Always Onward Adventures

Wine country is open! We went on our first bike ride van camping trip last weekend - a great test drive of the new van setup with tow bar/bike rack and our first wine country trip to eastern Washington - and we picked a great weekend to do it with all the rain in Seattle. We left on Saturday morning with the aim of getting to Walla-Walla mid afternoon to start our first bike ride.

We went on a 3 day camping trip this weekend - joined by my parents and Sara’s grandparents. We didn’t have any particular goals for the trip - but managed a good mix of hiking & the outdoors with some window shopping and hanging out in some placed we haven’t been in a while. We took off on the trip Saturday mid-morning - after picking up Sara & my parents from a fun night of swimming and sleeping over at the hotel. We drove through to Leavenworth for lunch at a beautiful restraunt by the water.

We decided to do a last minute trip this weekend - even though it broke the every other weekend pattern and we went two weekends in a row… It was Labor Day so we had to take advantage of the opportunity! There were only a handful of campsites left in the state, but we got one down near Snoqualmie called Tinkham campground. It was a nice campground - other than how close it was to I-90 which made it fairly noisy while we were out and about (it was quite inside the van). I decided to leave early Sunday morning and do a big Sunday hike - that way we could take it easy on Monday monrning and still get back into Seattle at a reasonable hour (before the Labor Day traffic.

We had grand plans this weekend of heading to San Juan island to take the Jolly Trolley tour and do some hiking, but after a 3am wake-up to catch an early ferry, I checked my email to find that they had cancelled all but two of the ferry sailings that day. For a minute, we though about just leaving and seeing if we could get standby for one of them - but decided that would be a miserable day (up at 3am to catch the 2pm ferry…). So instead, we decided to go to someplace new.

I decided to do something a little bit different for our trip this time - we went to an outdoor theatre “built” in a forest. I say built because apparently they built the theatre with the idea that they would not cut down any trees or change the landscape any more than necessary. I found the concept facinating, so I decided it would make for a good van trip. Relatively tame considering our trips of late, but the curveball this time was a heatwave coming through western Washington this weekend - so crusible by fire on the new van optimizations for hot weather camping (more on that below).

Sara’s first backpacking trip! It was amazing for everyone - Sara had a great time and it was an overall positive experience. Even more impressive, our little 4 year old hiked 12.5 miles over 2 days!!! I will admit that I didn’t plan it that way - we had to hike a bit longer to find a campsite than we had origionally planned, but mostly Sara wanted to go find blackberries and hiked over 3 miles to find them… Anyway, here’s the story.

Backpacking Trip Report The third (and final) installment of our Yellowstone trip was the backpacking trip. What an amazing trip it was… We went to a pretty remote part of the park which actually crossed out of the national park and into the national forest twice during the trip. We saw some wildlife, some of it got a little two close, and we saw some amazing scenery, flowers, animal sign, and most importantly - we found the remoteness that recharges me. Sara was with her grandparents for this one, so it was just Angela and I.

Welcome to the second post in our yellowstone travels. This post covers all of the touring around we did during the trip - lots of wildlife, thermal features, and exploring. There were a couple of day hikes, but mostly we were just driving around… Our first stop was Mammoth Hot Springs - where we hiked around on the Travertine terrace and Sara got her first introduction to thermal features. I think it took a couple of days to sink in, so her reaction was a bit mutted.