Johns Trippin'

What a beautiful park! One of the 5 camp hosts said that this was Jackson County's crown jewel. There are 4 loops here and we were in site C-07. They blasted huge sprinklers to water all the nice grass and trees and yes Jordan went out there to get sprayed once. The bunnies spent a lot of time outside in their fence, while Michael worked close to them. Our RV backed up to the playground. The kids loved running over and playing all sorts of games with kids like hide-and-go-seek in the dark, an Indian game, a dragon game, Castle, groundies (whatever that is) and tag. They also loved jumping high when they grabbed a tree branch while jumping up and down. Their were also nice walking and biking trails. Asher and I scootered to the creek with a small waterfall. I did a wheelie and a jump for the first time!  All of us went to Crater Lake National Park on Monday afternoon. It had just snowed two days before we got there and so only part of the scenic road was opened and all the trails we...

As we have have been on the west coast, we have been noticing and buying Tillamook cheese to eat at the national parks for a treat. The enjoyment of the cheese has only escalated as we have bought more and more. Asher wanted Tillamook ice-cream for his birthday. I not only bought him Tillamook's Peaches and Cream, but also the Oregon Strawberry too! Michael bought a big bag of Tillamook single cheeses so it would be very easy to pack and snack on them at the parks. I was so delighted to find Tillamook cheese at Costco that I took a picture of it to show the others (No, I did not buy this gigantic block, but one half this size.)   So when we found out that we were only hours away from the Tillamook Creamery, we changed our plans to come here. Instead of one free night at a rest stop, we found one free night 4 minutes down the road from Tillamook Creamery, at Blue Heron French Creamery! Yes, this place had farm animals and its own cheeses, but we quickly headed down the street once w...

We were a bit early on this one. When we sat down to plan our California, Oregon, and Washington route in December, we know we'd have to time the parks right to make sure we could both get in and get around once in. When it comes to the mountain parks (of which there are many in those three states), you can't just show up at any time of year and expect to see the park. We also knew we didn't want to wait  too  long to get to them because that would negatively affect our time available for Alaska later this summer. We had to shoot for the Goldilocks zone, so to speak. We used historical monthly snow accumulation at the parks as our guide, and it worked out pretty well through California. With the exception of a few trails at Lassen Volcanic National Park, winter weather and/or snow accumulation never prevented us from experiencing the parts of the parks we wanted to experience. Until now. You know a park gets a lot of snow if you need a tunnel to find the bathroom in winter ...

We have been on the road for a little over 15 months, and a full 5 months of that has been spent in California. The state is huge , and it has 9 National Parks (most of any state). Point Reyes doesn't belong on this map; it's a National Seashore, not a National Park I'm ready to move on, but there are some things I'll miss. Off the top of my head... The beauty. With a few exceptions (I'm looking at you, Central Valley), the state is absolutely beautiful. And yes, that includes the desert portions. It's a different kind of beauty down there, but the desert is stunning in many ways. The fresh produce. What it lacks in beauty, the Central Valley makes up for in productivity. The lack of bugs. I have no idea if this is due to time of year, location, or dumb luck, but there have been remarkably few bugs during our time here. The mild weather. I'll freely admit that this was largely due to our itinerary. The beauty of living in a house on wheels is that you can ch...

Redwood National and State Parks are a bit different, as you can perhaps tell from the name. These are four parks, one national and three state, that are administered as a single park. That, and most of what people come to see is actually in the state parks. That's where we spent most of our time. The state parks are along the coast, and the national park starts near the coast and heads inland and up in elevation. We actually took this at the end of our visit because we couldn't find it at first! Our run of good weather that broke at the last park  stayed broken here. It was chilly and misty the entire time (the fact that a park that houses redwoods has such weather is not a coincidence). And when we got above about 100 feet in elevation, we were in a cloud. That made it a bit difficult to enjoy the national park portion. But as we did at Lassen, we played the hand we were dealt. It wasn't raining, and it wasn't foggy at sea level, so the kids took advantage by getting ...

There are three ponds at this RV park. Two of them have fountains. The last pond has frogs and tadpoles! I caught some of the tadpoles, but I couldn't catch the frogs, because they were on rocks that are behind thick bushes. One night, around 9 o'clock, I caught eight toads and kept them for one night.  There was also a pool and hot tub. The pool was kind of cold and the hot tub was too hot. In the pool mom dropped coins and we collected them.  The boys gave me their money.  I bought a frozen push-pop in the camp store with them.  I did a lot of cartwheels at this site. It was fun. I liked playing bocce ball. Subway Cave Trail was cool because it was dark and mysterious. It is a lava tube. We got our flashlights out when we got inside. I was not afraid.  At Lassen Volcanic National Park we ate lunch in the Jeep after we walked around the Manzanita Lake. We saw goslings with their mother.  Very volcano-like Snow plants stand out a lot on the Lily Pond Nature...