First of all, apologies for taking awhile between posts! Christmas Break went generally well and we haven’t really had any snow days, so didn’t have much to say, to be honest (kids are fine, school is moving along, etc., etc.). However, now that we’re on the other side of maple syrup season, it was time to try out the new fire pit Brooke constructed last Fall.
Over the past few years, we’ve been relying primarily on propane to boil down the sap collected from the maple trees in our yard, but we wanted to try not burning fossil fuels in the process of making our own syrup (seemed somewhat antithetical). The weather has been remarkably good these past few weekends, so we had a few chances to burn some of the firewood we’ve collected from trimming trees in the yard.
Brooke picked up a few serving platters last Summer, partially for Oktoberfest and other hosting duties, but also to help add some surface area to the boiling vessels, hopefully boiling off sap more efficiently. It largely worked, and we were able to burn down sap relatively quickly! …..once the fire got started… Both days, it took a lot longer to get a fire going than we expected, meaning we didn’t really get started with the process until the afternoon.
Again, the weather was so pleasant, it was a nice reprieve from a normal February (though the implications of warmer and warmer Winters is terrifying for a host of other reasons). Still, sitting outside with a beer and a fire isn’t a bad way to spend a weekend.
Brooke also took a hacksaw to the gourds she grew this Summer. Most of them have been inside in our basement drying out, though she left a few outside…because frankly we didn’t notice them, so they’ve just been hanging out? She cut the tops off and ended up with some hollow gourds! The plan is to cut up some of the others and make bowls eventually, but she kind of tested the process this weekend. More on that in the future!
Brooke spent a few hours today refining the sap, heating it to the correct temperature (she plugged info into an online calculator this time, taking atmospheric pressure into account to target the correct boiling point, while not crystallizing the syrup). She ended up with just under 2 gallons, which is better than the 1.13 gallons we got last year. We still ended up going through almost two propane tanks, and more firewood, so again, was it worth it? Dunno.
But I got to have a few beers next to a fire in February. Not too shabby.
Brooke has been wanting to get another round of apple cider made this year before it gets too cold, and this weekend was really the last chance to get that done. Next weekend, the lows are dropping down to the teens once again (it did that a few weeks ago) and we’ve now got a snow chance in the long-term forecast, so really, today was the last opportunity!
Brooke and Calvin did a bit of cider processing earlier in October (mostly our own apples from our tree, as well as a few pears we were able to salvage), but didn’t make as much then as we did last year. This time, we went with two 5-gallon buckets of apples collected from a local seller, as well as some that Brooke’s Dad picked up from one of their properties.
This time, Brooke used a meat grinder to crush the apples before we put them in the press. She quartered them and Meg put them through the grinder, with Calvin scraping them across the cookie sheet toward a bowl for transfer to the press.
The press is always the challenging part, and the kids are amused in trying to crank it just a quarter turn further. The cider presses out, the apple pulp settles a bit, and usually you can crank it just a little bit more. After awhile, we sort of give up, but still keep the rest of the pulp to convert into apple cider vinegar (Brooke was pleased with how it turned out last year!).
While we were outside, we started up the new fire pit and roasted some hot dogs! We got 1.5″ of rain on Friday, so a lot of the sticks were still pretty moist, making it a bit difficult to get a good fire going. We got something out of it, but it wasn’t quite the roaring fire we were hoping for. Still, it was enough to roast some hot dogs!
Ultimately, we ended up with a pretty good haul! The smaller bottles will go in the freezer for smaller volumes. Calvin likes heating up cider and putting a cinnamon stick in it, so this should make it easier for us to make it on a whim without thawing out a ton that’ll go to waste.
Separately from the cider work, Brooke also harvested her gourds. It still may take another 6 months before we can actually make bowls out of them. We’ve got to find a “cool, dry place” for them, which will have to be our basement, despite the fact that it’s only really “cool” and rarely ever “dry.” Still, we don’t have much of a choice of where to put them!
In keeping with hair-brained ideas of what to grow in our garden, and maintaining our theme of producing “sweet things” (i.e. honey and maple syrup), Brooke decided to try growing sorghum. She’d read that the stalks of the sorghum could be ground up using a relatively cheap, electric wood chipper, and then she thought we could use the apple cider press we already had to squeeze the sorghum to juice it.
First of all, Brooke set aside Sunday to harvest the two rows of sorghum she grew. It did a good job “training” the soup beans to climb the stalks, so that kept the vines out of the yard this year. Brooke had to untangle some of that a bit in order to cut the stalks down, then we removed the tassels from the top and the leaves, as those aren’t necessary to get the sorghum goo out (it probably has a technical name, but I’m too lazy to look it up. “Goo,” it is.).
I tossed the leaves back onto the garden plot to let them decompose there, hopefully returning some nutrients back to the soil. We ended up with a decent number of stalks! It’s a bit tough to gather how many more we need in order to make more of the end product but, well….we’ll get there…
The wood chipper we picked up from Harbor Freight did a good job! I haven’t been happy with it for chipping sticks and leaves, as the opening at the top is very narrow (for safety reasons), making it annoying to get wide sticks that have fallen with leaves on them into the thing. For this purpose though, it’s perfect: the stalks are straight, you just shove ’em in there, and they’re chopped up efficiently.
The cider press, however, didn’t hold up its end of the bargain. It worked just fine for apples, especially after we chopped them up a bit, but there just isn’t enough water in the stalks of the sorghum plants to have much “juice” come out! Brooke was able to get a little out, but it wasn’t an efficient method of extraction. So, she had to resort to “plan B.”
She grabbed a big pot she had downstairs and effectively made a “sorghum tea” out of it. This ended up involving soaking the sliced-and-diced stalks in water, then trying to game out when the tea was “done” (i.e. as close to “fully extracted” as we’d get). I’m sure this process could be refined with something like a refractometer, but Brooke was just looking to “pilot” this process and refine it next time. The question was: how much will we get from two rows of sorghum?
Answer? A quart jar. She heated the liquid to 210 F for awhile, which is what she read the right temp was to do the job without causing undue crystallization. The color looked good! The taste isn’t quite as “molasses-y” as I think we expected, but to be fair, molasses doesn’t come from sorghum, so of course it doesn’t taste identical. It’s definitely sweet, though, and sticky. I don’t really pick up as much flavor as I do from molasses, though? There’s a “burnt” quality to molasses that this doesn’t really have. I think Brooke picked up more flavors than I did.
In the end, we didn’t get a ton, so likely isn’t going to be a process we can take advantage of to make enough to sell it or anything. We’ll just have to see how good it tastes in cookies: then we can decide if it’s worth it!
Normally, this time of year, the garden would be running a bit low on productivity, but this year, it sure seems like we’ve got a long(ish) way to go! It sure looks good, too, despite the notable lack of rain this Summer. I haven’t had to water for a few weeks, and the temperatures have been a bit milder recently.
The sweet potatoes are growing well (not really pictured, but just off to the right of this image), but the main story is the bottle gourds…which are apparently a thing?? Brooke picked up these seeds mostly on a whim and they’ve taken over the garden, and there are quite a few gourds growing (three in the image above – we’ve got almost 10, maybe?). I’m still not sure what, exactly, we’re going to do with them. I suppose we could carve one up like a pumpkin for Halloween?
In this shot, we’re still seeing a lot of bottle gourd plant matter (all those big leaves), but we’ve also got some zinnias! It sure took them a long time to get going this year, but Brooke’s had enough to pick here and there to bring into the house. I think she’s still planning on starting a new flower plot next year, so maybe the zinnias will move out there, but for now, randomly interspersed among the gourd plants, we’re still getting something out of them.
The sorghum are still doing their thing, of course. The tassels are mostly brown at the top, but it looks like they have grown secondary stalks, which is something we didn’t expect. The secondary ones are still green, so it may take a bit before we can do anything about them. When Brooke’s ready, we’ll use her new electric wood chipper to process them and see if we can get more than a teaspoon of molasses.
The beans are still coming along, too (pictured a few shots below). Brooke’s working on soup beans, and that will probably continue for the rest of the month. She ended up picking some green beans yesterday, despite the fact that we’d normally be done with them a month ago. She’s canned 9 pints of green beans so far, and she likely got enough for another 3 or 4 more. It wasn’t looking good earlier in the Summer, and we definitely don’t have as many beans as we normally would, but at least we’re recovering a bit compared to previous years!
The tomatoes needed some TLC, so last week, we removed as much of the greenery as we could while still leaving the green tomatoes on. We finally got a few “slicers” to ripen, but we still don’t have as good a haul of those as we have in the past few years. On the other hand, we’ve got a ton of romas this year, so we should be in good shape in the tomato sauce department.
The bell peppers, though…they’re a whole other thing. We haven’t had this good a pepper year since we lived in Iowa, and these last few Summers, I’ve questioned whether it’s even worth planting them because we get only a few peppers, sometimes one or two per plant. Well this year, we’ve got buckets full of them, to the point where the plants are so overloaded that they’re falling over (as seen above).
Those are some nice looking peppers, right?? And we’ve got multiple fridge crispers with more in them. And we’ve been giving peppers away because we’ve got so many. It’s. Nuts.
We’ve still got quite a few romas on the vine, as well as cherry tomatoes, but we’re about out of “big beef”-style ‘maters, sadly. Those are the ones I’d rather have, of course, but so long as we’re getting a lot of the others (and we are), it isn’t a total loss.
The peach haul this year was very disappointing, but the apple trees are actually doing pretty well! We won’t have enough to get a ton of cider out of them from our cider press, but they’ll definitely supplement whatever other apples we get from Peter’s. We’ve also picked some pears, but we aren’t sure they’re quite ready yet. Some are rotting on the tree, while the ones we preemptively pick don’t seem to be ripe. We’ll just keep trying, I suppose!
Last, but not least, the tobacco plant! It’s gigantic, and the flowers at the top are kinda pretty! The leaves started to turn yellow toward the bottom, suggesting that they were ready to be picked.
The leaves have been at a good size for weeks now, but only recently did we think it was time to try and dry a few. Not that we know what we’re doing, but you can see how the edges of the leaves are lightening up relative to the rest of the green centers.
And so, we’ve got some hanging up in the garage attic! It will be plenty warm up there, and hopefully humid enough to dry the leaves without overdrying (which is a concern). The whole point of the leaves are for them to produce smoke when lit, which means they need to be at least somewhat moist. Whether this particular setup actually ends up being the right one or not remains to be seen.
There’s probably a month left before we shut it all down for 2022! We’ve gotten plenty of produce this year, despite the fact that the proportions of fruits and veggies were different than we usually get. It keeps things interesting from year to year, I suppose!
So, we were gone for two weeks in June, and then it took a bit of catch-up time to make the garden not look like a trainwreck of weeds. We’ve been battling Japanese beetles and weeds for a few weeks now, between various trips to Hannibal, Springfield, etc. for a variety of reasons. Brooke was able to get a lot of weeding done a few weekends ago, and I’m trying to clean up other bits where I can during the week.
Firstly, the kale (seen above) remarkably survived this far into the Summer. It actually looks pretty good! But it’s starting to taste extra “kale-y,” so while Brooke harvested some and dehydrated it into powder, she’s not doing too much else with it. The bees tend to like the flowers from the kale plants, so she’s waiting for those to show up before we pull them out.
The zinnias kinda came up, but not nearly as well as last year. Old seed? Supplanted by other things? Who knows. Still, we got a few plants to getmoving.
The zucchini did about as well as they normally do. We got maybe 4 or 5 pretty large zucchini before the plants shriveled up and died, seemingly similar to what happened last year. We’ve still got a few on the plants, though, so we’re hopeful we get to use them.
We also have a few volunteer…somethings out there. Watermelon? Pumpkins? Who knows. We’ll know by August!
Brooke tried planting tobacco, and it appears to be growing remarkably well! Dunno what we’re going to do with it (I have a few friends who like cigars, so figured it’d be interesting to see if we can dry them out and actually do something? Hopes are not high for this to be a useful thing…)
In the above picture, you can also see sweet potatoes in the bottom-left corner. Brooke planted them way later than usual (we still have some potatoes from last year), so I’m having to water them relatively frequently to try and keep them alive. They’ve lasted through a ridiculous heat wave for a few weeks, so we’ll see! They always seem to surprise us.
The tomatoes are doing pretty well! We’re stringing them up like we did last year, and there are a lot of romas and, of course, cherry tomatoes coming on. We’ve seen a few slicer tomatoes on there, but as usual, we don’t do a good job of pruning early on in the growth of the plant, so we should probably have more on there…and they should be riper than they are (too much foliage blocking them).
The peppers are doing pretty well, too! We normally don’t have 6+ plants survive, so it’s kind of remarkable they look as good as they do. They’re pretty good about telling me when they need water (which is near constant…). They were watered before this picture above was taken, though, so I don’t know why they’re complaining. Jerks.
See! Big pepper! We’ve got 5 or 6 big ones like that on different plants right now. So while we don’t have the number of peppers I’d prefer, we sure have a bunch of big ones!
The beans, though, have been a disappointment this year. The season isn’t over yet, but we’ve only ended up with a few handfuls so far, unlike last year or the year before (or any other year, for that matter). The soup beans look alright, but they usually don’t develop much until later in the season.
You can also see Brooke’s sorghum growing in the above picture! They look good! No idea how much molasses she’ll be able to make from that crop, but we’ll see. She’s hoping she can convince her Dad to plant a lot of sorghum at his house, but we need to run a “pilot program” here first to see what we’re looking at. Honey and molasses seem like good things to make, eh?
Last, but not least, the bees live! We’ve got 5 supers on the three hive boxes now, and any time Brooke has gotten into them, they’ve had plenty of brood and capped honey, especially on that big hive. The last time she looked in the middle one, she didn’t see much in the way of brood, but considering that bees are still coming and going, and doing so in an organized fashion, sure seems like the hive is doing better than she originally anticipated. We’re going to extract on July 30th, so we’ll find out soon enough!
The drive to San Diego took about 2 hours, putting us at our hotel right around 5:00. The kids and Brooke went and checked out the pool while I went and picked up dinner (we went with “TV Dinner” night again, which is a popular choice for the kids. I had chips and salsa. It was good.
The next day was going to be our last beach day, and being “Sunny Southern California,” we assumed it’ll be nice and warm! Joke’s on us, though, because the high was still 75 F (while it was still in the mid-90s in Missouri! HAH!), so while the Sun was indeed out, making us feel warmer, we still didn’t really want to get in the water!
We observed some surfers, though, which was cool! It definitely explained why they’re always wearing wet suits when surfing, though, as the water, while warmer than northern California, still wasn’t anywhere near “warm.”
The kids took turn burying themselves in the sand, I took a 2 mile jog along the beach, and Brooke read her book. This was just a public beach we found outside of San Diego (the relatively non-descript “Pacific Beach”), parked in a garage, and then headed back to the hotel to wash up before dinner.
For our last “real meal” of the vacation, before returning to fast food and gas station options, we went to Baja Beach Cafe, which turned out to be quite good. Meg had a cheese quesadilla and Calvin had a grilled cheese sandwich. Everyone was happy.
The next day, though, was a daunting one. The whole reason we went down to San Diego was so that we would “book end” the trip, where the kids saw Canada from across a bay, San Diego would hopefully allow them to see Mexico on the southern border (that’s them waving to Mexico from the car). As mentioned previously, US-101 actually ended in Los Angeles, so we really only went down to San Diego for some beach time, and to complete the journey of the west coast of the US.
The goal was to get to Albuquerque that day, but we ended up making it as far as Santa Rosa, NM. That was 933 miles and 13.5 hrs of driving. It rained, surprisingly, outside of Albuquerque for part of the trip, and it obviously got dark. The kids fell asleep, and hotel options were somewhat limited, so we pushed it, rolling into Santa Rosa at 11:30 pm that night. I’m not going to say it was a “seedy motel,” but as you can see in the picture below, seeds were definitely planted in the swimming pool.
The hotel was fine, ultimately. It’s not like we spent a ton of time there. The next morning, we got up bright and early, leaving before 7:00 am. Calvin got his Taco John’s lunch finally (we got way too much food there), then Sonic for dinner outside of Kansas City, before heading into Marshall around 8:00 pm that night, a total of 760 miles and 11.5 hrs of driving.
When it was all said and done, we’d traveled 5571 miles, hit 14 states, and did it all in 17 days. Would we do it again? Maybe?? It really wasn’t all that bad, and we spaced it all out over the right length of time, with a good break in the middle where we didn’t have to drive as much. I did need an oil change in the Outback pretty much immediately upon returning, and ended up buying four new tires, so I guess we should add that into the total costs on this vacation.
It was definitely the trip of a lifetime, though! We saw just about everything we’d want to see on a trip like that, had a lot of different kinds of experiences, and the kids can say they’ve been to a Disney theme park now, so that’s a win for them.
Alright, the moment you all have been waiting for: Disney.
Brooke picked up a book and used it to come up with a bunch of good ideas, the first of which was that we should stay at a hotel directly across the street from Disneyland. Unlike Disney World, where the only hotels nearby are part of the resort (and are, therefore, crazy expensive), Disneyland is in the middle of Anaheim, so while you could stay at one of their hotels on the Disney campus, you certainly don’t have to. And indeed, the hotel we stayed at was such that we could literally walk across the street and we’d be there, allowing us to come and go as we wanted, and leave our car parked at the hotel, only moving it to go wash the laundry before we left. We also ate dinner at a Denny’s the night we got there, for a reasonable price. We grabbed coffee from Panera or McDonald’s, both of which were only a few doors down. There were a lot of good options if you didn’t want to eat at the park.
The other thing we did was pay extra for “Lightning Lane” access, which was something like $20 extra per ticket, but it provided multiple benefits. Brooke and I both downloaded an app that stored our tickets on it (that way, we didn’t both have to be there at any given point). That app also came with a map of the park that could be zoomed into where you could see what the approximate wait time was at a given ride. Sometimes, the wait was only 10 minutes, but for some rides, it was as long as 70 to 90 minutes.
Some rides, though, have Lightning Lane as an option, which allows you to bypass that main line and get in a shorter one. Newer rides were designed with this in mind, whereas older ones like Walt Disney’s Enchanted Tiki Room weren’t. Also, importantly, you could only do this once per day per ride, so if you wanted to right Hyperspace Mountain (which, duh), then you can only “Lightning Lane it” once, and you have to wait through the regular line for the next time. So yeah, we did our best to “game the system a bit,” getting there right when the park opened, and trying to target the big rides early.
I’m getting ahead of myself a bit, though. We got there on Monday, June 13th and had tickets to the park for 3 days. The plan was to arrive at the hotel late that morning, grab a quick bite to eat, then go to the park and see what we could see, that way we’d have a full day there on the 14th (Flag Day!) where we could target the rides we really wanted to hit. Then, June 15th would be spent at California Adventure, before leaving that afternoon and heading toward San Diego to finish out the trip.
The first thing we did was hit up Pirate’s Lair on Tom Sawyer Island (because, duh), and then we “Lightning Laned” Haunted Mansion (which freaked Calvin out tremendously). During the time we had the “LL” on, we couldn’t “LL” anything else: once we redeemed it, then we could apply it to another ride. (Also, side-note, you can split the tickets up, so if Brooke and Meg wanted to ride one thing, and Calvin and I wanted to ride another, we could do that).
Generally, we stuck together to hit most of the rides, sometimes twice. The morning of the 14th, for example, we saw Hyperspace Mountain had practically zero line, so we tried heading there first, but then we noticed that Buzz Lightyear Astro Blasters had literally “zero line,” and it was right next door, so we hit up Buzz Lightyear first. By the time we were done, Hyperspace Mountain only had a 20 minute wait, so we canceled the LL we’d applied to it and instead applied it to Matterhorn Bobsleds, that way we could still LL Hyperspace Mountain again later in the day if we wanted to (read: we totally did).
A brief side-bar on Hyperspace Mountain. The day before, when we did Haunted Mansion, Calvin got scared. Dark spaces like that caused him to, oh, freak out a bit. So when we were waiting for Hyperspace Mountain, he worked himself up into a frenzy because a). it’s dark in there, and b). it’s a rollercoaster, and every Disney ride would say “dark spaces with sudden drops,” or something to that effect. We did everything we could to calm him down, but ultimately he started to refuse to get onto the coaster, so the attendant (who’d surely seen this 1000 times…) offered he could cross over to the other side and not actually ride it, waiting for us. He jumped at that chance immediately, so the three of us went on it (and it was awesome), and Calvin waited for us. Later in the day, though, after having ridden other, similar rides, he’d gotten more comfortable with the idea, so he did ultimately ride Hyperspace Mountain, and I think he wished he’d ridden it earlier so he got to ride it twice.
So yeah, the Lightning Lane thing was totally worth it. We got to ride everything we wanted to, and it was relatively seamless. They even canceled our LL for Splash Mountain because they had to shut the ride down, so it gave us a free LL that we could reapply, giving us an extra that we could apply without having it affect the total tally. Score!
By the time we were done with June 14th, we’d done just about everything at Disneyland that we’d wanted to. Honestly, for June 15th, we weren’t expecting much out of California Adventure, but there were a few things we were curious about. All of the Star Wars stuff is over in Disneyland, as well as the more traditional “Disney things” like Peter Pan, Pinocchio, etc. Pixar stuff (aside from Buzz Lightyear) and Marvel stuff are over in California Adventure.
Similarly to over in Disneyland, we tried to “game” the Lightning Lane system, zipping directly to the Incredicoaster as the first ride, while applying the LL to something else we’d want to see afterward, allowing us to LL Incredicoaster again later (narrator: they did). I think most of us decided that Incredicoaster was the best ride we went on between the two parks. There were other good ones, for sure (for example, Hyperspace Mountain was great…the first time….but the second time, some of the “magic” was lost. Incredicoaster was awesome both times). Incredicoaster is a relatively long roller coaster, so it lasts for a bit, but importantly, there’s a loop-de-loop.
Meg noticed this when we were in line for it. We had to “shush” her so she wasn’t too loud, as we didn’t want Calvin to notice…. 😉
Still, both the kids loved it. Calvin was definitely apprehensive, but this roller coaster wasn’t in a dark building, so he could see it from the outside, which helped quite a bit.
Other rides there were cool, like the Guardians of the Galaxy (which is a re-skinned Tower of Terror), and the Pixar Pal-A-Round (which is “just a ferris wheel,” but the gondolas you sit in slide around more, so there’s a lot more movement), but by the time we were through California Adventure, I think we’d seen and done just about everything we’d wanted to. It had gotten hotter as the three day stint went on, so we were pretty tired and drained.
We headed back to the hotel (late….Brooke mis-read the check out time….), packed up the car, and headed back to California Adventure for lunch and a few more rides before leaving for San Diego! Below, I’ve typed in the names of all the rides we went on, mostly for posterity’s sake in case I need to look it up some day to tell somewhat what we did. It’s a pretty solid list – we hit just about everything at least once!!
We used Smith River as our “base of operations,” where we could head out and see other things in northern California. We had a few options for how to schedule things, but we wanted to give the kids a “beach day,” more or less, however we figured that Friday would be the better option, so we should see some stuff on Thursday, June 9th. Our first destination was Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park, which is not a part of the national park, but still has a ton of redwood trees. These are things Brooke and I got to see on our Oregon Trail trip back in 2015, and we thought it was cool enough that the kids should probably seem them at some point.
We didn’t want to do anything too strenuous, lest we end up with a minor revolt, but we stopped in at a visitor center (there are multiple) and asked what would be a good option. We found a 2-ish mile section that would take us out near the trees, close enough to hug them.
The only “wildlife” we saw were tons of banana slugs. We had to be careful we didn’t step on any. The biggest ones we saw got maybe 6 inches long, so Brooke was absolutely thrilled about that!
Similar to Devil’s Tower, I’m not sure the kids were totally impressed by the size of the trees, but they humored us and posed for some pictures. I think we only passed maybe one other family while we were out there, so it was a pretty secluded hike, which is always nice.
If anything, some of the dead trees we saw were more impressive to the kids, such as this root system from a tree that had fallen over years ago. We’ve got another picture of the kids standing on a stump that’s absolutely gigantic, but I’ve got enough pictures here already, so this is the one you’re getting.
We only spent an hour or so out hiking, and the weather was absolutely gorgeous, so it was a good activity to kill some time while we were in the Pacific northwest!
After the State Park, we found a picnic table overlooking the ocean to have lunch at while we made our way to our next destination, Battery Point Lighthouse.
We’ve wanted to go up in a lighthouse for years. We’ve been near them and seen them, and visited one when we were in Puerto Rico, but we’ve never been able to actually go up in one and get that perspective. Brooke found this one and saw they had tours, and it was less than an hour from Smith River, so score! The other interesting thing about it was that you could only get to the lighthouse at low tide, as there’s a rocky path you have to cross to even get there, so it definitely depends on the time of day for when to go.
We ended up having to wait for a school group to go through their tours first, as they can only allow a limited number of people up at a given time. It’s a relatively efficient operation, though the four people conducting the tours were clearly overwhelmed by the high school students they weren’t expecting. After waiting about 30 minutes, we got to go in, paid for the tours, and then were shuffled through different rooms to learn about the history of the lighthouse. The cool thing is that this lighthouse still has people living in it, and it’s one of the oldest that has been in continuous operation and had a continuous tenant. The tour guides told us that it’s usually staffed by retirees who live there for a month at a time. The lighthouse was originally set to be fully decommissioned, but the Crescent City historical society took it over and is maintaining it now.
The tour itself didn’t take all that long, but it was cool to go up and see things from their perspective! The kids ended up liking this one a bit more, as I think the tour guides gave them a bit more attention than we were giving them…..
We got back home around 4:00 pm, so we went down to the beach for a bit, and then the kids came up and hopped in the hot tub. Again, the water is relatively cold and it was cloudier that day, so not particularly pleasant for swimming…
The next day wasn’t much better, but the kids were promised a “beach day,” so a “beach day” they would have! Really, the kids just worked on digging a hole, and spent nearly all day doing it. Brooke went up to find a laundromat in Brookings, OR, which was just across the state border, so I was down with the kids for part of the morning, and then Brooke took over for some of the afternoon when I took the car for a vacuum and car wash, and also check out a nearby liquor store to stock up on Northeastern US beers (nearly all IPAs, of course).
That evening, we mostly hung out in the hot tub, but we kept an eye on the hole Meg and Calvin had worked on all day, so when high tide came in around 9:00 pm, Brooke took the kids down to see if it would fill. That hole was still there the next morning! They did a good job!
By the time June 11th rolled around, it was time to leave Smith River and start making the trip down to San Francisco. This was a longer driving day, as we needed to go over 350 miles, but we had a few stops in mind. One of them was Meg’s substitute for not getting to do the sea lion cave, but before that, we had to drive through a redwood tree. So we did. 🙂
Meg decided she wanted to stop by Confusion Hill, which was…an odd place… It reminds me of a tourist trap like you’d find outside of Branson, where they’ve got some stuff there to do, but they’re really just trying to sell you kitschy souvenirs (incidentally, the one place we saw a US-101 sticker for our cartop carrier was there, so it’s a good thing we stopped!).
The thing Meg was most excited about was the “gravity house,” which no, isn’t a house where there’s no gravity, but it’s built (?) in such a way that it’s all sideways, so when you walk through it, you kind of lose your sense of orientation. We paid actual, United States legal tender, money to do this. In this author’s view, it wasn’t worth it…..but I digress…
Another 4 hours in the car later, we made it to San Francisco! Brooke found a hotel that was down near Alcatraz, which was to be the next day’s main activity. This was good because the hotel was centrally located and it had on-site parking.
However, when we actually arrived, that on-site parking was full. This was not good. Brooke kinda had a meltdown trying to navigate San Francisco traffic while we figured out what to do. Ultimately, I hopped out and asked the hotel desk clerk where we should go, they directed me around the block, we went and parked the car and it wasn’t a big deal.
That night, we went to an Italian restaurant that wasn’t absolutely full (it was, after all, Saturday night in San Francisco). The food was solid, we only had to walk to get there, and it still allowed us to hit up Ghirardelli that night (which was something of a bribe to keep the kids in line…). We got some overly expensive ice cream (that took too long to get), as it was quite crowded, but still had time to grab some chocolates for the trip home. Score again!
On the way, we finally saw some seals. See, Meg? We didn’t need to stop at the sea lion cave! These were close enough. 😉
The way Alcatraz is set up was interesting. You can walk around most of the property, though some of is has fallen to disrepair, so you can’t go everywhere. Most of it is set up as a self-guided tour, where they give you a glorified phone that you can listen to through a speaker.
This part of the tour, though, got a bit annoying. One of our four tour devices wasn’t working, so Brooke and the kids started and I went back and grabbed one. Then, of course, I started listening, but now I was at a different part of the recording than they were, so they had to pause eventually for me to catch up. We’d also have to pause sometimes as large groups would have to listen to their recordings, as they were standing in a space that we were ready for, but couldn’t actually progress to until they moved on. It all worked, I suppose, and I’m not sure what else I would have done? It’s probably better than trying to pay tour guides to be out there and physically walk groups through every 20 minutes, as this method just lets the tours start in a rolling fashion.
The recording itself was pretty interesting, though. It was told from the perspective of some of the guards and some of the inmates, so you kind of got both sides of the story (certainly in a more “sanitized” fashion…). We were also impressed that the National Park Service had an exhibit up highlighting the issue of mass incarceration in the United States, so that allowed for a “teachable moment” we could have with the kids later on.
There were other written parts of the tour, and as Meg is our designated Tour Guide Reader, she had to read some of those bits for us.
I’m glad we did the tour, for sure, but I think Brooke was maybe a little disappointed. The tickets were relatively expensive for what we got (a self-guided tour and a whole bunch of people slowing us down), but we got a to-and-from ferry ride, so that was nice. It was a fine way to spend a morning, and we could check one more box off the West Coast Tourist Bucket List!
The last thing we did before leaving was hit up Pier 39, which was some kind of cross between shopping mall and amusement park? We grabbed lunch and then started the drive to our next destination, which ended up being an AirBNB in Oxnard, CA. Our options were kind of limited, and this stretch was really the only one we hit that had a decent amount of traffic. We wanted to stay in Santa Barbara, mostly because that’s where “Psych” is set (even though no aspect of the show was ever filmed there…), but hotel prices and AirBNB options were ridiculous, even for southern California. We found a place in Oxnard, though, that allowed us to spread out into a few bedrooms before we’d all be locked in a traditional hotel for the following three nights.
And where was that, you may ask? A hotel directly across from Disneyland! More on that, next time.
By this point, Brooke was using her specialized Pacific Coast Highway Road Trip travel guide to find things to do along the way. She picked it up in late May and skimmed parts of it, but hadn’t really looked at it too much because we wanted to remain flexible: find things we may want to do, but nothing that we’d plan an entire trip around. It was helpful in finding some things near places we thought we’d stay, but wasn’t organized as well as we’d have liked. For example, it had “northern Oregon” and “southern Oregon” sections of the book, but they weren’t all logically laid out in order as you’d pass them on US-101, so you had to bounce around a bit to find where things were organized. Not the end of the world, but could have been better.
One of the things she found was the Tillamook Creamery in Tillamook, OR, which is west of Portland. It seemed to hit a lot of the things we were looking for: a “halfway through the day” kind of stop; a self-guided tour; they made cheese, which all people like; and ice cream, which again, all people like.
There were a lot of people there! We didn’t see any literal tour buses, but it sure seemed like the place a bunch of elderly people would do as they traveled in buses to tourist destinations. The operations of the cheese factory were interesting, we got some free samples, and they had a few children-centric exhibits to check out (the kids milked a “cow,” for instance).
After that, we continued on to Florence, OR to stay the night. We stopped off at a beach to see Thor’s Well, which was kind of cool, but really only gave us 15 minutes to kill before we went into town for the night. We dropped off stuff at the hotel and went to Rosa’s Mexican Restaurant, and that was very nice. For once, we were at a hotel before 9:00 pm, so that was a plus!
The next day, again, we had to make it just under 200 miles until we reached Smith River, CA, which is where we were going to stay for another 3 days. That meant we had some time to kill, but more importantly, some opportunities to see and do some fun stuff. One option was a sea lion cave that Meg really wanted to do, but the timing of making that work would have meant some substantial backtracking, and we figured we’d see some other places along the trip (also, the time of year we were there wasn’t really the best time to see sea lions, apparently). Another option was renting a dune buggy to drive over some sand dunes.
First, some background. I watch quite a few car videos on YouTube, and one I ran across last year (after we knew we were doing this trip) was one from Driving Sports TV where the host drove a Subaru Outback like ours on some sand dunes in Oregon. Apparently, as I learned then, Oregon Dunes National Recreation area is “a thing,” where you can take your vehicle, ATV, buggy, or whatever and just drive on some sand dunes, including along the beach! Which sounded really cool!
Brooke saw some rental locations in the book she was reading, I called one up, and they had a few slots available relatively early the next morning as we were heading down to Smith River! As you can see in the satellite image above, the dunes we went to are relatively large and give you access to the ocean (we went to Spinreel Dune Buggy and ATV Rentals), but we only wanted to commit an hour to this part of the trip. If we did a two hour rental (or longer), then we could have taken a buggy to the ocean and driven along it, but alas, not this trip. We went through a safety training video and had someone draw on a map where we should go with an hour to spend: if we went past the hour mark, we’d have to pay for another hour, so we didn’t want to go too far.
It was fun! As I’m not a huge fan of heights, I was a bit wary of trying to drive up the big, steep dunes, but Brooke was more willing to give it a go (note: we didn’t die). I was more willing to drive faster in open spaces, so we both piloted the buggy in different ways, which was nice. We wore jackets because it was relatively chilly. It cost a decent chunk of change to do it, but it was totally worth it!
This was at Spinreel before we went out on the buggies. I don’t know what Calvin was doing, but I made a GIF of it. Enjoy.
We left Spinreel and went to Coos Bay, OR, where we had lunch at 7 Devils Waterfront Alehouse. The food was good (I had fish tacos) and the beer was nice, too! We started stocking up on beer at this point to bring back to share with folks, as most of the beers up there, you can’t get in Missouri.
We drove for another 2 hours and stopped at a beach about an hour outside of our final destination. The house at Smith River wasn’t ready yet, so we stopped a beach near Myrtle Creek, OR to kill some time. We also started using our new Cliq folding chairs that Brooke found. I can’t get over how awesome these things are. We wanted something compact that we could take without sacrificing room in the car. Four of them fit in an approximately 6″x10″x20″ bag, which is nuts. Were they ridiculously expensive? Yes. Was it worth it? Also yes.
We made it to the house at Smith River by 6:30 that night. It’s something of a “resort cabin,” meaning the houses were all relatively close together and, because of that, they were all smaller than maybe we’d have preferred, but we got a room and the kids got a loft with two twin beds, so it was better than nothing.
Importantly, this place was right on the beach, so we could walk down the stairs and we were there. Again, it was kind of “shared space” in that anyone from our “resort” could walk down there, but it was a pretty secluded beach and we rarely saw other folks. Mostly, just people out for a walk. We didn’t even really see many families out there.
The sunset was pretty nice, too. Especially from a hot tub.
We spent the next few days using the house as a launching point for other adventures. More on that next time!
The (ongoing) pandemic forced us to make some adjustments to vacation plans, where 2020 was supposed to be a trip to Yellowstone, but was unfortunately cancelled, leading us to instead head to some Missouri State Parks near Ironton, MO. We were able to do Yellowstone last year, then, which is actually fortunate for us because had we tried doing that this year, we would have been shut down again because a metric ton of rain ended up hitting the park, causing them to close practically the north half of the park for the foreseeable future.
Luckily, then, we just had to shift things by one year, putting us on track for the next destination on the list: Disney(something). Brooke and I both went to Disney World in our youth (decades ago…..ug, we’re old….), and that experience becomes a whole thing when you look into costs (indeed, we decided we’d rather spend the money on plane flights to Puerto Rico than spend it on a week at Disney in Florida…).
Now, Disneyland, though, that sounded more reasonable: it’s a smaller park, it has fewer “sections” (there’s no Epcot or Animal Kingdom, for example), and lodging is far more reasonable and way closer, so parking is less of an issue.
So, Disneyland became the target: the question was what else we do to make it align with the “spirit” of our other vacations (e.g. mountains, driving, beaches….an experience). Well, as we tend to do, we just decided to do all the things!
We made the call to do the Pacific Coast Highway, which goes by a few names depending on which section you’re on. US-101 starts up near Seattle, WA and continues down to California, where eventually CA-1 takes over as the “PCH,” which then returns to meet US-101 again further South. Eventually, US-101 ends as it merges with I-5, effectively at Los Angeles, CA.
Obviously, this was going to take a lot of time, but thankfully, Brooke’s job now affords a bit more flexibility so she can be gone for a ridiculously long vacation. She got some books and plotted out the basics of how far we’d go each day, what the lunch/hotel strategy should be, and we did our best to book it to and from the West Coast, and then spend more time on US-101 where possible, including 3 days at a house overlooking the beach.
So on June 3, Brooke worked the morning while the kids and I finished prepping the house and loading some stuff up. We left just after noon that day with a goal of getting to Sioux Falls, ND. Had Brooke worked more that day, we probably would have just stopped at Sioux City, IA, but with timing, we opted to go further, get in later, but then have a bit more time the next day in South Dakota. After nearly 8 hours and over 400 miles, and a stop for dinner at an overcrowded Pizza Ranch, we made it to Sioux Falls right around 9:30 pm.
And then we promptly crashed for the night, only to get up and do it all again!
However, this time, we were going to stop at a few icons of a classic road trip experience to help break up the day a bit. The goal this time was to get to Billings, MT, as that would set us up where we could get to (or near) Seattle the next day so we could begin the real vacation.
We drove for about an hour before we got to Mitchell, SD, so we could see the Corn Palace. This is a place Brooke and I both experienced growing up in various capacities, so really, we were only subjecting our children to it because that’s what happened to us. I’m not sure they really “got it,” so much, but it was an odd distraction that they can hopefully look back on and think, “you know, I don’t really know why we went to that weird corn place.”
We then hopped back in the car (after getting me some more coffee and talking to a rando at the coffee shop about how expensive farming is now….his idea, not mine) and headed to Wall, SD to visit the infamous Wall Drug, another experience Brooke and I had decades ago. This one didn’t really live up to Brooke’s memory of the place, though, so she was a bit disappointed that there wasn’t much to do except walk through it and buy things we didn’t need. The kids got to sit on a jackalope though, so there’s that.
We ate lunch out of the back of the car (which was the intent – we borrowed Mom and Dad’s smaller, but good, cooler and tried to pare down what we’d actually eat and what we actually needed to keep cold). A brief aside, we used the cartop carrier, as always, but Brooke had us all pack as light as we could, so shockingly, we were able to see out of the back of the car nearly the entire time! This is a first for us.
The next leg was a 2 hr drive to Devil’s Tower National Monument in Wyoming. This one took us off I-90 a bit, but it was worth the trip. Brooke had been there before, but I’d never seen it. I think the kids were ready to be done driving for the day, so while I think they “liked it,” part of their attitude smelled of “why are we here again?” There were a lot of people there hiking around the Tower, many of which had been in Yellowstone, so we saw a lot of t-shirts (and I was, coincidentally, wearing mine from last year’s trip). I think we hoped there’d be a bit more of a National Park Service presence there to see some exhibits, but it was a pretty small operation and there were a lot of people, so we didn’t stay more than an hour.
On the ride out from Devil’s Tower, we had our first real experience with “late afternoon rain.” Nearly every day we were in the Northwest, rain hit, and to the point where it was difficult to see where we were driving. We weren’t on I-90 yet, but we could see plenty of dark clouds off in the distance. Calvin had been complaining about his loose tooth for a few days now, so he had a granola bar for a snack. Of course, on a two-lane road with threatening thunderstorms, he lost it 🤦♂️. We pulled off in the parking lot of a remote Reservation casino so he could spit it out onto the ground and look for the tooth. Brooke decided to not do that, so she handed him a dollar and we kept driving.
Ultimately, we made it to Billings, MT right around 8:00 pm MDT. We went to an Applebee’s for dinner to use a gift card Brooke had from Christmas, which actually was pretty solid because all four of us could easily find something to eat and not complain about it. Night #2 where we got to the hotel after 9:00 pm. At least this time we got beers and margaritas before bed…
The next day was June 5th….and we did nothing but drive. 12.5 hrs of driving. 853 miles. We were tired, but made it to Lacey, WA, which is just south of Seattle by (you guessed it) just after 9:00 pm PDT. That night, we went to Wendy’s so we could all get Frostys.
Another brief aside: this whole trip, Meg branched out in her eating quite a bit. She actually had a quesadilla and didn’t complain about it! She had chicken tenders and didn’t complain (much) about it! She went to Jersey Mike’s and had a veggie sandwich…and didn’t complain about it! So proud.
So, now we were on June 66h, and the goal was to make it around the northwestern part of Washington, as pictured below:
So obviously, we didn’t have to do that. We could have just cut to the West from where we stayed in Lacey that night. But that’s not what US-101 does, and if we’re doing the whole thing, then we need to do. The. Whole. Thing.
It took us 7 hours to make that trip, though we did stop at a few spots along the way, including Olympic National Park.
Honestly, there wasn’t much to see there? It was an oddly laid out park, in that some parts of it were a decent distance away from the main visitor center office. It’s like it was laid out in patches near Port Angeles, WA. Still, we hiked up to a water fall and experienced some shockingly cool weather, compared with the 95 F that Missouri was experiencing around that time (we missed out on a nearly 2 week long heat wave in Missouri. Our plants all survived).
We drove awhile until we got to Ruby Beach, which is one of many state parks along the Pacific to keep the beaches public. It was the first time the kids saw the Pacific Ocean! They also noted how cold the water is. We wanted to stop a few times like this to make sure they notice how the beaches change as we make our way down the Coast, so it seemed as good a place as any to stop.
Lastly, we arrived in Aberdeen, WA, where we stayed at an AirBNB. Part of this calculus was because our destination in Washington that we were originally going to stay at for 3 days ended up getting sold a month before we left, so our reservations weren’t necessarily guaranteed. That place had laundry services available, but the place Brooke had to replace it with didn’t, so we weren’t going to make it with the 6 changes of clothes each of us brought along for the trip. She found a house in Aberdeen that had a hot tub and a washer/dryer available, so we took the opportunity to just do that and spread ourselves out a bit for a night. We also went to Breakwater Seafoods & Chowder for dinner that night, which was quite good.
The next day featured a 6 hour drive! But we’ll save that for Part II.
