A Trip Through Time: Epic Roadtrip 2015

Friday, May 1, 2015

Epic Roadtrip 2015

For this year’s spring break we decided to go to the Whidbey house again. However, instead of the usually, boring I-80 route, we decided to do an epic road trip up the west coast.

Our many stops included;

Donner Lake
Swimming with Cousins – in Sacramento
Redwood Trees – Stout Grove and Howland Hill Drive
Natural Sea Bridges – Samuel H Boardman State Park
Sand Dunes – Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area
Sea Lion Caves
Devil’s Punch Bowl – Devil Punch Bowl State Park
Tillamook Cheese Factory
Haystack Rock (Cannon Beach)
A Shipwreck – Wreck of the Peter Iredale in Fort Stevens State Park
The Goonies House – Astoria

Now, it doesn’t seem logical that turning a 13 hour drive into a 30 hour drive would make it more tolerable, but it did. We had a wonderful time.

Here is our Top Ten list:

10. Camping Alone: Camping on Monday has it’s benefits. We had the campground to ourselves.

9. Clothes Pins: Megan came up with the genius idea to have 2 clothes pins for each kid. If they misbehaved in the car, we unclipped the pin from the visor. When we stopped for Gas, the kids got a treat/drink for every pin left on the visor. It worked quite well. Gideon quickly became our unofficial gas monitor and reminded us every time we were getting low on gas.

8. Goonies: In anticipation of visisting the Goonies house in Astoria, we watched Goonies. It has a ton of swearing, but this was a family favorite growing up. Surprisingly, the kids were terrified by the show and wanted to stop watching it. I made them persevere and they ended up loving the show (once they realized Sloth was a good guy).

7. Tulip Festival: We visited a tulip festival in Skagit, Oregon. It was beautiful, of course. At one point, Harper borrowed my camera to take pictures….of practically every tulip in the festival.

6. Seeing Brenn and Kim. Brenn drove up from SF to visit us in Sacramento. We swam at our hotel and had a blast. Good to see them.

5. The 4 AM Hustle. We’ve had our share of bad experiences with our children not sleeping in the car, so we had a new strategy. We woke up at 4 AM, stealthily transported the kids to the car, and kept them asleep until 9 AM. It worked so well, we did it again when we returned to Utah.

4. Redwoods: The redwoods were amazing! so majestic and beautiful.

3. Bridges for Megan: For some reason, every time Megan was driving, we had to cross numerous towering bridges – which freaks Megan out a bit.

2. “Don’t Eat Me”: Our first stop was Donner Lake – named after the infamous Donner party. We explained this to the kids who were fine with it – except Harper. She asking where the dead bodies were and looked bodies in the lake. Finally, on our way out, she asked about if the Donner party ate any babies. We were giving an response when we hear from the back of the car, “DON”T EAT ME!”. Apparently, Reece thought we were discussing about eating him.

1. Candy Shop Wars: In preparation for the extensive trip, we planned lots of electronic and non-electronic activities. The big winner ended up being the Candy Shop Wars audio recording I had on my phone. The kids LOVED it. Every time we got in the car, they asked to hear more. The whole family got into discussing the characters and the plot. It was really enjoyable. We finished the book and downloaded the sequel (The Candy Shop Wars: Arcade Catastrophe) for the ride home.

Here are some of my favorite pics from the trip.