Washington Road Trip - Day 2 - Mountains to Oceans

The second day of our vacation was Saturday June 27th.  Read about Day One here. 

Our motel in Pendleton, Oregon was comfortable, but I had a hard time sleeping in. We'd gone back an hour so I woke up at what was something like 7:00 Idaho time, but was only 6:00 Oregon time. Derrick woke up a little after I did. We went for a walk around Pendleton so everyone else in the room could sleep.

We were in the downtown area. There were so many cute churches including this one that was right across the street. 

 Here's Derrick in a little city park area.

 There were cool statues all over the place.

 This was the entrance to a restaurant. Every building had signs asking patrons to wear masks.

 We found the Umatilla River.

 Another cute church.

 And in case you were wondering, yes I was wearing a mask. We were all really careful about germs on this trip. I did not want to be spreading the virus as we traveled from place to place. We wore masks in buildings, used hand sanitizer after every place we left, and made sure to stay 6 feet away from people.

We went back to the motel where everyone was awake. I had everyone wear the same clothes from the day before so packing up was easy. The kids got into the car and we handed out the doughnuts. (There was also fruit, but that's not fun to take a picture with.)

We started driving and were on the road well before 8:00 AM. As we drove out of the city the streets were more crowded than they had been a when I'd walked around. 

The original plan for this day had involved stopped at Multnomah Falls in Oregon and then going to the Mt St Helens  visitor center where we would meet up with my friend Melissa. But both of those places were closed. So instead we changed the plan to visit Melissa at her house in Vancouver Washington. (It's near Portland.) She offered to BBQ hamburgers for us for lunch. Then we would continue on our way to Ocean City State Park. 

The drive was pretty boring for the first bit. 

After a while we started following the Columbia River.

We got out and took a look at a view point.

Brandon and me. I was having an amazing hair day.

We stopped for gas at The Dalles and then drove over a bridge because it was there and looked cool.

Mt Hood looked really cool in the distance.

Lydia had a loose tooth and had been wiggling it the whole drive. It came out while we were driving.

Soon we were driving by lots of trees. We made the obligatory comments about how GREEN it was. This reminded me a lot of driving in the "Pine Tree Tunnel" in the South.

We knew Multnomah Falls was closed, but we were hoping that we could at least stop in the parking lot and look at the waterfall.  However, the exit was blocked off by cones. So I hurried and took this picture out Lydia's window as we drove by.

We drove around the outskirts of Portland and crossed a bridge into Washington.

Georgina (our Google Maps GPS) guided us right to Melissa's house. I'm so glad we had Georgina. We would have been so lost without her.

It was WONDERFUL to see Melissa. We worked together over a decade ago and she has been a loyal and good friend ever since. She'd moved to Washington about 18 months earlier and it had been such a good change for her and her family. They seemed so happy and well established.  Our kids ages don't quite line up, but everyone played well.

 The hamburgers were great and so was the conversation. I wish we could have stayed longer, but we had to get going.

We drove north and decided to detour to Mt St Helen's anyway. I knew the Visitor Center and the Observatory was closed, but I was hoping we could still drive up the highway and see the mountain.   Our first stop was the Visitor Center Parking Lot. It was open and we got out to see what there was to see. I think this was a view of the mountain though the trees. But honestly I'm not sure.

The trail was cool, but I didn't want to waste time on the trail.

Here's Derrick with the mountain in the back ground - maybe. He was one of the main reasons for this detour. He's pretty obsessed with volcanoes so we made sure to stop here.  Plus I wanted to see it too.

We kept driving up the highway. We had some crappy maps that we'd picked up at the visitor center, but neither of them were great at telling us where the good stops were. We ended up at a "view point" for a dam. But the viewpoint was really a hike. The girls weren't interested in hiking so I stayed in the car with them while Brandon and Derrick went down the trail to see what they could see.

I'd assumed they would go about 5 minutes and then come back if there wasn't anything interesting.  But instead they decided to do the whole 1.8 mile loop. They took lots of pictures.

They made it to the dam which holds back a lot of the dirt and ash that is still slowly flowing off the mountain. 

They had a good time hiking.

And I'm glad they got these pictures.

But at the time I was pretty annoyed.  The girls and I were waiting at the car with no idea when they would be back. Brandon didn't even have his phone with him. All I could think about was how much further we had to drive that day and how we still hadn't seen the mountain. It was already after 3:00 PM. This seemed like such a waste of time.

Brandon and Derrick finally came back. But I was pretty grumpy by this point. I did not like Mt St Helens. We kept driving down the highway and crossed a cool bridge.

The road went up the mountain and we were getting some good views of the river that flows off the mountain. But we still couldn't really see the mountain itself.

FINALLY we rounded a bend and THERE IT WAS. Something that looked like it had been blasted. And it was HUGE. I've seen so many pictures of this mountain, but I never realized it was a MOUNTAIN. This took up my whole field of vision. We stopped at the Castle Lake View Point and took this picture.

Derrick was pretty happy about finally seeing the mountain.

I was in a better mood too.

We kept driving and went as far as we could on the road which was to the Coldwater Lake Recreation Area. We never really got to a point where we could see into the crater - and it might have been obscured by clouds anyway.

The trees on the mountain literally looked fake. I didn't get a clear picture of them, but trust me, they looked super pixelated in real life.

This was the best map I found of the mountain. Why they didn't give this map out at the visitor center was beyond me.

On our way back down the mountain we stopped at this viewpoint for the bridge. The parking lot for the viewpoint could have easily held 30 cars. We were the only car in it. Most of the places we'd stopped had only a few cars in the parking lots. It was so strange to be somewhere this empty on a Saturday in June. This was one of the times I realized that vacationing during COVID-19 was a different experience than it would have been.

Overall I was underwhelmed by Mount St Helens. Maybe I would have liked the place better if it had been more fully open. Maybe the Visitor Center would have had a display that would have helped me understand the layout of the mountain better. Maybe going all the way to the Observatory would have given me a majestic view of the crater. But I'm not sure. Even in the best of times I think the area needs better maps and signage.

We backtracked to the Interstate and headed north again. After a while we exited the interstate and took highways west to the coast. Again we were reminded of driving in Alabama. It was a lot like driving down to Panama City Beach - except there weren't nuclear power plant cooling towers in the distance in Alabama.

The road was winding and the speed limits were slow and I was so so so so so tired to being in the car. It seemed like we would never get there.

Brandon had typed in Ocean Shores for our destination which was the city next to Ocean City State Park. It was a difference of about half a mile, but I was so ticked off about it when we passed the entrance for the state park and kept following the route to the city center. I was pretty huffy as we back tracked to the state park.

I think part of my anger was just nervousness. I was worried we'd arrive at the state park and find out it had been closed. I was also feeling grumpy based on the alternate reality of this trip. Remember we were supposed to be in Ocean Shores at a beach house with Brandon's family. We would have arrived at roughly this same time on Thursday night. Then we would have woken up and made an hour drive around the bay to Westport for the Pirate Festival. I was feeling grumpy for the fact that we'd have had to make that drive. Yes, we didn't actually have to do that on this trip because that part of the trip had been cancelled, but I was still mad about it. It doesn't make sense, but that's how I felt.

We checked in at the ranger station and everything was just fine with our reservation. The park hadn't been closed. It didn't even appear to be opperating at 50 percent capacity. Every site was full. And I mean FULL. Washington State Parks allow extra cars for $10 per car. And wow, it seemed like everyone was taking advantage of that.

It also looked like we'd wandered into an REI commercial. Everyone had excellent camping gear. There were all sorts of tents and canopies. Everyone was wearing waterproof jackets. The campers across from us had a table set up with folding chairs. Their food smelled amazing.

Brandon and I hurried to set up our tent. (I took this picture of our campsite the next day.)  We'd been snacking constantly in the car so even though it was after 7:00 none of us were really hungry. I asked the kids, "do you want to go to the beach or do you want dinner first."  The beach won instantly.

We could hear the waves in the distance, but getting to the beach was a bit of a hike. First we followed the trail through the forest.

The trees made it dark in there.

We came out of the trees into an area with small bushes and long grass.

This trail passed a lot of grass covered sand dunes.

And finally came out at the sandy beach.

From there it was still a long walk before we came to the water.

We were happy to finally reach the water. But WOW it was cold.

Brandon and I took a selfie together and recorded a Marco Polo for his family so they could see the place in case we are able to come back next year.

Brandon took this picture of me. 

The kids had fun running around.

These pictures look warm, but really it was chilly. I was torn between keeping their jackets on them so they'd stay warm or taking the jackets off so the jackets could stay dry.

The jackets stayed on and got wet.

We went back to camp and had a snacky dinner. It was mostly just more snacks like cheese sticks and hardboiled eggs since we'd already had hamburgers and hot dogs for lunch at Melissa's.  The kids all got into their sleepers and we had hot chocolate. I worried the kids would spill on their jammies, but they didn't. Camping with older kids is nice.

We put the kids to bed. Charlotte and Lydia were on one side of the tent.

And Derrick and Veronica were on the other.

Brandon and I stayed up for a little bit longer, but honestly we were so cold we didn't stay up much later. We pumped up the air mattress and climbed into our thick sleeping bags. It felt so good to lay down in the tent. We could hear the waves crashing on the beach while we slept.

During the night it rained, but the tent stayed dry. We'd bought this tent with this trip in mind. Our old tent had served us well since 2012, but had a habit of leaking. Plus it took up a lot of space in the car. This one folded up smaller and was still waterproof. I liked listening to the rain and knowing that I didn't have to worry about anything in the tent getting wet.

Read about Day 3 here.

Washington Road Trip - Day 1 - The Beginning

If you've been following this blog for a while, you know we love our family vacation road trips. If you are new to this blog- well sit back, you are in for a wild ride while I tell you about all the things we did for our vacation this year. 

The idea for this vacation started with Derrick. About two years ago he watched the movie Free Willy and became obsessed with whales. He started asking about where we could go to see whales. I did a little googling and discovered that one of the best places in the US was the San Juan Islands in Washington State.

Previous to this I had never even heard of the San Juan Islands. But as I read about them I realized that they were incredible and that I really wanted to visit them. There are a collection of small islands in the north west part of Washington north of Seattle. They were close to Canada and only accessible by water.  The largest island is San Juan Island. As I read some more I realized that I had a friend from Yellowstone who worked at Roche Harbor on San Juan Island. (Previous to this I hadn't realized where exactly she was working.)

This kicked off about a month of me trying to figure out how we could live/work at Roche Harbor after Brandon finished the maintenance program. In this dream scenario I'd do accounting for the Hotel de Haro and Brandon would work on airplanes at the Friday Harbor Airport. This dream was entirely possible except for one thing- or rather four people. I couldn't figure out how we could affordably live in the island with 4 kids. This wasn't like Yellowstone where there was an employee RV park. If I somehow did have a job at the resort they only provided accommodations for employees.  No spouses or children could tag along on this crazy adventure.

So I filed away living on San Juan Island to the "one day when we are retired file" and went back to planning a vacation to the islands.

Ideally I would have liked to have done this vacation in 2019, but buying a house took precedence last year. So the vacation was bumped to 2020.  Towards the end of 2019 my sister in law Shannon started talking about planning an extended family trip to the Washington Coast. She said there was a Pirate Festival in Westport that she thought we'd all enjoy attending that. That worked perfectly with our San Juan Island Trip so we planned to do the two trips at the same time. We'd go to the coast with Brandon's family for the weekend and then take off for the San Juan Islands afterward.

We had to wait for the dates of the pirate festival to be announced. It seemed like there was some sort of change of who was in charge of it. For a little bit it looked like no one would step up to take over the festival. But someone did and the dates were announced for the last weekend in June. Brandon's sister Melanie found an AirBNB in Ocean Shores that would hold the whole family. I started planning out the places we'd visit the week after Ocean Shores.

I booked two hotels for our drive to Washington and back. I also planned two nights at Olympic National Park. One night would be at Sol Duc Hot Springs and I was able to reserve that night. The other would be at the Hoh Rain Forest which was First Come, First Serve. Normally I'm afraid of FCFS sites, but I was willing to live dangerously with this one because it was so close to Ocean Shores. The County Park that I wanted to stay at on San Juan Island didn't open up for reservations until later, but I put the date that it opened into my phone so I could reserve our spot the first chance I had. As soon as the reservation system opened I booked us two nights.

And then things started to get unpredictable. COVID-19 was spreading. The country was shutting down. Everything was getting cancelled.  But I had hope that by the end of June all this COVID nonsense would be far behind us.

HA HA HA HA HA

The Pirate Festival was the first to go. It had seemed on shaky legs before COVID so I honestly wasn't surprised that it was cancelled. Brandon's siblings talked about still going on the trip and staying at the beach house. But since the Pirate Festival had been the main reason for the trip they decided to cancel the trip. It was officially cancelled as of Memorial Day Weekend. Less than a month before we planned to be there in June.

None of the rest of my trip had been cancelled yet so I was still planning to go.  But I had to do some rearranging to plug up the holes in our plan. The original plan had been for us to leave Twin Falls on Wednesday night after Brandon was done with work. We'd drive to Pendleton and stay the night in a Motel there. Then we'd continue driving and meet up with Brandon's siblings at the beach house on Thursday night. We'd spend Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights at the beach house before starting the camping part of our trip. Now that we didn't have the beach house reservation it didn't make sense to leave on Wednesday. I was able to move our night at the motel from Wednesday the 24th to Friday the 26th.

Washington State re-opened up camping reservations on June 1st so staying at State Parks became my camping back up plan. I still liked the idea of visiting the ocean before going up to the San Juans so I found us a spot at Ocean City State park which is next to the town of Ocean Shores. I booked that spot for two nights since I figured we wouldn't want to move the tent too much after driving all that way. That second camping night would have been the night in the Hoh Rainforest. So much for living dangerously with the FCFS site.

I realized that we'd never booked a hotel for the night we planned to be in Seattle. With COVID still spreading unpredictably I decided that maybe staying in a hotel in one of the original hot spots wasn't a good idea. I looked for a State Park near Seattle and Salt Water State Park right on the Puget Sound about halfway between Seattle and Tacoma. It would be perfect for a place to stay after we were done with the San Juans.

I felt pretty good about plugging up all those holes. Our trip was going to be great.

And then I got an email on June 5th that said our reservation at the San Juan County Park was cancelled.

The county had decided to delay opening the park until July 1. My reservations were for June 30 and July 1st. The county can't make changes to reservations so they had to cancel both nights. I immediately got back on the county website and re-reserved our July 1st night. But where were we going to stay on June 30?  I went back to the state park site and found Moran State Park on Oracas Island. This would require moving the tent twice and taking an extra ferry ride, but hey, we'd still be on the San Juans so it would be worth it.

Things looked stable for a while. The ferry schedule was delayed because they were determining whether to go to the usual summer schedule or stay on their winter schedule. They decided to stay on the winter schedule. I booked our ferry rides on June 12th. We'd have a total of four rides. One from Fort Townsend to Coupville. One from Anacortes to Orcas. An inter-island ride from Orcas to San Juan (Reservations weren't available for the inter-island ferries). And one from San Juan Island back to Anacortes.

Everything was in place and even though new COVID hotspots were popping up around the county again I was feeling confident that our trip would happen.

And then on Monday June 22, five days before we were supposed to start our trip, I got an email that Sol Duc Hotsprings in Olympic National Park would be closed for a week starting June 26.  Our reservation there would need to be cancelled.

This time I paused before hurrying to reserve something else. This reservation had been in place since the middle of February. The fact that I'd had this reservation in place for so long through all the COVID uncertainty had always encouraged me that this trip would happen. But now it was cancelled too. Were other parts of our trip going to be cancelled. Was San Juan County going to close it's park? What about all my reservations at the state parks? Were they going to be cancelled within a few days too?

So I called San Juan County. And I called Washing State Parks. And I asked if they had plans to cancel anything. San Juan County was waiting to hear what their health department recommended at a meeting on the 24th. State Parks didn't know. They said they wouldn't keep info from us and would let us know as soon as they knew anything. This was unsettling, but also encouraging. Things were still in place.

So I found us another place to stay. I decided to skip Olympic National Park all together. Instead we'd spend the night at Deception Pass State Park. My cousin Melissa talked about how pretty the area was and I'd actually been feeling like I should have planned for us to stay there. So I was actually fine with this new plan. I had to rearrange some of our ferry reservations to work better with the new plan. But by the end of Monday I had everything back in place.

I'd gone from having zero nights at the state parks to having five reserved with the state parks. I had two hotels booked. And one county park. Of all 8 nights only one - the one at the final hotel - hadn't been changed at all from the original plan. Vacation planning during a pandemic is not for the faint of heart.

It was time to start doing the usual vacation preparations. On Wednesday I went grocery shopping and bought the majority of the food we'd eat on our trip. (We had plans for stopping at grocery stores for fresh food two times on the trip.) On Thursday we packed the clothes and the car.

Brandon went to work on Friday and I stayed home and told the kids a million times that we would leave when Brandon got home from work.  We stayed busy by doing the many little things left on my to-do list. Items included updating this blog, printing the reservation confirmation pages (and thumbing through them to make sure that I really did have every night reserved), checking the height restrictions for the ferries, packing a tape measure so we could make sure our roof top bag was within those height limits, making sandwiches for dinner, cutting up left over vegetables in our fridge to take with us, picking peas from the garden to take with us (Veronica took initiative and did this one), returning library DVDs and books, and making two masks to add to the 4 we already had.

The kids and I also walked to Smiths to pick out doughnuts for breakfast the next day. The motel we were staying at didn't do a breakfast so we decided that doughnuts would be a good alternative.

In the late afternoon I made sure all the kids and I all took baths and showers and changed into clothes that we'd already picked out to wear on the trip. We were planning to camp a lot, but I wanted to make sure we at least started out clean - especially when we were going to be squished together in the car.

Brandon came home a half hour early at 3:30.  He took a shower too and then we got the last of our things in the car. We took Marcia over to Brandon's coworkers house. Hannah is a saint and had offered to watch Marcia any time we needed her too. She didn't even blink and eye when we asked if she'd want to watch her for 9 days. She had lots of fun things planned and it sounded like Marcia was going on a vacation of her own. The kids were sad that she couldn't come with us, but I was not interested in taking a dog on a super long car ride.

We were on the interstate by 4:30. We drove in basically a diagonal line from Twin Falls to Pendleton Oregon. In the past, I've navigated on our road trips, but we've finally upgraded to using the Google Map feature on our phones. We named her Georgina. She gave excellent directions and helped us out so much on the trip.

Most of the drive was pretty uneventful. We had to stop a couple times because the straps on our new roof bag were flapping around and Brandon had to figure out a better way to secure them. And of course we had to stop for a few potty breaks. But overall everything went well. We ate sandwiches in the car so we didn't have to stop and eat. 

 Here I am. Perscription sunglasses have become one of my favorite purchases of 2020.

 We stopped at a rest stop in Oregon and the kids played in this rock thingy.

 Apparently Brandon and his siblings had their picture in taken in the same place when he went on a road trip with his family about 25 years ago. He is the only one in our family to ever travel this way.

 I sat with the doughnuts on my lap the whole way. They smelled good, but I wasn't tempted to eat them because I was looking forward to eating them for breakfast the next day.

 Here's the car at one of the rest stops.  Our last "hat" (car top bag) served us well, but was falling apart and wasn't water proof. When we packed the garage stuff for our move last year I specifically told Brandon to throw it away. I said, "If we keep it, we'll try to use it again. If we throw it away, we'll have to buy a new one."  I'm glad we bought this new one. Since we were going to the Pacific Northwest it was very important to me to have a waterproof bag. We bought this for like $80 on Amazon. It kept all our camping things dry during the whole trip.

 Here are all the kids in the car. Normally Veronica sits between Charlotte and Lydia on the middle seat and Derrick has a lone seat in the back. We knew the kids couldn't survive like that on this trip. Veronica had to have a window seat and some space. So we folded up the other backseat and put her back there with Derrick. The roof bag made it so we had the space to spread the kids out a bit.

We stopped at a view point for an Arch Bridge. Which I'd assumed was a natural bridge, but turned out to be a historic bridge from the old Highway. It was pretty.

Here are Brandon and the kids

And me and Lydia. Look how tall she is getting. 

We made it to the motel around 10:00. (I took this picture the next morning.) I was a little worried we'd be at some sketchy place. But I was pleasantly surprised. The person at the front desk was super nice and got me all checked in. The room was clean and the beds were comfy. I was a little sad we weren't planning to stay longer.

In the past we've been able to lay all the kids long ways on the bed. But I guess we've out grown that. Charlotte and Lydia refused to share a bed with Derrick and Veronica. They said they'd rather sleep on the floor. So that's what they did.  (We did offer to get the air mattress out of the hat, but they said the floor was fine.)

 Derrick and Veronica got the bed. Derrick has been doing well with night potty training, but I wasn't taking any chances. I brought his mattress pad for him to sleep on. He woke up perfectly dry and so we put it away for the rest of the trip - but I'm still glad we brought it just in case.

 Here's Brandon relaxing after a long day at work and driving.

The kids wanted to stay up and watch TV, but it was too late for that. Brandon told them some stories and then everyone settled down and fell asleep.

Read about Day 2 here