Trip up North - August 2012

At the end of August Eric and I traveled with Emily and her kids while they made the move from Orem to Vancouver Island, B.C. We were mostly there just to be a support and to have extra drivers to rotate driving during the long drive. Eric and I didn't go through the border, we only had 3 days to make the trip in and besides that, I forgot our passports. The trip was bittersweet. We are so happy for Emily's family and all the neat adventures ahead but we miss them like CRAZY already!

 On the way back to Utah we stopped in Seattle to say hi to Eric's long time friend, Alicia. Then we headed west and made our way south along the Oregon coast. It was GORGEOUS!

 Saturday was our "fun day". We toured around and did some fun stuff. We went to Astoria, OR to some of the locations where Goonies was filmed.

 This was Data's house, which was right next door to Mikey's house - if you even know who or what I'm talking about.

 We stopped at a bay down the road from the Goonies' houses and there were tons of sea lions. I have never seen any wild ones up close before so it was seriously intriguing. They are big! And so funny to watch interact with each other!

 We stopped at Cannon Beach, it was beautiful!

 Then we went and did a little shopping to find me a full body wet suit so I could enjoy boogie boarding in the cold water. We were successful. We found some fun looking waves at Hug Point and went out boogie boarding for a while. It was invigorating and SO incredibly enjoyable!

 Food! Probably my favorite food on this trip was eaten on a pier. We had fresh oyster stew, the oysters weren't even chewy at all, unlike every other oyster experience I've ever had, and clam chowder. Both were divine and warmed our chilled bodies right up. We of course followed those soups up with way too many fish and chips - I don't know why we thought we could eat as much as we ordered.

 In our extremely full-bellied states we headed to Tillamook, OR to hit up the Tillamook factory. I am a cheese fanatic, and although we were stuffed to the brim, we couldn't pass up the cheese sampling table. SO fun!

 Down the road from the Tillamook factory is another cheese factory. We didn't go inside but did enjoy the old farm equipment and the interesting farm animals.

 Someone said their was a large Air Museum nearby. We never did spot it...

 We went on a really cool hike. It is called the Trail of 10 Falls. There are 10 waterfalls you can potentially hike to. We took the slightly shorter route, which was still plenty long, and saw 7 of the 10 falls. It was nice to get the blood moving and exercise off the excess fish and chips, not to mention the GORGEOUS foliage and waterfalls.

 Both nights we found really cool camping spots to sleep at. Camping, at least the way we do it, is so heavenly! We slept completely soundly, perfect temperature, wonderful smells, ah, I wish I could sleep that good every night! The view in the early morning before we had to make the long trip to Provo was breathtaking!

 The road stretched on and on and on! Seriously, although every day we drove a ton, the last day was not near as enjoyable. It really did seem like we were driving forever! I was so grateful my mom demanded she keep the kids, knowing full well they wouldn't enjoy the constant driving.

We were both super tired from having woken up really early the last couple mornings to start our excursions, we had no extra time left to take detours, we finished our Clive Cussler book, which was entertaining us, and we needed to get home to the kids and get things in order for Eric to go back to work the next day. It was a loooooong last day.

 We took one longer-than-5-minutes stop. In the middle of nowhere there were a few old buildings and a couple plaques that told about the place. The buildings housed a bunch of men who worked to build the roadway. There was a picture of their weekly menu, which was pretty awesome, it consisted of maybe 20 items that were mixed up in different ways to make different dishes.