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 several 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.