The National Park, not the Games.
We’ve been waiting a long time to get here, and it was well worth waiting for. With an RV, the journey is just as much fun as the destination (except the white-knuckle descent into Death Valley from the west), but our 10 blah days in Oregon left us really, really excited to press on and get to the park. We had big hopes that simply didn’t live up to the grandiose expectations we had set, and we were eager to get into Washington and experience the wonders that the Olympic Peninsula had in store.
The Oregon coast held very big hopes for the both of us and we’ve been anticipating touring the Pacific Northwest since we began our RV adventure in the fall of 2011. Years of seeing tourist information and hearing the stories may very well have raised our expectations higher than our journey was able to fulfill.
Craggy rocks, check.
Voluminous fog, check.
Piles of aged driftwood strewn along the beaches, check.
Small seaside towns and harbors, check.
Yet, somehow the whole did not exceed the sum of all of these parts as expected.
Alternate post title: WHEW, we made it home.
First the cruise, then a couple fun days in Key Largo snorkeling the reefs in Pennekamp State Park with Colette’s friend Angela, then a couple very full days in Key West diving on my buddy Silk’s boat.
With our time in Florida and the Bahamas finally over, it’s nice to get back to Northern California! No more 83 degrees at 0500. No more bugs. No more staying up too late and getting up too early. No more extroverting.
Have you ever come back from a vacation, and realized you needed a vacation to recover from vacation?
We’re now on our third leg of the vacation (the Keys) to recover from the vacation (the Bahamas) that was supposed to help us recover from vacation (Shelby visiting us in California). I’m tired just typing it!
Sometimes it’s nice to take a step back and get back to your roots. Since it’s not often that we make it to the Midwest, we decided to do a big family road trip and try to hit as many people as possible in one shot. Ditch Bighaus in storage south of San Jose, park Jeeperz at the San Bruno BART station, hop a train to catch a flight out of San Francisco into into Minneapolis to spend three days with Colette’s folks, drive to southern Wisconsin and spend a couple days with her brother, then drive to Ann Arbor to spend a few days with my folks, with a quick stop in Grand Rapids to have dinner with my cousins. Toss a couple days at Silk’s house in and cap it off with a flight out of Detroit back to San Francisco, and that makes for a crazy ten days.
