One Year on the Road

We were so close to home, but it was a week before we could get our house. Our friends, Kathy and Robin, offered up their driveway to Bessie but they had weekend guests till Monday. So from Newport we went…

Newport is less than two hours from Eugene, and we invited our friend Kathleen and her granddaughter, Madison, to come join us for the weekend. Kathleen has been our Eugene neighbor for 26 years, and our very good friend. We…

After Seaside, we drove further down the coast to the next Thousand Trails campground in Pacific City. We’d planned to stay three nights, but when we got there we discovered that we didn’t get any cell service at all. Also,…

We left triple-digit heat in Portland on Sunday and drove west to Seaside, where the beaches were socked in with fog, the wind was strong, and temps were in the 50s. I had a bad cold and the sudden chill…

I think about that kiss. The one Omar Mateen witnessed with his son at Orlando Gay Pride. The one he felt the need to avenge with blood. And I’m immobilized by emotion. I think about those nameless men. Joyful and…

After more than a year away, we crossed the border into Oregon last week and met our oldest Eugene friends at Viento State Park campground on the Columbia River Gorge. We hadn’t seen Kathy and Robin since we’d left, but…

I posted this essay on my Facebook page yesterday and have gotten such a positive response that I’ve decided to post it here as well, even though it stretches the boundaries of a usual travel blog. We saw Bernie Sanders…

Paradise RV Resort is in Southeast Washington, near both Mount St. Helens and Mount Rainier. It’s not too far off I-5 and Highway 12, but when we reached the entrance and saw the sweeping view below, we thought maybe we…

We left Seattle on the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend and drove north to La Conner, a small town on Skagit Bay in the Northwest corner of Washington. It’s also close to Anacortes, where you can catch a ferry to…

Our journey started in Seattle, really. Twice. We bought Bessie in Marysville, north of Seattle, and drove first to Whidbey Island where we stayed overnight with friends, then to Seattle where we parked in our daughter’s driveway for the night.…

Our friends who live on Whidbey Island (north of Seattle) wanted to meet us somewhere as we came through the state. None of us had been to Leavenworth, and we’d heard it’s a beautiful mountain town – a Bavarian village,…

Sometimes you just need a place to hole up a few days. This was a convenient Thousand Trails park in Northwest Washington not far off the road to Leavenworth, where we would meet friends later in the week. It was…