Spring Break Surfing Trip

My wife and I wanted to do something special with our daughters this year for their spring break, and the school district, where my daughters attend school, had their school spring break very late this year. In the past we might have planned a ski trip, but my daughters had spent the entire winter in ski lessons, and were probably ready for a change in their activities. So we decided to take a gamble and try our luck with the weather in mid-April on the Oregon coast. In the past we had camped in a tent on the Oregon coast, and were made very well aware of how bad weather on the coast can make a wonderful place very unpleasant to stay in, so we chose to hedge our bets and make the trip in our new Wolf Creek camper. We have only had our camper for around 6 months, and almost every trip we have taken in it on has been a ski trip, and never longer than 3 nights. Over the winter there had been a few rough times (especially for my daughters) in learning to adjust to living with a family of four in a very small space that sits in the bed of a pickup truck. This was going to be a much bigger adjustment, since we were planning on spending a full week in the camper.

beach swing at Cape Lookout

To keep things interesting I planned for us to stay at 3 different Oregon State Parks along the coast. I organized things so that other than our first day of travel, we would never have more than a 3 hour drive, and we would get to spend most of our time enjoying the parks. We decided to end the trip with a night at the indoor water-slide resort, Great Wolf Lodge in Grand Mound, Washington (this would hopefully give us a chance to get our girls good and clean before we brought them back home).

Beach at Cape Lookout State Park

On our drive down we made a stop in Seaside Oregon at one of the best surf shops in Washington or Cleanline Surf. They have a huge selection of surf gear for sale or rental. We made sure everyone in our family was set up to be able to play in the waters of the cold Pacific Ocean. After gearing up we headed on to our first campsite, Cape Lookout State Park. The park is west of highway 101, between Tillamook and
Pacific City. It is a fairly large state park on a sand spit between that separates the Pacific Ocean from Netarts Bay. Along the Pacific side of the sand spit there is a long beautiful beach that can be accessed with a short walk of a few hundred feed from the park camp sites. The park has full hookups which made life even easier in the camper. The family had fun playing on the beach, but during our stay here the temperature barely hit 50, we had a mix of sun and light rain, and a stiff wind on the beach kept everyone bundled up. No one was too interested in surfing, but my daughters were completely entertained by exploring the beach and hunting for shells.

Looking back to Cape Lookout

After two nights at Cape Lookout we headed a couple hours south to our next location. The second spot we camped at was a tiny campsite, not even large enough to warrant “State Park” in the name: Beachside State Recreation Site. Beachside is about 30 minutes south of Newport, just south of the tiny town of Waldport. We had visited this park about three years prior and stayed in a tent. That visit had been in early summer during a usually hot period when the temperature throughout Oregon and Washington was getting up into the mid 90s; that is until you went to the Oregon Coast, where a mile east of the coast you entered a huge fog bank and the temperature dropped to the low 50s degrees. That trip was rather disappointing, but I remembered the park and wanted to give it another chance.

The best thing about Beachside State Recreation Site is that you can have your campsite literally right next to the beach. Our camper’s back door opened to an amazing view of the Pacific Ocean. With the drive south the weather seemed to improve with mostly sun and

the temperature getting up to the low 60s. After getting settled in at our campsite, we all put on wetsuits, grabbed our boggie boards, and enjoyed hours of playing in the very mild surf. We were the only people venturing into the water, so we must have been quite an interesting site, several other campers at Beachside even took chairs onto the beach to watch our pathetic attempts at surfing.

"RV parking" in Newport

The next day we headed back up to Newport to check out a restaurant that my wife had read about, Local Ocean Seafoods. It’s a fresh fish market and restaurant where you can buy freshly caught fish to take with you and prepare for yourself or have their chefs prepare the days catch for you. We enjoyed and incredible meal sitting outside beside Yaquina Bay in Newport. Then it was back to our campsite at Beachside for some more surfing.

Tillamook Ice Cream!

With our week over halfway though it was time to start heading Tillamook cheese factory and a sampling of their cheese and ice cream. Then about another hour on the road and we were at our final campsite Nehalem Bay State Park. Like Cape Lookout State Park, Nehalem State Park also sits on a narrow sand spit. It was probably the largest of the three campsites, and the quietest with very few visitors. I had a chance to briefly speak with one of the park rangers, who told me that this was breif quiet time before May when things begin to pick up, then from July through September just about everything is booked.

Unlike the other two campsites, the beach was separated from the campsites by a tall sand dune that required a brief hike over to get to the beach. Once on the beach you could walk all the way into the town of Manzanita 2 miles away which is exactly what we did to pick up some supplies and get some dinner.

Our Seaside surf stop

The next morning my wife emailed a friend who is a surfing instructor in Seaside, hoping to get information on
where we should take the family for a day of surfing. She suggested “the cove” in Seaside; basically the far Southern end of the beach at Seaside. It was nice to have the camper to prepare a hot lunch and to have a place to change in and out of our wet suites before surfing. We surfed mild but well-spaced waves until my 6 year old daughter was pretty much warn out. Then packed up everything and headed back to Nehalem Bay State Park for the night.

That night we left our wet suits outside under a canopy, hoping they would dry a bit before we headed back North towards our final stop. Unfortunately that night it rained, and rained hard! The next morning everything was soaked. There was nothing we could do other than lay blankets and towels down all over the camper and load all our wet gear in it.

We drove up North for our final night of the trip, this time in a hotel room at Great Wolf Lodge, where (for me at least) the wave pool seemed rather disappointing after several days of surfing. My daughters both had a lot of fun at the lodge, which seemed to me like a Las Vegas casino for children. After a week in quiet state parks, 1 day was the absolute limit I could handle for Great Wolf lodge, so the next day around noon we headed back home to Seattle.

I look forward to getting to make a similar trip to the Washington coast when the weather gets warmer and perhaps spending a bit more time in just one place.

Holiday Road

This year the week between Christmas and New Years will be spent in Southern California. When I started shopping for plane tickets for this trip months ago it quickly became apparent that plane tickets and rental car were going to cost a fortune. When I compared the cost of flying to driving it suddenly made seemed to make sense to just drive. So our family has decided to boycott the obscenely high cost of plane tickets and instead do our holiday travel by car.

However this morning, while listening to the radio, I was reminded that tomorrow, the day we depart, is the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year. Tomorrow the family and I will be in the car for 11+ hours and there will only be around 9 hours between sunrise and sunset, and this is just the first of 3 days of driving.

We may be spending quite a few hours during this drip in the dark, but I think it will still be a fun family adventure...

Edit: Had to add one more video

The Family Roadtrip

3,300 miles in a car with 2 small children and your wife is not what most people would consider fun, but some strange longing for past childhood memories of summer road trips in the 70s lead me to inflict this on my family. To be honest, my wife was totally on board with the general concept, although I was pretty certain neither of us knew what we were in for. I kept telling friends that this would either be a wonderful trip or the worst trip of my life.

We were going to drive from Seattle to New Mexico and back, camping and visiting family and friends along the way. The plan was to drive 10 hours from Seattle to Bozeman and spend some time with my brother-in-law, then 155 miles down to Yellowstone and camp with my family and my brother-in-law, then 8-1/2 hours down to Steam Boat Lake State Park in Colorado, followed by 8 hours down to New Mexico to spend several days with family in a cabin north of Taos, then 8-1/2 hours East to Dead Horse Point State Park in Utah, followed by 9 hours up to Boise, and finally 8-1/2 hours back home to Seattle.

Sunrise during our early morning start

All of our days on the road (with the exception of our first night in Bozeman and our time spent at the family cabin in New Mexico) would be spent camping. What were we thinking?

The days leading up to the trip were a chaotic mix of trying to get everything necessary done at work and home before the vacation, add to all this trying to make reservations at campsites during the week of Independence Day; one of the busiest camping weekends of the year. After I mentioned my planned trip to a few coworkers, they suggested that I should head out in the wee hours of the morning on the first day, allowing us to reach our first destination with time to enjoy it, and allowing the cars passengers to sleep as we put miles behind us. It seemed like a brilliant idea to me, but my wife wasn’t on board. After a bit of a fight between my wife she very reluctantly agreed to put up with the crazy idea, but was not happy with it at all. We left at 3:30 AM.

The coffee shops opened as we went thought Ellensburg, lunch was in Missoula, and we arrived in Bozeman around 4 PM (even with the change to Mountain Timezone). Bozeman was a great town, and I broke one of my cardinal rules about not having fish more than 300 miles from a coastline and ate dinner at the restaurant my brother-in-law works at, Dave’s Sushi. The next morning we headed out to Yellowstone with my brother-in-law following behind us several hours later. We got to the very busy Yellowstone campsite near Grant Village, and checked in. At check-in we were informed that every couple days a 550 pound grizzly had been wandering through the campsite. The grizzly hadn’t figured out how to get into cars, so it was suggested we store all of our food in our car. After setting up our campsite we headed off to see Old Faithful where we met up with my brother-in-law.

The girls at the entrance to Yellow Stone National Park

The next day we got a late start and headed off to Steamboat Lake State Park in Colorado (just North of Steamboat Springs). Google had routed us South though the Grand Teton National park, though Jackson Wyoming, and eventually meeting up with Interstate 80 for about 50 miles before heading South again into Colorado. Grand Teton National park was filled with a million different views of the same amazing scene of the Tetons. We arrived in Jackson just in time to have a great lunch at the Silver Dollar Bar & Grill. By 4:30 PM it became clear we would not be arriving at our Colorado campsite until fairly late, so we made a stop at the Rock Springs, Wyoming McDonalds to get some quick food for the girls (nothing worse than having hungry AND tired young passengers). Then it was onto I-80 for the only miles of interstate we would drive between Bozeman and Eagle Nest, New Mexico.

Grand Tetons

Unfortunately the desire to really open up our Mazda 5 and see what it could do was too much for Kathy as she got pulled over and ticketed less than 30 minutes before we were to get off the interstate. I think I confused the Wyoming State Patrol officer when I said to him “Oh good, maybe you can help us with some road closures we heard about”. We had seen a sign earlier when getting onto I-80 that said that Wyoming SR-70 was closed indefinitely due to a landslide. I knew our route had us on SR-70 for quite a few miles, but I wasn’t sure if it was before or after our turn off onto the little county road that would take us to Steam Boat Lake. I actually needed to know this, because other alternative plan was continue on I-80 to Laramie or Chyenne and just get a motel room for the night. Unfortunately the officer was no help in this department, but the limited cell service that I had and my iPhone managed to get me enough information to suggest that we would probably be okay. Probably.

view from Steamboat Lake campground

We continued on I-80 for a little longer then onto SR-70. We were listening to the radio and several miles off of I-80 the emergency broadcasting service broke in with a warning of tornadoes in SE Wyoming, “find shelter immediately”. We were in the middle of nowhere, with nothing resembling services anywhere behind or ahead of us. After re-confirming where we were, we decided that the tornadoes where likely quite a ways East of us and we (hopefully) wouldn’t be coming anywhere near them.
We got off or SR-70 in the tiny Wyoming town of Baggs, then proceded to visit increasingly smaller towns of Dixon (population 79) and Savery (population 25). Then the pavement ended. Kathy drove us on the next 2 hours on increasingly rougher dirt roads, up into the mountains, as we continued along the dirt road up into the mountains, we were greeted with views of deer running into the woods as the sun was setting. Eventually we reached the location of our campground, the beautiful Steam Boat Lake.

The next morning we casually prepared breakfast, packed the car back up and headed out. We stopped in Steamboat Springs to get Starbucks and wash the car (unlike 4x4s, Mazda 5s don't look cool when they are totally covered in dirt). As we continued on we decided to stop, for the novelty of it, in Leadville Colorado for lunch. At 10,152 feet Leadville is the highest incorporated municipality in the United States. Then on to Buena Vista Colorado where I was inspired to stop for ice cream by Colorado Twitter legend Steve Garufi.

As we left the mountains of Colorado the drive became increasing more boring was we drove to Questa New Mexico, then to Red River New Mexico, and finally arriving at the family cabin near the tiny town of Eagle Nest New Mexico. We had arrived, and had 3 days to relax, before starting the whole crazy road trip back. But that will have to be another post.