[sic]

Coast to coast at last, though it may be a stretch to call the Chesapeake one of the coasts, and an even bigger stretch to lead off with a Lewis & Clark expedition quote.  But it was pretty cool to see the Pacific again through the windshield.

We headed northwest from Bend into what appeared to be a new and thicker blanket of forest fire smoke.  It was smoky enough this time that we could actually smell it, and the mountains on either side of us weren’t visible.  Still though, it was a gorgeous drive, which speaks volumes about that area.

This was the first time we returned to sea level(ish) in several weeks, and I was struck once again by how little the Davista/Toad beast enjoys grades, whether ascending them or descending.  Though driving in general has become much easier, with respect to total attention required, than when I wrote my first semi-panicked post about it, this does not hold true for going up and down.  I’ve become acutely aware of any elevation change in a road and try to roll considerations thereof into my planning, though sometimes there’s very little choice.  Steep downhills are the most nerve-wracking I think.  Steep and long downhills even more so.  Though climbing steeply is a grind, it doesn’t feel dangerous, just slow.  Going down anything more than about 6% of grade, however, will push us into 2^nd gear and 4500+ RPM in order to maintain a reasonable speed without using excessive brakes (which would, of course, be worse).  I’ve read that this is fine and the preferred technique to tackling hills, but when I start pushing 5000 RPM it just doesn’t feel right.  I figure something is taking up all that strain I’m feeling, whether it’s the transmission, the engine, or something else.  Maybe I’m just not used to it.

At any rate, we crossed the Cascades and descended all the way into the Willamette Valley, and thereafter the short (but steep) Coastal Range to the Pacific.  It was interesting to watch the vegetation change as we crossed quickly from the “dry” side of the state to the “wet” side.

The weather wasn’t the best, but we had expected that.  Pretty much from San Francisco north to Canada they were expecting a few days straight of cooler temperatures and rain.  Sorely needed in the fire-scorched Pacific Northwest, but not ideal for our Oregon Coast excursion.  On the other hand, we were due for some rain – we’ve had very little on our trip — and what better region than the Pacific Northwest to experience some?

Due to previously mentioned time constraints and some dawdling in Park City, we’d had to distill our Oregon Coast time to one site from three, and we opted for Seal Rock, just south of Newport and north of Yachats (go ahead, try to pronounce that.  WRONG!) and Cape Perpetua.  We’re in a somewhat old school private RV park rather than a State or National Park, but there’s wi-fi and the view is stunning, with the beach right across the street.  “The street” in this case is Highway 101, but out here it’s pretty easy to cross, unlike, say, at Cahuenga Pass in LA.

Our first order of business upon setting up was to throw on some rain shells and head down to dip our feet into the Pacific, high winds and sideways rain be damned.  Woodsprite wouldn’t even put on sweats (but quickly regretted her obstinacy).

The next few days were quite different than all that had come before, and as such marked well the beginning of the “coastal” part of our journey as opposed to the “mountain” part which we’d just finished.

One of the things I had been looking forward to for quite some time was taking Keeper salmon fishing, and hopefully filling an ice chest or two with the fresh pink/orange stuff, not to mention having it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for several weeks.  I’d planned out our Oregon Coast stops based at least partially on river mouths, reasoning that late September would be just about right for the salmon to be heading in from the ocean, netting us a high probability of a decent catch from the shore.

There are several flaws in that reasoning, the most significant of which being this is me we’re talking about, and evidently I reek of salmon repellent.  Also lessening our odds, though, was the fact that our time constraints limited us to one river (the Alsea, which is ok for salmon but not a front-runner, I learned afterwards).  And lessening them further were the tide / time of day considerations and our non-willingness to rent a boat to get where the salmon were.  Somewhere in the recesses of my imagination I had once upon a time pictured our going out in the kayaks to salmon fish, but seeing the environment in which we’d be fishing disabused me of that nonsense almost instantly.  Not saying that every river mouth is like the Columbia in Astoria, but there’s a reason there’s a Coast Guard station there and that they’re so busy rescuing people.  The Alsea is like the Columbia in miniature, but not too miniature.  Huge Northern Pacific waves meeting a large, shallow river mouth with shifting sand bars and currents plus high winds and 13 or so feet of tidal shift = no chance whatsoever we would be blowing up the inflatables to brave it.  Plus it was supposed to rain.  Nahhh.

Still though, we awoke dutifully on day 2 at 5:30AM after buying our (semi-exorbitant) 3-day fishing license and some “can’t miss” lures, bundled up, and drove down to what looked like a decent spot to do some casting.  It was actually really cool.  The rain let up right as we arrived and turned into more of “showery” thing, with most of the showers missing us.  We were even treated to a rainbow at sunrise and a single lightning bolt that struck near enough to us to get our undivided attention, but no more followed it.

It became clear pretty quickly that any salmon we were going to catch would have to be lost or at least unintelligent, as we weren’t able to get the lures too far off shore, and we could see in the considerable distance where all the boats were fishing (and presumably where the salmon were).  Keeper lost a bit of his enthusiasm when he realized this was going to be yet another fishing-with-no-fish excursion with Dad, but to his credit he kept his spirits up and we fished for at least an hour before heading back to the women-folk and homeschool time.  We even did it again on day 3, with the same result.  Decided to sleep in on day 4 though.  Mmmmm, warm.

A quick note on 3-day fishing licenses, at least in Oregon (and California I would presume).  They are not economical.  I forget the exact price, but I did, without thinking, blurt out “no, I said a 3-day pass, not annual” when I was told the price.  Oops.  After being assured by the woman behind the counter that the price was in fact correct, I made some quip about how I was far (FAR!) better off going to the local grocery store and buying a salmon there.  She chuckled dutifully and offered that that wasn’t true if we caught 3 or 4 of them (with the implication that this was a simple matter).  Clearly she doesn’t know me.

The weather, despite the overall wetness and chilliness, actually cooperated with us far better than we expected throughout our Oregon time.  It seemed to rain all night every night, but the days would bring a decent amount of sun in between the random showers.  We were able to see quite a bit of that part of the coast, which is spectacular by any measure.  Our beach at Seal Rocks morphed with the tides from a wide, shallow tide pool wonderland with waves crashing in the distance, to a roiling maelstrom of sea foam that we could only watch from the path above.  Something none of us had ever seen was a sort of brownish sea foam that didn’t dissipate at all, and in fact collected on many of the surfaces there and in the various gyres that formed based on the all the rocks / reefs.  We looked it up (because in 2017 you don’t have to “wonder” anything) and discovered that it’s associated with rough seas and is composed of ground up seaweed/kelp and other organic material.  One of the kids decided it should be called “flarp,” so that name stuck.  Here’s some flarp.

This was the first time the girls were really able to see no-kidding tide pools with anemones, urchins, sea stars, and the like.  Keeper had seen several, and Firebolt had seen a few on vacation, but she’d been too young for them to make an impression.  Plus these were far more dramatic.  We spent several hours over the few days engaged in tide pool exploration.

Cape Perpetua, a few miles to the south, took the “rugged Oregon coast” thing and upped it several notches.  We scrambled on the tide pool strewn rocks next to the ocean where there’s a feature called “Thor’s Well” and another called “Devil’s Churn.”  You get the idea I think.  Waves were running about 15-20’ as well, so it was a little intense with the three kids wanting to go in different directions.  Hilarity ensued when I managed to get splashed pretty heavily by a wave while trying to demonstrate to the kids where the safe and less safe places to stand were; I was in a “safe” place.  My seawater-soaked jeans quickly became a non-factor, however, when we all got caught in a downpour and tried, unsuccessfully, to huddle downwind of a small ridge.  The kids took it in stride, though, and we chalked it up to “adventure.”

The last night we spent up in Newport, where Keeper (OK, it was me, but he definitely helped) dragged us to the Rogue brewery.  Keeper had tried Rogue’s root beer at a restaurant recently, and had declared it the best soda he’s ever had.  He’s not a soda guy and doesn’t particularly like sweet drinks, but this is evidently solid stuff – heavy on the “root” and light on the sugar.  We’d promised him he could buy a few bottles there as it’s almost impossible to find elsewhere.  I had a sampler flight with my dinner, as I’m inclined to do when I visit a brewery.  I like Rogue.  They’re not my favorite by any stretch, but there’s very little beer they make that I dislike.  The dinner was solid and Pacific Northwest-y too, with some Dungeness crab thrown in there for good measure.  Between all that, the rain outside, and the chill in the air, it felt very home-ish, and even Keeper expressed that sentiment, which surprised me a bit.  He seems energized in this environment, and I find that encouraging.

Tomorrow we head further down the coast into California and the Redwoods.  The last time I was there we blew through the area; I’m looking forward to spending some time there this go around.

By the way, if it wasn’t completely clear, we caught no salmon, and presumably won’t this trip.  At some point someone’s going to have to teach my son how to fish…

It seems absurd that with a year to travel we would need to make difficult choices between places we would very much like to visit.  Yet there we were looking at Bend vs Hood River / Portland, knowing that with the commitments we had already booked, we would not be able to see both, at least this go around.  Ultimately the wildfires made our decision for us, as the State Park near Hood River was still closed upon our departure from Park City.  This was fortuitous – we would not have wanted to miss Bend, as we would soon find out.

First of all, getting there – not especially nice.  No offense to Idaho, I’ve always liked it and still do, though when thinking of Idaho it’s always important to remember that there’s the mountains in the north and there’s the not-mountains in the south.  The latter half of the state is pretty in its own flat, farmy, check out our potatoes sort of way, but we didn’t navigate it especially well.

 

That’s two days of driving, to be clear.

We wanted to get at least halfway to Bend on the first day, and so we skipped what were probably some of the nicer campgrounds and hot springs along the Snake River Gorge. Evel Knievel anyone?  No?  Never mind.  Anyhow, my intended destination (pronoun intentional — I’m taking full responsibility for this) was Bruneau Dunes State Park, near Mountain Home.  Dunes, mountains, state parks… win win win, right?  Nope, not right at all.  I was already well aware that “Mountain Home” is a gross misnomer, so that part wasn’t a disappointment.  What was a disappointment was Bruneau Dunes State Park.  This is more or less what we saw when we pulled up to our destination, after driving several miles down isolated 2 lane roads.

This is one of those times when the picture, rather than not conveying the grandeur, doesn’t convey the misery.  The RV campground area looked similar, but with a smattering of gravel pads and electrical hookups, and a wayward outhouse or two.  There were probably a hundred sites, and only 3 or 4 people staying there.  Also no cell coverage.  Again.  “Sketchy” as a blanket adjective is a gross understatement, but it’s all we had to describe what we saw when we arrived.  So for the first time this trip, we turned right around out of a place we’d planned to stay and moved on.

The next area we would hit would be Boise, and I’d heard good things about the town.  Unfortunately, we chose poorly there too.  Opted for the KOA rather than one of the several other campgrounds near downtown, and it turned out to be west of Boise in Meridian, and in what amounted to a busy parking lot surrounded by construction.  Tightly packed, too.  Ah well, it was only one night, right?  At least we could dump our toilet tank.

Firebolt made friends with some girls there, as she’s wont to do, while out riding her bike around the lot with Woodsprite.  That was cool right up to the point that their new friends gave our girls unfrozen Otter Pops from their trunk and then came back to our RV and practically forced themselves into it.  I’m not necessarily anti-Otter Pop (though I kinda am — I just think it’s a little hypocritical since I had so many as a kid), but the “we’re coming into your house now” part was weird.  I slowed things down to make sure the girls were ok with these new friends invading their living space (Firebolt yes… sorta, Woodsprite no), but had to draw the line when they came straight in, went into the girls’ beds, started opening compartments, and then resisted me a little when I told them that wasn’t ok.  It was all a little funky yet at the time I couldn’t have told you how exactly.   Boundaries were crossed but I couldn’t articulate which ones.  Instead I just told the new friends that it was time for them to head back, which they did.  Fortunately the whole episode was short-lived as well, and we were off in the morning.

The drive through Eastern Oregon was bleakly pretty.  I imagine most people picture Oregon as green and wet, but of course that’s only the half on the west side of the Cascades.  The other half, with the exception of the far northeast corner, could just as aptly be called Northern Nevada.  Same dry, mountainous, and very sparsely populated terrain.  We followed the Malheur river up to near its source then continued back down toward the heart of Central Oregon.

The closer we got to Bend, the more obvious it became that we were solidly in volcano country.  The soil became deep reddish-brown with a generous smattering of pumice rock lying around.  There are perfectly symmetrical cinder cones visible in most directions.  What’s more, the pine trees started kicking in as well, likely due to the elevation gain as we approached the Cascades.  It’s gorgeous.

Unfortunately there was still lingering hazy smoke, or we’d have seen the Three Sisters and Mt. Bachelor looming behind the city with their obviously volcanic shapes and year-round snow.

I’ll dispense with my only Bend complaint from this go-around now, because everything, and I do mean everything else about it was overwhelmingly positive: there are not many options for RVs.  If I were to live there I’d probably like that fact about it, but in our current situation it was problematic.  There are two places in town, neither of which looked appealing, and then another, which we opted for, south of Sunriver.  Sunriver is basically a resort-town hybrid, though more resort than town, about 15 miles south and upriver from Bend.  Both lie on the Deschutes river.  The campground was well-wooded (though dusty), sprawling, and offered some decent privacy, but felt a bit isolated and with heavily dated facilities.  That’s it though, done semi-griping, because Bend was… awesome.

So here we were, coming off of a long Park City stay that had us talking smack about how we could certainly live in Park City, and in strolls Bend to blow our minds.

First of all, the layout and size.   It’s right about at 100K people, which is just small enough not to feel big, but just big enough to offer all of the cultural, food/drink, and retail options we appreciate.  It’s, as previously mentioned, bisected by the Deschutes, which is a clear mountain river with rapids both north and south of town, and a slow-moving part through town that people float on all summer.  It even has both a free shuttle to take you and your floating device of choice back upriver to meet your car or to float again, and a fairly new whitewater park right in the middle of town so that you can practice your river kayaking or even surfing moves.  The climate is dry, hot, and sunny in the summer, and sunny and cold in the winter, with a good bit of snow.  Mt. Bachelor’s lifts are about 20 minutes up from town.   The whole place smells like pine trees.  And there are trails EVERYWHERE.  Bike trails, walking trails, water trails…   To top it off, something like a dozen breweries and two cideries, plus a thriving food scene.

But OK, the truth is, we knew all this ahead of time and yet we were still blown away.  I’ll try to flesh it out a bit.

On our first day there we opted for a fairly slow morning followed by an afternoon hike.  Once we fought through the kid inertia (WHYYYY do we have to do a HIIIIIKE?  We ALLLLLWAYS do hikes…) they found, as they normally do, that hiking is a great idea.  In Bend it’s an especially great idea.  We chose just a short section of the Deschutes River Trail, which follows the river all the way from Sunriver to Bend I’m pretty sure, and as far I can tell, is nothing special trail-wise by Bend standards.  Yet I felt like we were hiking through a National Park.  Clear, rushing river on one side, recently (geologically speaking) cooled lava flows on the other, with huge, vividly colored Ponderosa Pines everywhere.  Everything seemed laid out just so, as if it were designed. But it wasn’t, it was just a trail – one of many in town.  And that pine/river/clean smell!  It permeates everything.

 

Afterwards we headed into town, stopped by the whitewater park and then checked out Crux Fermentation Project’s taproom / restaurant, which ups the brewpub ante by adding a sunset-behind-the-volcanoes view and a huge grass field full of cavorting kids and Portland-style food trucks.  On the way back through town (in search of good gelato, which wasn’t at all tricky to locate), we found ourselves in the middle of a block-off-the-streets Oktoberfest celebration.

The next day we floated the Deschutes in Sunriver, which was just about everything the Snake River Float should have been (though without rapids).  The kids made friends with a few ducks, who are evidently used to being fed by their human river-floating companions.  Keeper got a little too up close and personal with the river when he got over-ambitious in a game of kayak tag.  But all of them caught the river bug.  We want more!

 

 

On the penultimate day, we took a drive up along the Cascade Lakes Loop road, which appeared to offer yet another cavalcade of trails, pristine mountain lakes, campgrounds, and the like.  Once again the smoke obscured what would’ve undoubtedly been an incredible view, but also once again it didn’t really matter – we hiked around one of the many lakes and clambered all over the volcanic rocks.   The kids said it was the best hike yet.  That day we topped off with a dinner at 10 Barrel Brewing (sensing a theme?), where what appeared to be a small bluegrass band turned out to be playing ‘80s and ‘90s alternative standards on a fiddle, among other instruments.

 

 

And I haven’t even mentioned the mountain biking, which we didn’t have time to partake in, but is everywhere, world class, and easy to access.

Really though, it was more about the vibe there than anything else.  Some places you just feel. We probably all experienced it in different ways, but everybody agreed that we could very easily live there, and that it just seemed right.

But ARGH, what to make of that, though?!  All this talk about our desire for previously established connections where we move, and in Bend we really don’t have that.  We do know two families there, but nothing resembling a support system.  And the commute!  Oh man, the commute.  There’s just no getting around the fact that for me to get to work and back, I’d be flying two legs out of / into a small airport.  There’s one flight per day to LAX (as of now) – all the rest would be connecting flights.  Plus this would require me to transfer back to the Long Beach / LA domicile, where I would lose much of my relative seniority and consequently my ability to bid a desirable flight schedule.  I’m pretty sure I’ve passed the age where a two leg, cross country commute to work would be something I could do reliably.  Back in the day when I could be asleep within 15 minutes in any location and position, maybe.  But now the idea of spending 8 hours in planes that I’m neither flying nor sleeping in, just to get to and from work… well that makes me shudder.

Recapping… we have, over the last 7 weeks, decided we could easily live in, and made compelling cases for, Anacortes, Seattle, Park City, and Bend.  And we haven’t really even spent time in New England yet, which was arguably the front-runner before.  Our goal was to narrow this choice down, and we seem to be expanding it instead.  On top of that, we still have a house in Annapolis that evidently no one who can pay for it wants to buy, which may make the entire discussion moot.  We’re clearly making progress, but toward what?

Back to enjoying the journey I suppose.  Maybe that’s the point.  Maybe?

Park City I mean, of course.  Though actually it’s more the other way around – Park City isn’t Utah.  Which is also incorrect, because it’s very much Utah, but it’s always been somewhat of a thorn in Utah proper’s side, even from its early days as a rollicking mining town rife with all the things that tend to accompany a group of isolated, mostly single, hard-laboring men who spend most of their day underground.  Today it’s known more for its ski areas, Olympic venues, and the Sundance Film Festival, but there’s still a (completely unofficial and somewhat speculative on my part) sense that the rest of Utah, Salt Lakers in particular, wish it would just go away or secede, or maybe just pretend it and Utah don’t actually know each other.

I remember when we first moved to Park City and TC was working down in Salt Lake at the University, I would get a lot of vague comments from random people down the mountain along the lines of “why on Earth would you want to live up there?”  When pressed, the reasons for the distaste were never entirely clear, and ran the gamut from “oh, the weather’s just bad” to “the roads aren’t very good” (?), and when pressed even further, I usually got something along the lines of “it just isn’t NICE up there.”

Tacco and I, on the contrary, found it very nice up there.  She lived in PC for 3 years, the last of which I joined her for after I returned from my last active duty Navy gig in The Netherlands.  This was the newlywed / no kids days, so they’re probably easy to idealize for just about anyone, but for me it was enhanced by being not yet employed (I’d interviewed with JetBlue but didn’t start for several months) and being a ski bum in a ski town with a season pass.  What a life.  That was the year I decided I’d get decent at snowboarding, and just about every day went something like this: get up, check the snow report, get my snowboarding gear together, drive Tacco to the base of Deer Valley where she sold lift tickets while finishing off her Masters degree, drive back to the coffee shop at the base of Park City mountain and have a cup of coffee while I waited for the lift to open, then “take a few runs, just to see how it is.”  In quotes because inevitably “a few runs” became the whole day on the slopes.  Why wouldn’t it?

ANYWAY… back to the present day.  Any time we’re in Park City, there’s a point during our visit when we look at each other and say “we could totally live here again.”  This time was no exception.

Our going plan, if you recall, was to stay a couple days and then move on to Oregon via Idaho.  We ended up staying just shy of two weeks, in increments of “just another day or two.”  The first few days were a fantastic blur of family and friend visits interspersed with a bit of relaxing time up at Jordanelle.  Tacco’s got a lot of extended family in Salt Lake whom we always love to visit, though it’s overwhelming when we only have a small amount of time (when we arrived we didn’t realize we’d be staying so long).  Her parents were also in town, which I already mentioned.  On top of that, I have an aunt/uncle and 3 cousins + kids who live there, and we managed to meet up with them on Labor Day evening, which was an outstanding visit.  Brisket, more garden fresh veggies than we could’ve eaten in a week, and invaluable catching-up time. When we lived in Utah 15 years ago, we completely failed to spend much time with them – huge mistake, as they’re an amazing family.

 

The next few I was away working for, but Tacco will cover that as well as the other family visits I’m sure.

We solved the “no place to stay Sat/Sun” dilemma by booking a hotel room at the base of The Canyons ski resort – correction, that should read The Canyons base area of Park City Mountain since the two merged a few years back creating one mega-resort.  I was surprised how reasonable it was, and the kids enjoyed the hotel beds / shower, as well as the live music at the base of the lifts.  Still no Wal-Mart parking lots! [knock, knock]

We also had dinner with the same friends (minus the dad, who was out stalking a deer near Moab) at a friend of theirs’ stunning house which they house-sit at times.  Check it out.

 

To be clear, we will never, ever live in a house like this in Park City or elsewhere.  This is high end, even for PC.  But there are a lot of these, some of which back up to the slopes.

After I returned from work things slowed down a bit (by necessity), and a combination of the continued burning of the Pacific Northwest fires in our desired destinations and flight convenience convinced us that we’d be better off staying in Park City all the way through the following weekend, when Tacco returned from her Navy duty back in DC.  This put us behind with respect to seeing Oregon, but felt like the right call; we sorely needed some “stop moving!” time.

Keeper broke the fishing curse with a little perch he pulled from the shore of Jordanelle.  It wasn’t the Kokanee we were hoping to pull in, but something is better than nothing.  Firebolt followed with a few even smaller ones.  The hook was almost as big as their bodies – how did they manage to snag themselves on it?  Must’ve been really really hungry.

On the second to last day, with TC still away, I decided to treat the kids to all day passes at the base of Park City Mountain, where they have an Alpine Slide, Alpine Coaster, zip lines, mini golf, etc.  I think I prefer this sort of thing to an amusement park.  Though as the sole adult it was tricky to balance the supervision needs of all the kids (and by that I mean “oh maaann, I wanted to play too!”).  I’d have liked to throw the lift-served mountain biking into the mix, but that wasn’t to be.  We did find out that Firebolt is quite the climber – she got the highest of the three kids on the climbing wall!  And Woodsprite swallowed much of her fear and jumped on the ropes course and mini-zipline, which is excellent progress.

 

 

The kids were all very positive about Park City when we dialed them into our “we could totally live here” conversations.  There is a big wild card though – they all profess to not liking skiing.  Which is completely ridiculous since none of them know how to ski yet, but much like lacrosse is a center of gravity for kids in Maryland, winter sports are the same if not more so, I would imagine, in Park City.  It would be a bit pointless to live in PC and not have a desire to get on the mountain, and beyond that I would speculate that the non-winter-sports-loving kids have a harder time fitting in there.  Tangentially but perhaps more importantly, Keeper has yet to master a skill that takes a lot of effort to conquer.  Firebolt, too, but she’s only 8 – she has time.  It took Keeper several years for the light to come on with soccer / team sports – I’m hoping it doesn’t take that long with individual sports and skills.  In his mind he tries something once and if it doesn’t come to him immediately then he’s “not good at it.”  That’s where he is with skiing (he’s tried it exactly twice for a couple hours, 2 years apart – he never had a chance).  Not that I find it necessarily important that he ends up a snow sport wizard, I just fervently want him to experience the pleasure of mastering a difficult skill.  So I guess what this all means is that we need to explore all of this a bit further.  We’re talking about taking a month or two this winter, whether or not our house sells, to park the motorhome and do a month in a ski town.  Originally we were thinking Alps, but we’re now leaning more toward a return to PC in February-March-ish.  If we end that month with 3 slopes-addicted kids, that will change our calculus quite a bit.

Which leads me to what we took most from our Park City time (other than the home-offer story, which Tacco either has already covered or will shortly) — a great set of discussions about where we want to live at the end of this.  It’s a recurring theme of course, and we only approach an end decision through the tiniest of baby steps, but we spent quite a bit of what down time we had reflecting on how much we enjoyed being in a place where we already have a few connections and people we want to be around.  Park City would be near the top of the list without any of that due to its exceptional amenities and the general vibe there, but we’ve got both family and friends nearby, and that is starting to feel like a factor we need to weight more than we have been.  We were fortunate to have family already in Annapolis when we moved there, and I think it’s easy to forget what a difference that made.  Though we’ve both moved to several places where we didn’t know anyone, this was pre-kids and often pre-marriage, and always under the auspices of a Navy squadron, where a support system is built-in.  It’s tough to envision what a move to, say, Portsmouth, NH would look like when we settle in without a name to put in the “In Case of Emergency, call _______” space in the many sign-up forms for the kids.  It’s doable, to be sure, but do we want to put ourselves through that?  I don’t have an answer yet, but we’re inching our way there.

Still trying to work out where in Oregon we go next.  We had three general areas we intended to spend time in: Bend, Hood River / Portland, and the Coast.  We’ve realized that we can’t do all three now and are going to need to pick and choose.  Plus it’s all still on fire, and the weather is taking a turn for the worse, though in some sense we’re staying just a tad ahead of it.   We just learned that it’s supposed to snow all week in the places we just left — chasing mild weather indeed!

Stay tuned.

The beginning of September was a large blurry blotch on our calendar, and had been for some time.  We had reservations for the end of September in California and several more after that, but the few weeks in between there and Grand Teton was our first experiment in playing by ear.  Making it a bit more complex was a 3-day work trip I had to do after Labor Day and a few days of Navy duty Tacco had to knock out back in DC / Annapolis after that.  “Nail down accommodation for Labor Day weekend” had been staring at me sternly from my electronic to-do list for about a month now, which portended campsite-lessness given that it was a few days away.

One of the things I’ve found in trying to plan for where we stay, and I’ve likely already hit on this, but weekends fill fast, even when it’s not high season.  Though I’m beginning to realize that first-come-first-serve campgrounds will likely net us a place to stay just about any time as long we don’t arrive on a Saturday afternoon, I’m still not comfortable with arriving in a place after a 6 hour drive and only then starting the where-do-we-stay dance (most RVers probably feel this way, hence the FCFS availability).

Several areas had been competing for our attention, all of which we very much wanted to visit: Bend, OR; Hood River / White Salmon, OR (and Portland by extension); and Park City, UT.  All three, incidentally, are on our short list of possible end points.  Complicating things were the previously mentioned wildfires, though.  I mentioned the fires that made Bozeman smoky, well a short internet search revealed that essentially the entire Pacific Northwest was on fire, or at least covered in smoke.  Dozens of fires, and hazy, smoky skies in the forecast everywhere.

Reasoning that the Columbia River Gorge would have a steady wind that wouldn’t allow any smoke to accumulate, I focused on Hood River.  Nope!  Turned out half of the Gorge was on fire as well, I-84 was closed for much of its length there, and the campground we had focused on was temporarily closed as well.  So Utah it was.  Park City had the added bonus of Tacco’s parents being there visiting a friend for the week.  Plus we have quite a few friends and family in and near PC.   So I booked us a spot for a couple days at Jordanelle Reservoir, which looks at Deer Valley from the less skied east side and off we went.  Nothing available for Labor Day weekend by the way; we booked the days around Saturday and Sunday and prepped our “how would you feel about our parking in your driveway?” pitch.

Another gorgeous drive from Grand Teton south.  We stopped in Jackson for lunch.  This is probably unfair to say given how short a time we spent there, but here goes… Jackson is a very cool place in a great setting with respect to skiing, National Parks, etc.  Lots of antlers.  Yet I have to say that taking cost of living / housing, proximity to major airports, etc into play, Park City would take Jackson hands-down in a cage match, or at least our family’s cage match.  Not even close really.  I did still buy a T-shirt there though.

We arrived in Park City to find it significantly more developed than when we’d lived here 15 years previous.  Our little condo complex by the outlet mall and not much else is now at the edge of a major commercial and residential area that appears to be booming.  To be fair, I had been back several times since then as I try to do a yearly ski trip there with a bunch of guys from my Navy days, so I knew about all the development, but even since I had been last the expansion had blown up.  Maybe we sold our condo there too soon!

The camp site at Jordanelle is nice, with playgrounds, bike trails, fishing, boating, and laundry (!).  Plan is to stay a few days, then revisit the trek to Oregon & see how we can shoehorn our work commitments into that.  Happy Labor Day!

It was yet another stunning Tetons day – brilliant blue sky punctuated by a few puffy cumulus over the highest peaks, 80 degrees and dry. I’d been looking forward to a chance to float a river with the family since well before we started the trip, and the previous day’s play session on String Lake had worked some of the kinks out with respect to inflating, using, and re-packing our kayaks.

I’d spent quite some time planning what stretch of river we’d float as our requirements were pretty narrow… Tacco and I would be going tandem with a girl each, and Keeper would go solo.  Some current but not too much, very little actual paddling required, a couple gentle rapids, good scenery, an easy put-in and take-out… and I’d found it.  It was to be a 10 mile stretch of the Snake that cut through the heart of the National Park.  Of course there was also the logistical issue – several ways to skin that cat, but the friendly ranger at the Visitors’ Center had assured me that I’d get picked up hitchhiking within about 5 minutes (or at least, she always had), so I decided I’d unload everyone / everything at the put-in, inflate the kayaks, then drive down the road to the take-out by myself, leave the car there, and hitchhike back to them, at which point fun would commence.

And commence it did.  The entire evolution went like clockwork, I was picked up and dropped off by a carful of cheerful college women doing one last summer outing before heading back up to MSU, and we got on the river just after a picnic lunch on the beach.

The water was crystal clear and just cool enough for the occasional dip to cool us off, and we saw trout darting beneath us over the entire route.  We saw otters, ospreys, even a moose or two on the side of the river.  Keeper took to his kayak as if he’d been paddling rivers his whole life, and couldn’t contain his excitement for the next rapid, and afterwards, the next float.  The girls were equally enthusiastic and said they wanted to do something like this everywhere we go.  All three kids informed me that they had inherited my love of rivers, and that this experience would make them more confident, independent, and high functioning adults.

THAT WAS THE STORY I REALLY, REALLY WANTED TO WRITE. 

HERE IS THE REAL ONE.

We awoke to an overcast day.  Though there was no rain in the forecast, the skies to the West over the Tetons were a bit ominous.  We were a little sluggish in the camp that morning, so didn’t really get moving until after we had planned, but we weren’t really on a timetable, so figured we’d catch lunch (and a few minutes of cell phone coverage) in Colter Village, I’d talk to the rangers one last time, and we’d head out.

The rangers were my first buzzkill.  Which isn’t to say that anything they said to me was incorrect or unhelpful, it just wasn’t exactly what I wanted to hear.  First they told me that I’d be required to buy permits for the float.  I’d read that inflatables under 10’ were exempt, but apparently I’d read that incorrectly.  OK, no problem.  Then they informed me that I’d need to get all my boats inspected for invasive creatures (i.e. mussels).  Yet another thing I thought I’d been exempt from, and what seemed like a massive time-suck – finding an inspection station, pulling all of the inflatables out of their bags, inflating them, deflating them, re-packing them… and for what?  I’d had them on exactly two bodies of water – our pool and String Lake the day prior.  Hard to imagine I’d have picked up mussels in either of those places.  Plus that exemption I’d read about.  When I asked about it they explained that I was exempt from getting the sticker for the inspection, not the actual inspection.  Wait, huh??  So I should get the inspection but no proof that I’d had it done?

The two rangers had begun to assume good cop / bad cop personas, at least slightly, over the course of our conversation, and the bad cop was clearly taking offense at my line of questioning, so I let it go and told them I’d “get an inspection.”  (after she stepped out, the good cop let me know that if she were me, she’d just go float, given that we’d not had the kayaks elsewhere)  Thirdly, when I told them my plans, they shook their heads and tut-tutted at me.  “That’s a bit much.”  Yeah?  “Yes.  For a family?  Yes.  Lots of braided channels, lots of ways to get stuck in a section of river with protruding obstructions, etc.  You want no part of that with a 5 and 8 year old.”  Really?  I’m pretty good at this. [actually I’m not – I’ve only done guided trips in the past] “Really.” Well shoot.  So I took their recommendation and opted for the 3 mile stretch with no rapids instead.  I was told there might be some paddling, but it shouldn’t be too much as long as there wasn’t a headwind.  And they were right of course, but already this float was deviating uncomfortably from the vision I’d concocted.

Permits purchased, family re-grouped, we headed to the Jackson Lake Dam and the put-in.  Skies were looking ever more ominous, but Keeper chimed in with “who cares if we get wet on a river?” That’s my boy.  Though it wasn’t exactly warm out, nor was the water.  Never mind though, we inflated all the kayaks, packed the snacks and I left the family behind to find the take-out, which was easy enough.

Shoot, that’s gotta be rain out there over the mountains, headed our way, isn’t it?  Nah, don’t look at it, we’re fine.

But then I had to hitchhike.  I’ve never hitchhiked.  It was awkward.

Where do I stand?  Do I look them in the eye pleadingly or pretend I can’t be bothered?  Arm straight out with thumb up or more of a sideways thing?  Would tooling around on my phone make me look less creepy (“hey, he’s solid enough to have a phone at least, I say we take him anywhere he wants to go”)?  Should I stay near the parking lot or walk down the road?  Many, many questions, and I’d thought of none of them until I was In It.

Ten minutes in, I realized that I was facing the wrong way; doing it with my back to the people I was hoping to catch a ride from was an almost guaranteed show-stopper.  I could’ve turned around and displayed a hideous monster-face once they stopped.  Maybe I had an axe in the other hand.   So I turned around to face my potential ride-givers.  It felt weird in a way that’s hard to describe to not know how to hitchhike.  Twenty minutes and several dozen tearing-past-me cars into it, and I started mulling over the idea that a young, attractive female ranger (“I get picked up within 5 minutes any time I hitchhike”) might have better luck than a solo middle-aged dude with a questionable hat.  At thirty minutes I texted Tacco (fortunately I had one bar of signal, as did she), only to find that it had started to rain and they were huddled under one of the kayaks, though she assured me it was “all good.”  It didn’t seem all good, and I’d gotten not as much as a friendly look from passers-by.  I’m a truly crappy hitchhiker.

So between my lack of thumbing skill and the rain, I opted to admit defeat and return to the car to pick up my stranded family.  Fortunately it had only sprinkled, so they’d made an adventure of it and hadn’t gotten too wet.

As soon as I pulled into the parking lot next to where they were squeezed together under the kayaks, however, the sky opened up.  Wind, heavy (cold) rain falling in sheets, total mayhem.  One kayak caught a gust of wind and went airborne down the river bank, sending Keeper after it (in bare feet, on semi-sharp rocks) to keep it from going solo down the Snake and never seeing us again.  The girls ran for the car and piled in to try to warm up.

I spent the next half hour collecting all the kayaks and kayaking gear in the downpour, deflating them, and wrestling them back into their carrying cases, all the while trying not to think of the mildew that was going to grow on them if I left them this way for more than a day or two.

Right about the time I’d got them more or less packed and shoe-horned with the other wet gear into the car, the rain stopped.  “Wanna try it now?  We could just float down and all hitchhike back to here instead.  We might have better luck with five of us!  Never mind that it’s pushing 4PM!”

“No, Dad.”

Shoot.  So that was our river kayaking day.  In the interest of silver linings, no one was especially dispirited and I was probably more disappointed than anyone, which I kept in check when I saw that the others were playing up the “adventure” part of it.  We’ll try again another day, on another river.  It’ll be cool.  I’m certain of it.

 

So much to say about Yellowstone.  I’m inclined to condense our stay there into one post – as usual, Tacco was more the picture taker than I (though I did get some good ones), and my thoughts on Yellowstone are gelling into more of a big picture than a granular one.

The title, of course, refers to the PBS special about the National Parks in general, but as most folks know, Yellowstone was our first, and though it’s not the most visited, likely due to the difficulty in getting there compared to a Yosemite or a Great Smoky Mountains, it’s certainly up there.  The first time I visited (not counting aerial “tours” during my Navy time) was four years ago, when we were forced by time constraints and a pending house closing to blow through in an afternoon.  The kids had been excited to see it then and I felt like we let them down, so I wanted to make sure we had plenty of time there this time; I was looking forward to our 5 days.

Interestingly though, I came to the conclusion that a lot of people, maybe even the majority, see Yellowstone just as we did the first time.  They blow through in a day, see some geysers and hot springs, take pictures of a bison or two, watch Old Faithful erupt, and move on.  And that’s crazy because the park is enormous.

I ended up with somewhat of a schizophrenic opinion of Yellowstone – a whole mess of “this… but on the other hand…” type observations.  Let me see if I can flesh that out a bit while talking about our specific experiences.

It is a fascinating and otherworldly place.  If you don’t know the underlying geography, it sits atop a volcanic “hot spot” or “supervolcano,” and is basically one massive caldera that erupted twice that we know of, and then collapsed.  Since this was so long ago, it’s difficult to visualize the caldera from anywhere in the park or even from the air, but it’s enormous, and still active.  Hence all the geothermal activity, and this odd sixth sense you get if you’re paying close attention, that things are “different” here.  Hard to explain, but everything feels alive and in motion.

The down side though… how do I put this.  It’s very commercial.  No, “commercial” isn’t right, but it’s very clear that they have spent a lot of time dealing with the fact that they get a ton of visitors each year over a small period of time (pretty much summer only), almost all of whom want to see it from their cars.  There are rules upon rules about what you can do, places you can go and not go and when, and there’s a feeling of being funneled.  There are ways to avoid this, all of which I would love to try some day but am not sure I’ll get to.  Going off season would be one.  I think a Yellowstone visit in the winter, particularly one that involved camping, would be life-changing.  Not going in an RV would be another.  Though they try, I did not find Yellowstone to be RV friendly.  And I don’t blame them given the sheer volume of RVers they see and the fundamental incompatibilities inherent in trying to bring your home to the wilderness, but it becomes clear very quickly that if you’re going to stay at a nice campsite, you need to be in a tent.  Even better if you’re backpacking.

All this to say that, though we had an excellent time in Yellowstone, by the end we were ready to move on, and we didn’t even miss the first day that we spent with friends back at Hebgen Lake.

Backing up a bit.  We drove in via West Yellowstone and threw the windows open wide.  The drive follows the Madison River higher and higher toward its source, and is gorgeous.  A word on the bison – I guess it’s ridiculously common to have them wander either right next to the road or walk down the middle.  Either way stops traffic just about dead.  You see it the first time and take picture after picture (slowing down traffic further) and pat yourself on the back for getting such a great bison picture.  But then if you stay for a few days it happens again, and again, and you think “Dude.  Thousands of square miles of wilderness and like four roads, and you have to walk here?”  It’s like they do it on purpose.

Our campsite at Fishing Bridge was… interesting.  The word “sardines” comes to mind.  I just noted that it came to Tacco’s mind too.  Hard not to.

Oh and by the way (and previously covered by Tacco), nothing left out at night that might smell even remotely like food due to the grizzlies, so every time we needed to cook, we had to set up and break down the grill.  We bought some bear spray (to the tune of $50) after reading all the warnings, which are absolutely everywhere.  Never ended up seeing a grizzly, unfortunately (?), but I guess bear spray would work against a hostile human as well, so there’s that.  We still have it.

Not much within walking or biking distance from our campsite either, unless you count the large General Store.  Big Yellowstone plus, which was a surprise:  their prices on everything are very reasonable. We expected price gouging and didn’t find that at all.  A plus/minus hybrid:  zero cell phone coverage.  In theory we liked this and wanted to show the kids that you normalize very quickly to having no cell coverage and internet.  In practice though, we’re still trying to sell a house, and being off the grid entirely is inconvenient at best.  Also, Keeper is at a somewhat crucial stage of the trip (more on this in another post), in which he’s acutely feeling the reality of what we’re doing and the fact that he has left his Maryland friends behind.  It’s very raw for him, and losing his one lifeline to them right now is not ideal.  We found ourselves generating excuses each day to drive to a point where we could get one or two bars of 4G to check email, messages, and texts.  It’s a very odd reason to visit Hayden Valley, which a friend of mine compared to the Serengeti for the concentration of wildlife.

At any rate, immediately after arrival and setup, we biked down to Fishing Bridge (from which you may no longer fish, because too many people did in the past) and checked that out, then headed back to our site.

The next few days were similar in structure, somewhat by necessity I think, due to Yellowstone’s massive size and the distance between points of interest.  We would get up, walk or ride bikes, have breakfast, and then jump in the car to do a several hour tour of various Yellowstone sights, then return, make dinner, and crash out.

Touring Day One took us to the Mud Volcano area, Hayden Valley, and the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone.  This was our first view of geothermal features and strong smell of sulfur.  There was also a fairly large herd of bison warming their bums (seriously, that’s what the ranger said they do there) in the area while we strolled the wooden pathways.  The Dragon’s Mouth Spring was a highlight there.

The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone was something I’d seen both pictures of and flown over, yet it hadn’t made much of an impression on me.  It should have.  I suppose the name had me mentally comparing it to the one in Arizona, but radical river erosion is about the only thing they have in common.  Beautiful place that pictures don’t do justice.

Touring Day Two took us on a longer loop through more of the geothermal features of the park.  We took a long-ish (by Yellowstone whirlwind car tour standards) hike at the Artist Paint Pots, then turned south at the Firehole River to check out the various geyser basins.

Quick digression:  I love rivers.  The astute reader will find me referring to them constantly, and I’m only now realizing how much I think about my immediate surroundings in terms of river flow, and how much of a draw I feel when I see a clear, running river (get outta here Severn and South, you guys are inlets!).  It seems like a massive oversight that I never learned to fly fish or truly run a river solo in a kayak.  I hope to correct that over this year, and to pass some of that enthusiasm on to my kids.  We’ll see if my being “haunted by waters” plays into our future decision on where to settle.

Returning to the Firehole, it seemed like a perfect idea to pull over and dunk our heads in the water at one point, given the heat and dryness of the day.  Also, any excuse to break up the dynamic that develops when you have three kids jammed into a back seat without electronic distractions is welcome.  I’ll say this for Kindles / Phones / etc – despite their obvious shortcomings as childcare providers, they may make the phrase “don’t MAKE me stop this car and come back there!” obsolete.

A majority of Yellowstone’s geysers and hot springs empty into the Firehole (hence the name likely), which I only thought about after noting that my head dunking, though refreshing, wasn’t quite as bracing as I’d expected.  The water is noticeably warmer than other mountain rivers.

The Grand Prismatic Spring was a highlight, as was the Excelsior Geyser crater right next door.  It’s difficult not to think at least a little bit, as you and all the rest of the gawkers walk on the carefully constructed wooden pathways around these incredibly violent geothermal features, about how all of them are active right now, and will undoubtedly continue to erupt, collapse, and morph, and how even though there’s been significant thought given to safety, it’s still an odds game.

It also made me think about Keeper’s getting doused by a slightly off-center eruption of a geyser on a previous trip to Iceland.  He got what amounted to a hot, slightly sulfury shower rather than a massive full-body burn, but that seems more like luck than solid risk management.

Earlier that morning, Firebolt, Keeper, and I braved the chill to see if we could catch some Yellowstone River trout.  Our expectations (i.e. the kids’ vs mine) for “fishing” vs “catching” are starting to converge a little.  I suck as a fisherman, but even adjusting for that fact, I tend to see any given fishing outing as a few hours hanging out somewhere beautiful and quiet, with the distant possibility of getting a few bites, and maaayyybe converting one of those bites to an actual hauled-in fish.  The kids seem to be assuming that we’ll have 3 days of dinner within 15 minutes, and get bored when the action doesn’t materialize.  I’ve been trying to explain that the truth is somewhere in between our expectations, likely far closer to mine than to theirs, but they’re not having it – they assume it’s just because I can’t fish.  An early morning on the Yellowstone, however, with the steam rising off the water, brought them at least a little closer to appreciating the process rather than the result.

By the end of our second “tour the park from the car” day, I took the liberty of canceling the third.  It would’ve been a longer drive up to Mammoth Hot Springs than we’d done yet, and it was time for a chill out day.  Tacco felt the same way — glad we were on the same page.  We did, however, opt to participate in a ranger-led hike near Lake Yellowstone, which was one of our better calls.  Tacco covered it well in her post so I won’t add to it, other than to say that every time we braved the kid-inertia to participate in a ranger led program so far this trip, it was WELL worth it and we all learned something.

Speaking of rangers, I need to give a shout out to Firebolt, who took to the Junior Ranger program there far more enthusiastically than we had even hoped.  The National Parks all have a program wherein the kids, according to age level, accomplish various tasks and write about them in their workbooks in order to earn a Junior Ranger patch.  Firebolt went well beyond her age level’s activities and completed all of them, earning her the patch usually reserved for kids 12 and older.  What’s more, she was thrilled about it, and expressed her desire to do the program everywhere we go.  Score!

A few words on the kiddos in general, as we’ve been asked how they’re reacting and adapting.  We’re quickly approaching the month-on-the-road milestone, and my intention is to write a bit more extensively about how we’re all handling that when it hits.  I will say that the honeymoon is over for them.  Maybe for us a bit too.  Though we’ve hit what I saw as the “high excitement” segment of the trip, in which we hit National Park after National Park in some of the our country’s most stunning scenery, they’re starting to realize that this is real, that our lifestyle is changing semi-long term and not just for a vacation, and most importantly, that they won’t be seeing their Maryland friends regularly, if at all.  That feeling has been made more acute by our being “off the grid” over the last few days.  I mentioned the lifeline of texts being exchanged between Keeper and his buds; the reality of not having that has driven all of the rest home.

Though my sense of it is that they’re absorbing much of what we hope that they will during this trip, the reality that they won’t realize it until later adds a bittersweet layer to it all.  We expected this.  Still, though, it’s a challenge to encourage kids at that age to live in the moment when you’re struggling to do the same.  All of the kids at one time or another over the last few days have expressed their hope that our house doesn’t sell and that we’re forced to return to Maryland.  The realities of the DC / Annapolis housing market make that still a distinct possibility, so we’re careful with what we say about our next few months.

In the meantime, we’re off to Grand Teton next, with a ton more adventure on tap, and a trek out to the Pacific Coast, which we’ll head down throughout September and October.  I’ve been able to get a week of vacation (which translates to a very gentlemanly work schedule for the month, when you factor in additional time off that I’ve been saving up) for August, September, and October, so I’m looking forward to maximum family time at least through Halloween.  It’ll be interesting to see where we are then.

Though our Yellowstone reservations started yesterday, we took advantage of a previously mentioned semi-chance meeting with some old Park City friends to do a “boat day” at Hebgen Lake instead.  This is exactly the type of thing we were hoping would continue to happen this year – bump into people we hadn’t known were in a certain place, and spend a day or two catching up in some cool setting we hadn’t planned on.  In this case, they were staying for a couple weeks at a family cabin on the lake and had brought their boat / toys up.  Their two girls are close to our girls’ ages, so some kiddo play time was on tap as well.

Hebgen Lake is an interesting place.  Just inside Montana and just out of Yellowstone, it’s formed by a dam on the Madison River just prior to its descending into the Madison Valley, which we drove up a week or so ago.  While that’s not especially interesting, what is is that the entire lake was in effect tipped by a large earthquake back in 1959.  It changed the shoreline dramatically, just as if you’d taken a pool and tilted it.  Their family cabin had originally been built on the lake shore.  Fortunately they were on the “up” side of the tip, so instead of their cabin ending up underwater like the cabins on the north shore of the lake, the lakefront moved a few hundred yards away from the cabin.  Many of the residents banded together after that and dug channels back toward their cabins so that they could dock their boats nearby.

Our plan was to decamp from West Yellowstone and drive out to their cabin, spend the day playing on the water with them, and then make a call on the fly whether to just spend the night in the RV parked in front of their cabin or drive back into Yellowstone to start our reservation.

It was a short drive out to the lake.  Theoretically.  Perhaps you remember my diatribe on rough roads and Davista’s inability to take the “bump” out of them.  She’s kind of like a stagecoach in that way.  Well, this is what we saw when we turned onto the dirt road that took us out to their cabin.

Six miles of that.  This turned out to be a particularly exquisite hell.  I could only manage about 10 mph at best.  Slower in the really rough patches and a tiny bit faster where I could find some non-washboarded areas of the road, which I was weaving all over like a drunken sailor looking for the smoothest bit.  The noise of everything in the motorhome bouncing was almost deafening, and it felt like the whole rig was shaking itself apart.  It can’t have been good for it.  At one point I had the bright idea to try going a bit faster, reasoning that maybe I’d get some sort of resonance where I was only hitting the very tops of the bumps.  WRONG!  That lasted about 10 seconds and was chalked up in the “worst ideas” column for the trip.

We did make it eventually though, and pulled up to this cabin, which is exactly the type of place you want to hang out with friends at a lake in Montana at.  The inside was filled with hunting trophies going back 50 years or so.  Such a cool place.

We made our way immediately to the boat and spent the afternoon tubing, paddling, and living the boat-on-a-lake life, which is of course far superior to normal life.

In the evening we returned to the cabin to clean up and relax.  We discovered that our friends were leaving for Park City in the morning, so we opted to go ahead and leave that evening in order to give them some space, but they plied us with wine, tempted us with the smell of flank steak on the grill, and very convincingly told us that our presence there wouldn’t make any difference in their preparations to depart.  No wonder they’re both so good at business.  We stayed, and we’re so glad we did. Amazing hospitality, awesome evening!

We left the next morning for Yellowstone, probably just a few minutes before they left for Park City.  It’s looking probable that we’ll head down to Park City after Yellowstone and Grand Teton, so hopefully we’ll see them again when we head down to Utah.

Well how do you top a total solar eclipse from the top of a mountain?

You don’t.  You don’t even try.  What you do is you chill out with some friends, so we did.

We had made plans to stay in the same RV park in West Yellowstone with the friends with whom we’d watched the eclipse prior to their moving on up to Glacier NP and our moving on into Yellowstone proper.  If you’ve never been to West Yellowstone, it’s probably not what you would picture.  It’s a postage stamp of a town just into Montana and bordering (outside of) the national park that serves as a jumping off point into the park as well as sort of an overflow campground and accommodation spot for people who couldn’t get any place to stay inside the park.

On the surface it’s a little cheesy, with about a mile and a half square grid packed with hotels and RV parks, punctuated by T-shirt & souvenir shops, mid-brow eating establishments with flashy lights out front and the odd “adventure park.”  But I have to tell you that that RV park was really nice.  Full hookups, lush green grass (first time we’d seen that in a while), and plenty of space.  And the town has a charm to it if you know where to look, which fortunately our friends did (he grew up in Montana, not far away from where we were).

They arrived first and were told that though we wouldn’t be parked next to each other, we were quite close and “in the same row.”  “Row” must have a different meaning there, not to mention “close.”  Perhaps they just meant we were at the same RV park.  No matter though, we all had bikes, and were exhausted from the day’s events anyway.  The kids did a little mini movie night using our outdoor TV (first we’d used it!) and crashed out.

The next day was our friends’ only day to explore Yellowstone, so they spent the entire day doing that, while we were grateful for a “down day.”

Laundry, relaxing, bike ride, relaxing, teepee building, relaxing…

One of the W Yellowstone gems our friends knew about and had dialed us into was the Playmill theater, which has an in-residence theater group that puts on various plays throughout the summer.  They were doing The Little Mermaid that evening, and we’d gotten tickets for it.  There was definite cheesiness potential, but I have to say that they did an extremely good job with it — everyone was entertained.  They even do an intermission in which all the players come out with play-themed treats that they’d made themselves — root beer floats, brownies, “poopcorn,” etc.  Good clean fun, and well done.

Thereafter we moved down the street to the Slippery Otter for more hearty high ranch food (read: elk and bison burgers, etc).  Firebolt, perhaps inspired by the busking musicians in Bozeman, decided she’d see if she could earn some spare change by doing an aggressive dance to the ’80s music that was playing outside while we waited for a table.  It was an interesting musical interpretation, and an interesting face to accompany it (she later designated it her “bear face,” and I can’t disagree).

Alas, only about 21 cents taken in, and that may have been the seed money.

What was fantastic, though, and spurred later conversation about the important stuff, i.e. where we want to settle after this adventure, was having dinner with our friends in a relaxed, non-rushed environment at last.  They live in Seattle on Lake Washington, and my previous visit there had stricken me deeply with a sense of “I’d love to have this sort of neighborhood setup, and even better to be around these people.”  That was one of the reasons I’d hoped we could all (as a family) visit them at home, but unfortunately it hasn’t worked out.  But this evening got Tacco and I thinking and talking about the difference between moving someplace that we like, but don’t know anyone, versus moving someplace where we at least have a foothold and some friends/family we know we want to be around and have our kids be around.  It’s a great conversation to have, and one we will revisit many times I think before we settle.

Amazing to be in a position to have this sort of choice on where ultimately to live and raise your family, but the sheer range of choice makes it almost paralyzing.

Tomorrow we say goodbye to them for now as they head to Glacier, and we spend a day with another set of friends (Park City friends this time) who happened to be in town, spending time at their cabin on Hebgen Lake, just outside of West Yellowstone.  Boat time!