I’ve been wanting to take a trip through the Pacific Northwest for years, but it just never worked out amongst various family functions and COVID. But, this year was the year. We drove up the coast and took a ferry into Canada and then came back down I-5.
(I’m back-dating these posts to the day of the events for convenience of using the blog as a journal.)
Day 1, July 11, was packing up the car with enough supplies to trek the Oregon Trail and getting to the northern coast of California which required more than 7 hours of driving with a stop for lunch at a Wendy’s. Our destination for the night was Motel Trees across the street from Trees of Mystery. We had tried to visit Trees of Mystery back in 2017, but their power was out from a storm and they were closed.
We tried a couple of new things with the girls on this trip. First was entertainment. Although I prepared the Raspberry Pi with TV shows and movies as we’ve used on previous trips it only got used once. Instead, the focus of our driving entertainment was listening to the audiobooks of the first arc of the Wings of Fire series. Both girls had already read these books and like them. Jess and I were only familiar with whatever snippets we had read to the girls during bedtime reading. This worked out really well. Heather did some drawing while listening and Corinne mainly looked out the window. It passed the time and the car stayed calm.
The second was handling purchases. Rather than listen to the constant refrain of, “Can I get this?” at every gift shop and dealing with sulky kids whenever the answer was, “No;” we gave each of them $60 and explained that this was their money for both souvenirs and gas-station snacks along the way. They could spend it however they like, but once it was gone it was gone. This also worked out really well. They considered what things cost, how that related to how much trip was still ahead of them, and how much they liked the thing. They each ended up with souvenirs they were enamored by, snacks they enjoyed, and a little bit of money still in their pocket by the end.
But back to the trip.
Jess took some pictures along the drive of views that she liked. We stopped to watch some elk. And once we finally arrived at the motel, and after dinner at the Blue Ox Cafe, we walked down to “Hidden Beach” with hot chocolate. I got some pictures I really like on the beach. There were a lot of pelicans flying along the shore.
