We’ll always be from Texas, but Oregon has become a second home for us. As soon as we crossed the bridge from Vancouver, Washington to Portland, Oregon we both felt it. We had come full circle. Funny enough, we had also driven almost exactly 10,000 miles since we began this journey. We started at 70k and Brandon watched the odometer cross over to 80k about an hour outside of Portland.

Finally arriving back in Portland also meant that we would be stopping for a while. We tend to move pretty fast (for better or worse) but a short stay just wasn’t going to cut it in Portland. We needed to visit all of our old haunts, catch up with old friends, go Jeeping with our buddies, and drive by our old house to see if they killed all my plants. But before we do any of that we needed to take Brandon’s mom on the grand tour! Carla would be flying in to PDX in just a few days for her first ever visit to the amazing state of Oregon!

In the days preceding Carla’s arrival we hunkered down at our old favorite campground, Champoeg State Park. It felt great to be back home, but just being at Champoeg made me miss our dog Rudy. He really loves Champoeg. I know that he has been well cared for by Carla (she sends me regular updates) but walking all of our old favorite trails at Champoeg was tough. We decided not to bring Rudy on this adventure for a number of reasons, but we still think about him all the time.

Our stay at Champoeg was so low-key we didn’t take a single photo. I think we both just needed a few days to recharge.

We would have loved to bring Carla back to our favorite campground when she arrived, but Champoeg was totally booked up for the weekend. Instead we ended up “drive-way surfing” at our friend Eric’s house. Eric was our next-door neighbor when we lived in Portland. He moved to the little wine country town of Carlton, Oregon shortly before we sold our house. He was a fantastic neighbor and is a great friend. Thank you Eric for letting us park in your driveway (twice!).

We were parked in front of Eric’s house when Brandon went to pick his mom up from the airport all the way across town. When she arrived she could not stop talking about the trees. Not surprised. The trees here get me every time. They just don’t seem to grow them like this anywhere else.

Carlton is a super cute town in the Oregon wine country but it was not our destination. We were taking Carla to go see the Oregon coast and to go Jeeping at Sand Lake, a gigantic off-road playground right on the coast.

Continue reading “Sand Lake and the Oregon Coast” →

This trip is really an American road trip but we didn’t want to completely ignore our friendly neighbors to the north. Plus, the adorable city of Victoria, British Columbia is just a 90 minute ferry ride from Washington!

This little side trip is a bit different from our normal adventures because we didn’t take the RV with us. For large vehicles the ferry charges by the foot so it would have cost us a couple hundred dollars to take the RV to Canada via ferry. We were only staying for five days so it just didn’t seem worth the trouble. Instead, we rented a studio apartment on airbnb.com. Our apartment was very close to downtown and the harbor, which was perfect.

We left the RV at the Rainbows End RV Park in Sequim, Washington and for anyone traveling that direction we highly recommend it. It was one of the best maintained parks we’ve seen in a while. The landscaping was gorgeous and the park is exceptionally dog friendly. The owner even offers a dog sitting service for visitors planning to take the ferry to Victoria.

The process of booking a ferry crossing was a first for both of us. In retrospect, we should have bought our tickets sooner but it all worked out in the end. Our plan was to take the Black Ball Ferry from Port Angeles, Washington over to Victoria. The ferry runs multiple times a day but the most convenient times (not too early and not too late) book quickly. We were only able to reserve a spot on the 9pm ferry. However, they said we could try to get on the noon ferry without a reservation but we would need to arrive extra early to get one of the non-reservable spots. The lady at the ferry terminal suggested 9am. We didn’t want to miss the view from the ferry by crossing at night so we showed up early to try and catch a ride at noon.

Continue reading “Oh, Canada!” →

Washington has been a surprisingly difficult place to find camping. Just about all of the state parks have been full, our bus is too big to fit in many of the national park campgrounds, and it has been too hot to boondock comfortably without A/C. We needed somewhere to stay for about a week before our little side-trip to Victoria, Canada and genuinely struggled figuring out where to go. We wanted to stay in western Washington, preferably near the Olympic Peninsula.  We called various RV parks in the Seattle area (we’ve never been to Seattle and hear it’s awesome) but everyone was booked solid due to some local festival/trade show/competition. I got different explanations depending on who I was calling but the answer was always “no”. We ended up finding a privately owned campground on Lake Cushman just outside of Hoodsport, Washington. We knew nothing about the area but were pleasantly surprised.

Continue reading “Lake Cushman & the Hoodsport Coffee Co.” →

It feels so good to finally be back in the Pacific Northwest! The first thing we always notice when coming back is the trees. They just don’t seem to grow this tall anywhere else! Plus, we were on our way to Leavenworth, somewhere I had been wanting to go ever since we bought the Alpha Uno.

Leavenworth is a small town in central Washington that is modeled entirely off of a Bavarian village. The town grew from the location of a small sawmill in the late 1800s to the headquarters of the Great North Railroad in the early 1900s. However, the Railroad relocated in the 1920s leaving the town to struggle with a limited economy. During the 1960s a local committee went about trying to revitalize the town and came up with the idea of transforming Leavenworth into a “theme” town. One by one, the local buildings were remodeled to resemble a Bavarian village. Businesses changed their names to match the Bavarian theme. New businesses began to arrive along with the tourists. It helped that Leavenworth was situated in a picturesque mountain valley (much like Ouray, Colorado). Overall, the whole experiment seemed to be a success. Leavenworth is now a thriving tourist town with adorable boutiques, local artisans, and yummy restaurants.

The whole thing is a bit silly and kitschy, but I love it. Writing this I realize that we have now toured three different European theme towns in three months. I think we need to start planning a trip across the pond!

But before we go anywhere we need to stop for groceries.

Continue reading “Prost from Leavenworth, Washington!” →

Glacier National Park was everything we wanted it to be. It is arguably more beautiful than Yellowstone but with far fewer people. Honestly, the two are really such totally different places that they shouldn’t be compared, but I found the dramatic mountains of Glacier hard to beat in terms of beauty. You still need to get off the beaten path to find true wilderness in Glacier but most of the time you can drive through the entire park without encountering a single traffic jam!

We decided that the drive from Yellowstone to Glacier was too far to do in one day so we stopped at the half-way point in the one stop-sign town of Drummond, Montana. There wasn’t much to see in Drummond but it worked well for overnight camping that isn’t a Wal-Mart parking lot. The city park offers RV parking right by the river for $15 with water and electric hook-ups. We were some of the only people there, making it surprisingly peaceful.

I fell asleep during part of our drive the next day, completely missing Flathead Lake, which Brandon said was amazing. It is the largest natural lake in the west and the breezy day had lured out all of the sailors. We briefly considered back-tracking and camping at the lake after Glacier but eventually gave up on the idea in favor of spending more time in Portland.  We’re both really looking forward to seeing our old friends and revisiting all of our favorite places in Oregon.

For the next week we’d be staying at the Sundance Campground in Coram, Montana, just a few miles from the west entrance of the National Park. We loved this campground from the moment we pulled up. The place has been run by the same couple for the past 30 years and you can tell that they really care about the place. They were so friendly and welcoming. But what we loved most was that the park felt more like a campground and less like an RV park. There were lots of trees and the layout felt more organic than the typical parking lot layout.

The place got us to thinking about what we would do if we ran a campground of our own. There would be plenty of trees, no clear-cutting of the land. It would be laid out in loops like a state park rather than in parking-lot rows like most RV parks. There would be recycling (surprisingly hard to find at RV parks) and hiking trails. And it would be outside of a cute little town near a lake or river. But most of all, it would be a social park, a place people want to go and hang out. Possibly with a beer garden where we would sell food and drinks and have live music. Think Luckenbach, Texas but with RV camping. Sounds pretty good, right?

Continue reading “Glacier National Park” →

For the past few weeks we’ve been on a tour of some of the more popular national parks in the west. We’ve now toured Rocky Mountain National Park, Yellowstone National Park, and Glacier National Park. All were amazing! I am currently working on the blog posts about Yellowstone and Glacier and they should be up soon. LOTS of photos to edit : )

While you wait, please enjoy this video of our helicopter tour of Glacier!

We booked a one hour tour with Glacier Helitours and it was totally worth the splurge. From the air we saw ancient glaciers up close, flew over perfect ice-blue lakes generally only seen by mountain goats, covered nearly all one million acres of the park, and crossed the Canadian border (which is really just a line of clear-cut trees). If you ever get the chance to do something like this, go for it. It’s so worth it.

 

OMG! They’re finally here! All of our wedding photos and our wedding video are now posted on the blog for your viewing pleasure. Either click on the Wedding Photos tab or click here to view them.

The page includes over 1,200 photos so please be patient while they load. But if you find an issue that is not related to your internet connection please let me know and I’ll see what I can do to fix it.

Enjoy!

Southern Wyoming would be much more interesting if there were still buffalo roaming about. The landscape is mostly high desert grassland and exceptionally windy. You can see for miles around but it’s not nearly as flat as it looks. The road heading West from Cheyenne steadily climbs in a straight line all the way to the summit near Sherman Peak. Even though the ascent was not as dramatic as what we had seen in the Rocky Mountains, we were still having a problem keeping our engine temperature under control. Engines typically run hotter when climbing, but ours was going way above normal operating temperature and was not cooling back down nearly as fast as it should.

This has been concerning us for a while. Our plan was to carefully proceed North towards Oregon, stopping to cool down the engine when needed and avoiding mountain passes when possible. Once we got to Oregon we would take it to the Cummins mechanic that we had been to before. Our RV engine is a Cummins 8.3L 300HP turbo diesel motor and we feel safer taking it to a specialized mechanic that works on these larger engines. This plan probably would have worked out just fine, but we got a lucky break when we stopped in Rock Springs, Wyoming.

Continue reading “Boondocking at Camp Cummins” →

With our time in Colorado almost up we had one final goal, to visit the Rocky Mountain National Park. This will be the first in our National Park tour. Once we leave Colorado we’re heading north to visit Yellowstone and Glacier! Stick around and enjoy the scenery, deer herds, and bison from the comfort of your favorite chair.

We left the James M. Robb State Park before 7am, on our way to the Boulder County Fairgrounds in Longmont, Colorado. We were so pleased with our fairground camping experience in Durango that we decided to give it another shot. Also, most of the other campgrounds in the area were full and we were looking for something cheap because we would be leaving the RV parked for a few days while we tent camped in the Rocky Mountain National Park. No sense in over-paying for a camping spot we’re mostly just  using for storage.

The drive was less remarkable than what we’ve been seeing the past few weeks. We were on I-70 the entire time. The interstate was dull, like most interstates, and very bumpy. Every so often we would hit a pothole and our fridge door would fly open, sending the ketchup, pickles, and last night’s leftovers onto the floor. I was napping in the passenger seat and kept waking up to the sound of food flying across the RV. Each time I would leap out of my seat to shut the fridge and clean up whatever fell out this time. Luckily, the only thing that actually busted open and spilled was a carton of yogurt. We didn’t really like that flavor anyway.

Camping at the Boulder County Fairgrounds is first-come first-serve but there were plenty of spots left when we arrived. This park is set up more like a traditional RV park than the Durango fairground had been. There were about 50 spots but they were all pretty narrow. For the most part there are no staff at this park. You pick your own spot from the available empty spaces and pay at a kiosk. But we didn’t have any problems and all of our neighbors seemed to be doing fine as well.

Once we were settled into our spot we made a store list and picked a spot for lunner. Our choice was a place called the Roost in downtown Longmont. It was excellent. They had shaded rooftop seating and an interesting menu. I had Thai pork tacos and Brandon had chicken fingers and a spiked sweet tea. How southern of him.

We were honestly pretty impressed with the suburb of Longmont. We were expecting another boring suburb full of Costcos and Targets and with no discernible center. Instead, we found a lovely main street with lots of local shops and eateries. It was also very clean, with people out and about everywhere and ample parking. Sure, not all of Longmont is picturesque but it was much better than we expected. We picked Longmont as our home base because we wanted to be within driving distance of Rocky Mountain National Park as well as Breckenridge where we had a potential off-road trip in the works. Also, just about everything else in the area was booked. The off-road-trip fell through but our choice of spot still worked out well.

Our main goal for our first night in Longmont was to pack for our camping trip at Rocky Mountain National Park. All of our camping gear was stashed in the lockers underneath the RV. We needed to drag it all out, make sure everything is in working order, and strap it all to the roof rack on the Jeep. This would be our first tent camping experience of the trip and, actually, the first tent camping trip we’ve ever been on with just the two of us.

Continue reading “Rocky Mountain National Park” →