We did little planning for this trip yet saw a wide variety of things. We purposely skipped some things if we had already seen them on the trip such as the other aquariums available along the way.
Following is a list of links to photos of the sights and activities along the way:
We started with visiting nephew Jeff at Camp Ocean Pines, then along the California cost on highway 1 to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, visited the Monteray Wharf, across the Golden Gate Bridge, ate lunch in Sausalito, then over the tree covered mountains to Fort Bragg.
Leaving Fort Bragg highway 1 crosses back over the mountains to highway 101 where first drove through a tree, ate lunch in Garberville before heading on into the fabulous Avenue of the Trees filled with enormous redwoods. We spent the night in Crescent City where we took a tour of the Battery Point Lighthouse.
After three days of driving north in the large state of California we finally passed into Oregon, along the beautiful Oregon coast and on into Florence. Old Town Florence was a short walk from our hotel where we enjoyed dinner at MO's.
Driving from Florence along more of the Oregon coast we arrived at Tillamook to tour the richly stocked WWII Air Museum in the largest wooden structure in the world. The next morning we visited the Tillamook Cheese Factory then headed toward our friend's house in Washington.
First we stopped in Portland for lunch at a sidewalk cafe, then across the Columbia River an over to Yacold to the Boyle's house. They pointed out how close was Mt St Helens so we left their house a day early to expand our horizons knowing we'd return to the Boyle's a week or so later.
After visiting Mt St Helens we stayed at a hotel in Packwood and realized we were too close to Mt Rainier to pass that up. Boy were we glad we went to Mt Rainier because it was the landscape highlight of our trip.
We spent two days at our long time friends the Shepard's house in Wenatchee Washington.
Monday, August 11, 2008
Saturday, August 9, 2008
The Prius
The high cost of gas in the summer of 2008, hovering around $4.50 in California when we departed on our three week 3,800 mile trip, could have been a show stopper. Fortunately our 2008 Prius took that expense down so low it wasn't a concern.
The Prius is an amazing car and has continued to surprise us along the way. Purchased in January after losing one of our other cars in an accident we have been pleased with the comfort, quietness, smooth ride, and of course fuel economy of this well designed car. I don't think hybrids are the long term answer to the world transportation dilemma (I think it is hydrogen fuel cells), but it is a good gap-filler until something better comes along.
The Prius is a surprisingly simple design with big benefits. There is no traditional transmission, in fact the car doesn't actually have a reverse gear. Instead it has what Toyota calls the Synergy drive; a set of six gears in a planetary arrangement that is coupled to two electric motors, the gas engine, and the wheels. This single reliable unit serves as the transmission, continuously variable drive (read no gear shifting), and the transfer unit that allows the engine and electric motors to share the load. Aside from that the synergy drive will transfer power from the wheels to the motor-generators to charge the battery when ever the car is slowing down whether you apply brakes or not.
The engine of the Prius is an alternative to the standard internal combustion engine in that it is highly efficient when pushing the car along at a constant rate of speed but needs a little help from the electric motors when climbing or accelerating. The computer will shut the engine off when not needed so sitting at traffic signals is to be using no gas at all.
We now have about 18,000 miles on the Prius since January and have averaged somewhere around 48-52 mpg. We've never had a tank of gas under 45mpg and have experienced a couple of tanks around 60 mpg. On this 3,500 mile driving trip from Southern California to Canada and back we are easily averaging 50 mpg.
For this trip we did nothing special to achieve 50 mpg other than over inflating the tires to 46 psi in the front and 44 psi in the rear tires. Normal I think is 38 psi. For this we've noticed no difference in the ride and think it has resulted in about 2 mpg better performance. Otherwise we have had two adults and an adult sized 14 year old in the car for most of the trip along with our luggage including two laptop computers and a medium sized ice chest. The air conditioner has been on for 98% of the trip, windows closed, and we've used the cruise control for perhaps 90% of the driving. Our trip has been rather slow in terms of highway speeds, mostly due to the routes we have chosen. Only on the very last leg did we travel at higher speeds. Perhaps 90% of our trip has been at 55 mph or less. However the trip also has involved a lot of hills, sometimes climbing from sea level to over a mile high in Washington, Mt Rainier, and over 7,000 feet at Crater Lake.
The Prius has a clever display called the Multi Function Display shown here:
This display shows 56.2 mpg average over 199 miles since we last filled the tank. No special driving techniques, just a great car doing it's thing and doing it well. As I write this the car sits outside the hotel room with 420 miles on the tank and 55.5 mpg average showing with still 1/3 tank left. Averaging the six tanks we used so far shows 51.6 mpg overall.
Aug 11, 2008 Final gas mileage is 51mpg over 3,574 miles on this 21 day trip. The last two tanks carried us 530 miles screaming down highway 5 in the California central valley at 75mph; both tanks averaged 46.9mpg - our lowest tanks ever in the Prius. It's easy to see that speed is contrary to good mileage.
The Prius is an amazing car and has continued to surprise us along the way. Purchased in January after losing one of our other cars in an accident we have been pleased with the comfort, quietness, smooth ride, and of course fuel economy of this well designed car. I don't think hybrids are the long term answer to the world transportation dilemma (I think it is hydrogen fuel cells), but it is a good gap-filler until something better comes along.
The Prius is a surprisingly simple design with big benefits. There is no traditional transmission, in fact the car doesn't actually have a reverse gear. Instead it has what Toyota calls the Synergy drive; a set of six gears in a planetary arrangement that is coupled to two electric motors, the gas engine, and the wheels. This single reliable unit serves as the transmission, continuously variable drive (read no gear shifting), and the transfer unit that allows the engine and electric motors to share the load. Aside from that the synergy drive will transfer power from the wheels to the motor-generators to charge the battery when ever the car is slowing down whether you apply brakes or not.
The engine of the Prius is an alternative to the standard internal combustion engine in that it is highly efficient when pushing the car along at a constant rate of speed but needs a little help from the electric motors when climbing or accelerating. The computer will shut the engine off when not needed so sitting at traffic signals is to be using no gas at all.
We now have about 18,000 miles on the Prius since January and have averaged somewhere around 48-52 mpg. We've never had a tank of gas under 45mpg and have experienced a couple of tanks around 60 mpg. On this 3,500 mile driving trip from Southern California to Canada and back we are easily averaging 50 mpg.
For this trip we did nothing special to achieve 50 mpg other than over inflating the tires to 46 psi in the front and 44 psi in the rear tires. Normal I think is 38 psi. For this we've noticed no difference in the ride and think it has resulted in about 2 mpg better performance. Otherwise we have had two adults and an adult sized 14 year old in the car for most of the trip along with our luggage including two laptop computers and a medium sized ice chest. The air conditioner has been on for 98% of the trip, windows closed, and we've used the cruise control for perhaps 90% of the driving. Our trip has been rather slow in terms of highway speeds, mostly due to the routes we have chosen. Only on the very last leg did we travel at higher speeds. Perhaps 90% of our trip has been at 55 mph or less. However the trip also has involved a lot of hills, sometimes climbing from sea level to over a mile high in Washington, Mt Rainier, and over 7,000 feet at Crater Lake.
The Prius has a clever display called the Multi Function Display shown here:
This display shows 56.2 mpg average over 199 miles since we last filled the tank. No special driving techniques, just a great car doing it's thing and doing it well. As I write this the car sits outside the hotel room with 420 miles on the tank and 55.5 mpg average showing with still 1/3 tank left. Averaging the six tanks we used so far shows 51.6 mpg overall.
Aug 11, 2008 Final gas mileage is 51mpg over 3,574 miles on this 21 day trip. The last two tanks carried us 530 miles screaming down highway 5 in the California central valley at 75mph; both tanks averaged 46.9mpg - our lowest tanks ever in the Prius. It's easy to see that speed is contrary to good mileage.
Friday, August 8, 2008
What's this trip all about.
Note: You'll see some colored links in these blogs that will lead you to our Smugmug photo web site.
Going into retirement I thought a lot about what we are going to do for the rest of our lives. One attraction is the option of traveling the country in an RV to see all that the United States has to offer. The costs are large though when you consider the start-up cost of the RV, the dual costs of the home left behind and the RV, then there is the gas which can these days be prohibitive. Another option is taking shorter trips.
In over 40 years of work I've never been able to be away from work for more than two weeks. The thought of taking a leisurely driving trip fit right in with our new life. I have the freedom to travel without limits other than financial. Nancy and Keith however are tied to the school year as Keith enters high school. So we decided to take a lengthy drive bounded by obligations near home and a three day seminar Nancy and I were to attend in the middle of August.
Our plan is for Keith, Nancy and John to take a long driving trip up through California, Oregon, Washington and on into Canada. The trip is planned to last three weeks and will cover about 3,800 miles including many varied activities, visits with friends and relatives, and sights along the way.
The idea for this particular trip started with the realization that we had the time for a long trip, and the new Prius would make a driving trip reasonable in terms of the cost of gas. We home school and can do that on the road but Keith is now in high school and will be taking several classes in small groups at other home school houses. Nancy also teaches two classes of American Sign Language. So we had to be back home at least by September for school and by mid August for the seminar.
We started with the idea of driving north to see things we hadn't seen before such as the Oregon coast. Our plan extended into Washington when we listed the friends we could visit our trip. As long as we were going to be that close to Canada I wanted to see Vancouver, having heard such positive comments about how beautiful that city is. Keith's best friend Joseph Boyle moved from Thousand Oaks to southern Oregon last year, and the Shepards live in Wenatchee Washington. Our children and grandchildren live in Northern California and we wanted to see them too. These three people visits were the anchors for our trip, all other places were variables.
We decided not to extensively plan for this trip but take things as they come. As it turns out this was one of the most fun components of the trip, discovering things along the way and altering our plans to suit. The first adjustment occurred just two days before the trip.
My nephew Jeff is doing stone mason work in a camp near Cambria
California. We planned to go to the Monterey Bay Aquarium and only had to alter the route slightly to see Jeff. We made contact with Jeff and included a stop to see him in our plans. We could hear sea lions barking when we drove into Camp Ocean Pines on the first day of our trip.
We made only one hotel reservation before we left home and that was in Monterey. In order to see Jeff we drove up highway 101 then turned onto the scenic highway 1. Two lane Highway 1 follows the coast often cut right out of the mountain that slopes down to the ocean. It is an incredible coastline with spectacular views. The trip from Cambria to Monterey is one of the most beautiful drives in the United States.
After checking into our hotel we headed for the aquarium just a couple of miles away. Not only is this a great aquarium but it is also located at the edge of the beautiful Monterey Bay and next to Cannery Row, another interesting place to visit. The Monterey Bay Aquarium has sev
eral large tanks with sharks, rays, eels, and other varieties of fish found on the west coast. Nancy and I have been SCUBA diving since 1989 so familiar with most of what is on display in the aquarium. There were quite a few visitors to the aquarium that day. One special treat was seeing a sea otter close to the aquarium in Monterey Bay. I watched as the otter dove down and came up with a crab which it proceeded to devour in a matter of moments.
Even with the visit with Jeff and the aquarium we still had time to relax in the hotel room the first night.
Going into retirement I thought a lot about what we are going to do for the rest of our lives. One attraction is the option of traveling the country in an RV to see all that the United States has to offer. The costs are large though when you consider the start-up cost of the RV, the dual costs of the home left behind and the RV, then there is the gas which can these days be prohibitive. Another option is taking shorter trips.
In over 40 years of work I've never been able to be away from work for more than two weeks. The thought of taking a leisurely driving trip fit right in with our new life. I have the freedom to travel without limits other than financial. Nancy and Keith however are tied to the school year as Keith enters high school. So we decided to take a lengthy drive bounded by obligations near home and a three day seminar Nancy and I were to attend in the middle of August.
Our plan is for Keith, Nancy and John to take a long driving trip up through California, Oregon, Washington and on into Canada. The trip is planned to last three weeks and will cover about 3,800 miles including many varied activities, visits with friends and relatives, and sights along the way.
The idea for this particular trip started with the realization that we had the time for a long trip, and the new Prius would make a driving trip reasonable in terms of the cost of gas. We home school and can do that on the road but Keith is now in high school and will be taking several classes in small groups at other home school houses. Nancy also teaches two classes of American Sign Language. So we had to be back home at least by September for school and by mid August for the seminar.
We started with the idea of driving north to see things we hadn't seen before such as the Oregon coast. Our plan extended into Washington when we listed the friends we could visit our trip. As long as we were going to be that close to Canada I wanted to see Vancouver, having heard such positive comments about how beautiful that city is. Keith's best friend Joseph Boyle moved from Thousand Oaks to southern Oregon last year, and the Shepards live in Wenatchee Washington. Our children and grandchildren live in Northern California and we wanted to see them too. These three people visits were the anchors for our trip, all other places were variables.
We decided not to extensively plan for this trip but take things as they come. As it turns out this was one of the most fun components of the trip, discovering things along the way and altering our plans to suit. The first adjustment occurred just two days before the trip.
My nephew Jeff is doing stone mason work in a camp near Cambria
California. We planned to go to the Monterey Bay Aquarium and only had to alter the route slightly to see Jeff. We made contact with Jeff and included a stop to see him in our plans. We could hear sea lions barking when we drove into Camp Ocean Pines on the first day of our trip.We made only one hotel reservation before we left home and that was in Monterey. In order to see Jeff we drove up highway 101 then turned onto the scenic highway 1. Two lane Highway 1 follows the coast often cut right out of the mountain that slopes down to the ocean. It is an incredible coastline with spectacular views. The trip from Cambria to Monterey is one of the most beautiful drives in the United States.
After checking into our hotel we headed for the aquarium just a couple of miles away. Not only is this a great aquarium but it is also located at the edge of the beautiful Monterey Bay and next to Cannery Row, another interesting place to visit. The Monterey Bay Aquarium has sev
eral large tanks with sharks, rays, eels, and other varieties of fish found on the west coast. Nancy and I have been SCUBA diving since 1989 so familiar with most of what is on display in the aquarium. There were quite a few visitors to the aquarium that day. One special treat was seeing a sea otter close to the aquarium in Monterey Bay. I watched as the otter dove down and came up with a crab which it proceeded to devour in a matter of moments.Even with the visit with Jeff and the aquarium we still had time to relax in the hotel room the first night.
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