Travel Journal
-
Manzanita, OR
One more strategic stay-in-place night for the weather to clear. At one point, Rett voiced what I’d been feeling, which is that it felt bad to just be hanging out in our motel room watching HGTV (or blogging) when there was the edge of the globe’s largest ocean continually arriving right outside our door. But… Read more…
-
Astoria, OR to Manzanita, OR
We loved Astoria so much, we just needed to find a way to stay a little longer: morning laundry! And hey, even the laundromat was top-notch and modernized, with a credit-card computer that would let you start your machine directly from the panel. Fancy! Ok, seriously, we knew we wanted to wait a bit longer… Read more…
-
Astoria, OR
Weather along the Pacific Northwest coast is nearly rain-free for the entire month of August, and mostly clear through September. But October is the month where everything falls off the cliff, with rain being near constant by the end of the month. So we have a strong motivation to get south as quickly as we… Read more…
-
South Bend, WA to Astoria, OR
43 miles, a bunch of hills, and not a single bit of services between our endpoints. We knew that almost-desert Eastern Washington has super-empty wide-open spaces, but apparently southwestern Washington does too. That means the day was pretty uneventful until it got super-eventful. Heading out from our stealth lunch spot on someone’s for-sale land, I… Read more…
-
Satsop, WA to South Bend, WA
The morning continued on a totally empty country road, one that was unusually filled with a lot of “country”: those relatively rare areas in Washington where areas of trees are cleared around a river valley, opening it up to farming in a way that makes it feel more like the eastern half of the country.… Read more…
-
Belfair, WA to Satsop, WA
The continued requirement to compensate for our lack of preparation meant we stuck with the familiar, continuing our 2020 route along the Hood Canal, and even the gray skies mostly matched our memories. There would be only one “grocery store” along today’s route, but when we stopped at the Union City Market, it had more… Read more…
