical stoner fashion we started discussing the FLAMEON qualities of our movements (extra jalapenos) and giggled like school girls with an NO2 tank. eventually i began to wonder if someone might have walked in. "uh, Ian? you think we're alone?" "uh, yeah man." and then, a deep voice from urinalville: "uh, no. you're not." who knows what he was thinking. he sounded like a trucker.

I love oregon rest stops. they always have free coffee and mother's cookies. well, I don't care so much for the metal seat covers, but I like the idea that there's free bad coffee every 50 miles or so. the bathroom here at work is co-ed, two women's stalls and two men's stalls. they're pretty much equally used -- the women take longer but a lot more men work here.

I know a guy who has a photo record of all the bathrooms he was in on a trip to Italy. He took a ferry at one point. I've never seen anything so disconcerting when it comes to "toilets". There are better-equipped outhouses. The Musee d'Orsay has wonderful bathrooms. I came out of one once and was treated to one of the best surprises: a boy I liked led me with my eyes closed to an elusive Monet--a later Monet, all electric colors.

I've got a photo of the second stall from the left in the main fire station in Sarajevo. They've got the standard hole in the ground with footprints on either side thing going. It was during the war when all the municipal services were cut off by the besiegers, so it was pitch black, freezing, and there was no water. It took some real balancing, and frostbite was a concern. Lemme know who wants reprints.

me

my parents gave me a camera to take on my first trip to europe without them when I was 14, and then they took all 12 rolls to costco like the day I got back, spent $100 or whatever on express developing, and then got mad because half of the pictures were of bathrooms. I had only nice bathroom experiences in the former yugoslavia during the war, but I was young then and highly valued my life, so I stuck to zagreb and ljubljana. I stayed in people's houses, and the bathrooms were clean and had hot water. I fell in love with autumn ljubljana and felt I could spend the rest of my life drinking coffee and eating tiramisu and going to cows shows in the alps. the worst bathroom experience was in a little town in nicaragua where in 1997 they hated americans because in the '80s the guerrillas that the cia trained and armed in honduras, 15 miles up the road, came in and killed the locals. I didn't want to stay there at all, but striking bus drivers blocked both roads out of town, and there were of course no hotels, so we had to ask people if we could stay with them. this one family let us stay in a spare concrete room with a hole for a window next to the pig pen. the cots were made of wood and burlap, and the only decoration was a jean-claude van damme poster peeling off the wall. the room was very small, but we had to share it with many of god's creatures. there was a small living room where two very old-looking people sat very still, as if they were dead. if they were alive, they were watching los simpsons. this room was next to the toilet, which was partitioned off with a shower curtain. the whole place, which was behind the family's little general store, was very dark and filthy. I had to go to the bathroom so bad that I finally gathered the courage to take a look. the toilet bowl seemed to have been full for a long time, and I saw no flushing mechanism. I decided I would just hold it until we tried to escape the next morning. I felt I had to take a shower (cold water only, of course) the next morning, even though that was disgusting and filthy as well, but at least it wasn't full of shit. I took a necessary pee in the shower. the whole situation grossed michael out so much, that he couldn't even talk about it. I think the toilet situation made it his mission to escape from nicaragua or die trying, which seemed the more likely outcome since we'd have to hike by ourselves through the mountains, which were inhabited by machete-wielding american haters who wouldn't earn in a year the $100 we each carried on us. {but we didn't die and we made it back to some little town in southern honduras, which then seemed to us like the pinnacle of civilization and human accomplishment, and we never complained about a bathroom again.)

we went to the egg today. it was truly splendid. unfortunately, we were not able to measure it because it is up on a large pedestal and we had neither ladder nor the desire to be arrested by winlock's authorities. it's pretty big, though. i would hazard somewhere around seven feet tall, and maybe five feet wide. the park around it was really funny. it was probably about 150 square feet total, with a chain link fence around it. there were cement lions and a couple of cement tables with benches in there for picnickers. dave and i were joking about getting married there, in the shadow of the egg. everything in winlock was closed, but there were some interesting places around there. we also saw an outrageously cool treehouse there that looked as though somebody was living in it. we will go back on a saturday, perhaps, and partake of the local businesses to complete our experience. pictures coming soon.

please tell me about any other interesting ventures you may take into southwest washington. did you stop at any rest stops on the way there or back? I can't wait to see the photos.

we did not stop at any rest stops, but we did stop at a texaco with a sparkling clean bathroom. i have noticed that texaco's have very clean bathrooms, in my experience. we went to a town called raymond, i think, that had all of these cool rusty metal sculptures all over town, and a burned down thrift store that i wanted to go into, but dave was convinced we would get arrested. it was chock full of stuff, and the fence around it was knocked down. it was a bizarre sight. we drove through aberdeen, which has some very nice art deco signs. i will have to check the map to tell you where else we went. i hope the pictures come out.