I get a bit lazy with taking pictures when we’re in areas I’ve been before, but I took my camera out while we were wandering Paso Robles and tried to take a few pictures. The vines were much greener and bushier than they were when we went to Napa four months ago. I think I should go back to the vineyards in September/October right before the harvest so I can take nice pictures of the scenery.

We met up with Bryan and Behshad and camped for 2 nights in San Simeon. We visited our old favorite wineries the first day, and then spent the second day checking out unfamiliar wineries off the main road.

Pictures below include a neat view of the marine layer over the ocean while we were up in the hills, a fat greedy campsite squirrel who ate our stale cheerios and sunset from the campground.

Our trip is over now — we’re back in sunny Southern California. It was an awesome 4 months and 5 days on the road, but it’s also great to be back in a familiar area and get back to a normal life. I can finally get around to printing pictures and making albums, and we have a whole bunch of good memories and stories to last us forever. I’ll probably do some wrap-up posts later — I wanted to do a “best of” type list, but Travis wanted to wait until after we officially returned and unwound for a few days.

The Redwoods National Park had a lot of very tall trees. We found out that the trees in Redwoods Nat’l Park are taller than those at Sequoia, but not as fat. We didn’t go to see out the tallest tree or the widest tree at the park — we basically drove straight through and then passed out in Sacramento.

In Sacramento we dined with Leila and took pictures of the capitol. We saw the capitol in Sacramento the first time we were here this journey but failed at taking pictures. I now officially have pictures of all the capitols we saw this trip — Sacramento, Austin, Baton Rouge, Annapolis, Harrisburg, Montpelier, Boston, Providence and Olympia (I might have forgotten some). We drove through Tuscon, St. Paul and Salem but did not stop for pictures. Oh well. Taking pictures of capitols was more of an afterthought rather than an objective anyway.

We are in the last leg of our journey, planning to be back to our starting point this coming Wednesday. We hit our 4 month mark yesterday. Usually I try to sum things up thus far for each month, but since we are returning home in a few days I’ll save all those trip round-up and lessons learned until then. We arrived in San Luis Obispo, CA on Friday, and tomorrow we are heading to San Simeon, CA to go camping and wine tasting for 2 days with Bryan and Behshad. Our trip started out by visiting Leila in Sacramento then camping with Bryan and Behshad, so I feel like we’re completing some sort of circle these last few days before coming home.

See you all soon!

Crater Lake National Park was underwhelming for us — this was partially our fault, and partially the fault of mother nature. We left Portland, Oregon early afternoon and weren’t slated to hit Crater Lake until around 5pm. This would have been fine on a normal day, but yesterday became increasingly overcast as we drove towards the park. This, combined with the low sun, made everything quite grey and dull without much hope of a good sunset. The north entrance to the park was closed off, either due to construction or wildfires (there were conflicting reports), so we had to drive around the park to the south side.

Once we entered the park we chose to drive the 33 mile looping rim trail, stopping at various scenic overlooks. After the first two overlooks, everything started to look very similar–the central island volcano was either closer or farther from the road and the sky had varying cloud patterns of grey and yellowy-orange. We would have liked to take one of the mile-long hikes down to the lake, but it was getting dark and the mosquitoes were out in full force. I will admit, the water was still impressively blue despite the general greyness of the atmosphere, and the weather was a tolerable mid-60s to low 70s which is a vast improvement over the 100+ of Portland. The main issue, of course, was timing — we would have liked to spend more time at Crater Lake, so what we managed to see in our short time there did not live up to what we would have liked to see. Plus I blame the rain.

After successfully driving a loop of the entire Crater Lake National Park, we decided to continue on our merry way towards Medford, OR. We were not expecting to find anything interesting between here and there, but it turns out we were mistaken. We stopped at the Rogue Gorge because we saw the the waterfall on the side of the road — the evening lighting situation turned out to be perfect for the smooth flow-y water look I usually struggle to achieve midday. It had rained recently, so the ground was damp and the plants were covered with drops of dew. Mild fog started to rise from the river, which combined with the orange-pink color of the sunset proved to be quite peaceful. We stayed at the site for over an hour, first taking pictures of the river falls and flora, and then moving on to the canyon gorge itself. By the time we had finished, it was 9pm and we were still miles outside of Medford, with no dinner and no place to sleep.

We finally recommenced our trip to Medford, our thoughts of getting a sit-down meal vanished and we debated whether McDonald’s or Carl’s Jr. sounded more appealing. Unfortunately, our plans were again delayed when we looked off the side of the road into the distance and saw a giant yellow flame spewing smoke into the sky. A forest fire! We quickly drove to the closest vantage point where I snapped a few pictures while Travis waited hungrily in the car. After a few minutes of pictures he decided it was time to go, so I hopped back into the car and we completed our drive to Medford, arriving shortly after Travis’ Dodgers finally lost to St. Louis in the 15th inning. I think the only reason I was allowed to take so many photography detours yesterday evening was the 5+ hour baseball game on sports radio.

And now, my blog has taken 20 minutes longer to write than Travis would have liked, so it’s really time to leave. Onwards to California!

We started our day yesterday by trying one of the restaurants mentioned in our guidebook, a brunch place called Gravy. Our book describes it as a “hip joint serving up huge portions of breakfast and brunch. Expect to wait on weekends.” We did not have to wait long but the portions were indeed huge. Travis ordered biscuits and gravy with a side of sausage and bacon (he figured he had to try the gravy at the place called gravy), and I got their “Bacato” omelette (bacon, tomato and cream cheese) with hash browns. Everything was massive. The omelette with cream cheese instead of real cheese was a little weird since the omelette was so huge and the egg was minimal, it was basically like eating cream cheese coated bacon bits mixed with hash browns. It was okay, just really rich and waaay too much quantity-wise. Travis’ biscuits were like little mountains on the plate covered in thick sausagey gravy. Too much sausage for me. I think I ate maybe half the omelette and Travis did about the same damage to his biscuits, although he finished his meat, of course.

After breakfast we lazily started our tour of the Columbia River Gorge (we were too full to move). We started off by driving down the Historic Columbia River Highway and stopped at several lookout points (Portland Women’s Forum State Scenic Viewpoint and the Vista House), which overlooked the Columbia River Gorge. We quickly moved onto the waterfalls. The first waterfall we pulled over for was called Wahkeenah Falls, which was 1/4 mile away from the Multnomah Falls. Multnomah Falls is the 604ft tall waterfall which is the most famous of the gorge’s waterfalls, so we knew we had to stop there inevitably, but I think we both enjoyed visiting the Wahkeenah Falls more.

It was over 100 degrees outside, so we were trying to view as many sights as possible with minimal walking (extreme heat and food coma = very lazy wanderings). You could *almost* see the main part the Wahkeenah Falls from the road, but you had to walk about .2 miles to stand next to it. We decided we’d brave the uphill journey, and good thing we did. Once we got to the top suddenly the temperature seemed to drop and a cool mist spray from the waterfall hit us. We were the only ones up there at the time, so we enjoyed sitting in the crowdfree mist and took pictures of the falls. I didn’t have my ultra wide lens with me, so I tested out taking some pictures I could stitch together in a vertical panorama.

After Wahkeenah Falls we headed to the famouse Multnomah Falls, which was overly crowded with people. It was so crowded there was actually a gathering of photographers all hovering in this one cover (the only one with tree shade) to take pictures of the falls without as much sun glare. Actually it was really just me and one other woman waiting for this photo happy man to stop taking pictures of every possible thing from the one shady corner of the viewing area. We then walked up to the bridge and had fun weaving through the ridiculous madness of people trying to take family portraits with the waterfall in the background. Took a few pictures at the viewing area above the bridge, then headed back down. We dipped our feet in the stream at the bottom of the falls and I contemplated getting a sno-cone, but we decided to move onwards.

After seeing the crowds at Multnomah Falls we had this image of small children wading in every other water feature the guide book mentioned, so We skipped the next few points of interests. Our next stop was the Bonneville Lock and Dam, which is the grown-up version of the locks we went to in the Seattle area. We got to see a boat lock through — it looked like a small toy boat compared to the size of the lock. I think the locks in Seattle could fit maybe 8 of that size boat, whereas these locks can hold five-barge tows.

We took some pictures of the dam, and then visited one of the powerhouse facilities until they kicked us out. Then we went to go look at the fish ladder and take pictures of salmon and weird eel things that occasionally latched themselves to the window so they wouldn’t get sucked backwards. As we were leaving the facility we decided to check and see if there was anything new in the locks, because they would have finished with the toy boat by now. Sure enough, there was a giant barge pulling into the locks — Travis asked them what they were transporting, and they said they were an empty 2 million gallon oil vessel returning to Vancouver. We decided we wanted to stay until the boat locked through, because they’d have to swing out the car bridge in order to let the barge onto the river and it sounded fun to watch.

After that we decided to head back to Portland, OR. We got the oil changed in the car and then went out to dinner. Travis wanted to try a brewery since our Oregon guidebook has a pub themed chapter, a brewery themed chapter and a winery themed chapter. We parked near the Powell’s Books in Portland, OR (arguably the largest independent new and used bookstore in the world) and found a random brewery restaurant. It turned out to be the same brand of beer we had tried at my uncle’s house 2 days prior (he had mentioned it was from Oregon).

After dinner, we went to Powell’s Books. It was a really cool bookstore, since it’s both used and new books, and it’s really massive so they have a lot of stuff you might not find in your average bookstore. For example, I was looking through the puzzle/sudoku section and I came across a Dodgers themed crossword puzzle book, and when I pulled it out to look at it there was a Dallas Cowboys themed puzzle book behind it. I ended up getting a Japanese number puzzle book and an origami book full of different ways to fold sonobe modules for those origami balls I’m obsessed with. I was sad to discover I had not brought my origami paper in the car (although it was probably good considering I didn’t care about its absense for the first 3.5 months of the trip). I’ll just have to buy some origami paper once I’m back home.

Today we left Seattle, WA and decided to tour the northern Oregon coast before driving to Portland, OR. We started out by driving towards Astoria, OR, which took us through Olympia, WA. I randomly remembered that Olympia was the capital of Washington, so (since I was driving) I decided we were stopping to take pictures of the capitol building and eating some mediocre Mexican food.

After that we continued onward to Astoria, OR. There was a Maritime museum in Astoria, but Travis wanted to look for shipwrecks since the area is nicknamed the “Graveyard of the Pacific” because it has a dangerous bar and a lot of ships have run aground over the years. It was mid-tide and rising towards high tide, so he wanted to look for shipwrecks asap rather than view the museum. We went to the Peter Iredale shipwreck, which ran ashore in 1906. There was not much left (except a lot of children running around it) but it was cool to see. I think it didn’t live up to Travis’ expectations, but it’s fairly impressive considering it’s been washed ashore for over 100 years.

We then decided to drive southward, our primary goal being Meares Cape (for obvious reasons, I hope). We stopped at Cannon Beach, since the books we picked up at the Oregon tourist place mentioned it was one of the most photographed places in Oregon, and I vaguely remember vacationing there in the past. When I was 4~ish, I think my family met my aunt and uncle in Oregon (Cannon Beach, Cape Meares, and some waterfalls). I don’t remember much from the trip other than playing with my etch a sketch (or magnadoodle), seeing the large rounded rock at Cannon Beach, and fireworks my uncle set off. Travis decided that Cannon Beach was like an overactive California Newport Beach. It was really crowded. I think the best part was probably that we managed to snag a free parking spot on the main street through town. We walked to the big iconic rock of Cannon Beach, and then back. Travis had left his trashy shoes at the bottom of the stairs to the beach, half hoping that someone would steal them but alas, no luck there.

Our next stop was the Tillamook County Creamery Association, which is a cheese factory with a self-guided tour and free samples. We checked out the tour and samples, and then spent lots of time in the gift shop figuring out what to eat for dinner. We decided on a chunk of habanero jack cheese, a chunk of garlic chile cheddar cheese, and a sample bag of cubed mixed cheddar, jack and colby cheeses. We picked up a couple packs of crackers, a half pound of peanut butter fudge and a bottle of Oregon wine (from a local Safeway) to complete our local Oregon themed dinner. It was quite delicious. (Picture on the left, but ice cream sampler not included — we tried Tillamook’s Udderly Chocolate, Peppermint Candy and Caramel Toffee Crunch ice cream).

We also went to Cape Meares. I was jealous that it’s so easy to find properly spelled Travis and Teague destinations that I cherish any properly spelled Lindsay or Meares destinations. Cape Meares in Oregon is one of the few properly spelled places I know of in the country, so I insisted we go there for photo ops. I took pictures of the lighthouse (featured at the top of the post, and the right here), and I had to take a few obligatory pictures with the park sign (you might see me hiding on the left side).

Fun times ^.^

When we were in Seattle a month ago one of the things we thought about doing was watch a baseball game at the local stadium. We often consider this idea on our trip (we’ve actually considered rearranging bits of our trip around the LA Dodgers schedule), but thus far the only day we’d actually seen a game was Houston, TX, where we saw a Dodgers vs. Astros game. The second closest time was when we were in Boston and we wanted to go to a Red Sox vs. Rangers game but it was too difficult to get tickets so we just sat outside Fenway for a few innings and got a beer at the nearby bar.

Today we saw our second game of the trip — Seattle Mariners vs. Cleveland Indians. I don’t think either of us have a preference towards either team — Travis wore a LA Dodgers jersey and hat and I wore my Red Sox hat, just to show off our lack of preference. (I think we were both rooting for the Mariners though). The game started off well, with the Mariners taking a 2-1 lead in the first inning, and meanwhile I could see on the outfield scoreboard that the LA Dodgers had taken an early 0-1 loss in their game. The Dodgers were playing at the same time as the Mariners game and I like to heckle Travis when his sports teams lose.

I enjoy going to baseball games although they are more fun when there are more runs/action. I know that a 0-1 game is really great for the pitcher, but as the viewer I tend to prefer games a little more action packed (when I go to live ones, that is). Today’s game did not disappoint with the action, but it was not the home team getting all the runs. The Mariners held their 2-1 lead until the 4th inning, but then the Indians tied it 2-2. In the 5th inning, all went south when there was a home run followed by a grand slam followed by another homer, giving the Indians an 8-2 lead. After that it continued to go downhill, with the Mariners eventually losing 12-3. At least there was a lot of action though! Plus, I got to tease Travis as the Dodgers slipped to a 8-0 loss before pulling it back together for a slightly more respectable 8-6 final score.

I wanted to bring my camera to the game for fun, but the Mariner website said I couldn’t bring in a lens longer than 200mm. My longer zoom lens is 75-300mm and I didn’t feel like risking sneaking it in. I just brought my normal lens and took a few pictures of the stadium in general. Travis decided to try and catch a shot of the Mariner’s Ichiro sliding into 2nd base. I just wish I had brought a longer lens. It was “kids day” at the park, and they had “honorary <>” kids helping out around the stadium. I was jealous of the little honorary photographer kid.

It was a good revisit to Seattle, and we got to see that baseball game we’ve been aiming to see for awhile. Tomorrow we head to Portland, OR for a few days, then begin our descent back into sunny southern California.

Above picture is one of the latter dust devils, since we never saw anything else remotely tornado-like.

Today we decided to hit up a few more places that Travis remembered (or thought he did) from the last time he was in Banff. The first place we stopped was Lake Louise, which had the turquoise waters of yesterday’s Lake Minnewonka, but the mountains in the background had glaciers on them! We again looked into the prices for renting a kayak — Travis guessed (in jest) that it would be $50/hour, whereas I said it would be $40/half hour. Turns out we were both right — it costs $40 for 30 minutes but if you rent for an hour it’s only $50. We walked around the lake a short while then decided to move on.

We next visited Moraine Lake. Travis thought he hadn’t been to Moraine Lake (he only remembered Lake Louise), but later found out otherwise. Moraine Lake is in the “Valley of Ten Peaks”, which refers to the 10 giant mountain peaks rimming the lake. It used to be featured on the Canadian $20 bill, which was what made Travis realize he had been there before. We took a nice walk around the lake to the dead end of the trail, then wandered back. Travis showed off his kayak cost guessing skills by accurately deciding that Moraine Lake would be $10 cheaper hourly and have no listed half hour rate — he was correct! $40/hr for a kayak.

We considered taking a longer hike, either at Lake Louise or Moraine Lake but we ran into a minor issue at Lake Moraine — there was a sign at the trailhead of all the longer hiking trails that said you must have 4 people to proceed because of bears. We tried to figure out why they thought 4 people could defeat a bear but not 2. Perhaps the bear would eat 2 people and the other 2 could run to get help. In the end, we decided to turn today’s journey into an extensive drive rather than a hike.

Our next goal was to find more glaciers. We started driving up the main Banff highway, but we encountered a small detour which involved passing by the ranger station who wanted to check if our park pass was still valid. It had expired 15 minutes earlier. We had to pay another $20 to proceed further down the road (I’m sure we would have had to pay if we had wanted to turn around anyway). Travis decided that since we had to pay another day’s worth of park fees, we better find some awesome stuff to take pictures of. We stopped at an overlook of Crow Foot Glacier, which is named as such because it originally had a 3-forked section which looked like a crow’s foot; however, it had since lost it’s bottom toe.

After that we stopped at Mistaya Canyon, which was a rushing river which dug some a really cool canyon into the rock. We walked around on the canyon rocks a little bit with Travis holding the loop on my camera backpack since apparently he doesn’t trust me to not fall into the river (I do have issues with not tripping over my own feet while walking). We then found the Columbia Icefield, which is actually located just inside of Jasper National Park (as opposed to Banff). We walked up to the Athabasca Glacier — there are signs on the ground marking how large the glacier used to be in years past. We took pictures at the 1992 mark since Travis thinks that’s when he was last there. It was impressive to look at just because you could get so close to it, but they didn’t allow you to walk on it since it’s unstable and people fall into the crevasses and that’s bad.

We also were lucky enough to find another roadside bear — this time a grizzly bear. It actually ran in front of the car and then we u-turned to take window pictures. We’ve been very lucky with animal sightings, except for the elusive moose. Tomorrow we head onwards to either British Columbia, Idaho or Washington — I think it’s one of those “let’s see how far we get before we get tired of driving days.” Should be fun!

Lake Moraine:

Mistaya Canyon:

Athabasca Glacier:

Grizzly Bear:

The next place we stopped at was Bankhead, which is an abandoned coal mining town. It was a 1.1k trail which passed by the broken building foundations and had placards with historical information at points of interest. Halfway through the Bankhead trail there was a fork which lead to some sort of “Crystal Cascades” that were 2.1k away. We decided to see what these cascades were, but it ended up being a very poor idea. We walked and we walked, but all we inevitably found was the main highway and a dried up riverbed. I’m not actually sure if that’s what we were supposed to find, but it was pretty anticlimactic.

After that we went to the Johnston Canyon, which was pretty cool. It was 1.5 miles to the Upper Falls — I know some of my distances are miles and some are km, but the signs vary and I’m too lazy to convert, but anyway, it was a nice path following a river with several waterfalls along the way. What I thought was cool was that some of the path was a metal walkway constructed against the canyon wall so you could walk directly over the rushing water, as opposed to being up on a dirt path above the canyon. You can see the path in the image on the left, and some of the waterfall pictures down below. We also had several animal encounters today (in the form of sunflower seed eating chipmunk and some roadside bighorn sheep).

Waterfall pictures (and a random bench/mountain):

Wildlife Sightings:

The problem with auroras is that not only do you need the sky to be clear, fairly dark (little to no moon), and have reasonable auroral activity over where you happen to be. There’s also certain months where auroras are more common (not July). I had mostly given up with the prospect of seeing northern lights until I looked at the aurora watch website tonight and it showed a big ol’ level 10/10 activity and looked like it *almost* touched where we are in Banff. I then spent the next hour refreshing the aurora page to see if it would move more over Banff and looking out the window to see if anything green appeared in the sky.

Eventually Travis decided we could go for a drive out of the town (to get away from the lights) and to see if we could get a better view of north, since there’s a large mountain directly north of our hotel. We took a drive about 20 miles NW from the hotel and then pulled over at a truck stop to survey the sky. Sure enough, there was a giant faint green-hued circle arcing across the sky. We couldn’t see much definition in the faint light but my camera decided to take some nice shots. I think we are a little too far south to see much aurora action, but it was still neat to go out and actually find something worth taking pictures of.