It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time: 2016

Saturday, December 24, 2016

Around and Around We Went--Washington to Maine

It was just another quiet Sunday morning when we left the kids and grand kids in Bellingham. The only thing for sure was our general direction heading east. We also intended to stay off the main highways, which allowed us to see the smaller towns and out-of-the-way places.

The odometer read at 163,247 miles as we passed through Redmond, Washington. We use this as our starting point for the trip. By the time we reached Boston, Mass., we had traveled 5,437 miles. If you take the direct route across the states, it comes out to about 3,048 miles. We somehow fit around 2,400 miles extra into this leg. Efficiency is over-rated.

Gas and food were our biggest expenses, but having work done on the van added a significant amount to the monthly total of $3,488. Spread out across the leg, our costs were $0.64/mile or about $112/day.

The familiar places were revisited first, of course. Along the highway was a small hamburger stand called Zeke's that Pam's family would visit on trips to Seattle from Wenatchee.

Lake Wenatchee was windy, as usual, but the view back towards Seattle was memorable.

Leavenworth was the next stop. Pam attended high school there, enough to have solid dreams of leaving Leaven-worth. Here she is in front of a Sue's parent's shop.

Grand Coulee Dam and Lake Roosevelt have been on Pam's list to see places for awhile. Eastern Washington is greatly different from the side west of the Cascades. The wheat fields go on forever it seems, then this long, narrow lake appears out of nowhere.

We popped into Canada to approach Waterton Lakes/Glacier National Park from the north. This is actually one park, with half on the Canadian and other half in the U.S. The wind was so crazy that I thought it was going to rip off our newly installed awning that normally stays put just fine at 75mph.

View looking into Waterton Lake Provincial Park in Canada

We stayed in one of few remaining campsites in the Waterton Lake Park. It is said that some people make plans and reservations, but we enjoyed showing up announced just to see what would happen. In Glacier, we went on a couple of hikes that made for an exciting day with the wind and weather.

We didn't see any grizzlies, but we did buy two canisters of bear spray


The walk at the top of the mountain

The weather only added to the beauty

Just a dozen or so Big Horned Sheep lazily watching the human fools walking up the hill

The wind and rain showed up in force on the way back down

We were lucky to catch a bus just as we got to the parking lot to get out of the rain

On another hike out of the rain

Saint Mary's Falls

We didn't spend a lot of time in the U.S. We were back in Canada by the end of our day at Glacier

We crossed the plains in Canada, which look lot like the plains in the U.S. Who knew?

Somewhere in Saskatchewan


Somewhere in Manitoba

Near Falcon Lake, Canada

After doing laundry in Fort Frances, Ontario, we headed into the U.S. again. This time we were headed for Voyageurs National Park, which is supposedly the least visited in the whole park system. Wouldn't you know that they had already shut off the water for the season. We wandered down the road looking for an RV park to dump our tanks and came across an offer we couldn't refuse. For $25/night we stayed at the Sunset Resort for a couple days and had a good rest.

When the owners said that free canoe use was part of the $25/nite fee, I was sold

After the pilgrimage to Duluth Trading in Duluth, Minnesota, we headed into Wisconsin and wandered over to Green Bay. We were told about the tunnel trail in Sparta by a couple we met at Sunset Resort and decided it would be a lot of fun to enjoy one of the premier Rails-to-Trails trails.

We were able to overnight right in the parking lot at the beginning of the trail

We went through the very dark tunnel--walking--and headed back on the same trail. It was mostly downhill on the way back.

Thursday, December 22, 2016

Around and Around We Went--The Trip before the Trip

The idea when we started was to blog about the trip as we went. That idea was one of the first things in the "went" pile, as we spent of all of our days enjoying the days. There was very little left over at the end of each day to even jot down a few notes about what went on that day and having the discipline to make myself do anything had also ended up in the "went" pile. Mostly, we were driving and looking out the window or riding and looking out the window. About the only administrative things that were done during the trip was the expense book and highlighting on the map where we'd been.

The general plan--and that's all there was, really, was a general plan--was to go east along the northern U.S. border in September, south along the east coast somewhere to Key West in October, November across the south U.S. to end up in Sacramento before Christmas. And, that's pretty much how the trip went. Every day was a new day and decisions about where to go along that general plan's path were made as the day unfolded. We went to places that were suggested by those we visited with along the way, made detours based on weather and the effects of weather, backtracked when we felt like it, and just generally wandered our way around this big country of ours. We missed a lot of neat places and missed more than a few connections with friends and family, yet we experienced as much as we could jam into our senses at the time.

It could end up being a book instead of a series of posts if I do the whole trip on one post, so I'll break it up into the different legs of the trip. This post will be about the section of our trip from Arizona to the Seattle area.

While we traveled from Prescott up through Sacramento to Seattle beginning in April, we didn't keep track of those miles or the costs involved. Some bright spots were getting to spend a few weeks with my Mom and siblings, a couple of weeks looking after the new grandson, and getting to spend some good one-on-one time with the older grandkids. Along the way, we tried to be tourists in our own neighborhood. Here are some pics: