Denver --> Portland
Greetings from Portland! We're all having a great time on the road trip so far, though it's still up in the air as to whether we're doing permanent psychological damage to our 2.5 year old. Every single day she queries from the back seat, "Are we going home?" And every day, we steel ourselves to tell her the hard truth. "No, hon, we are going...camping,...to Denver/Boise/Portland, or...we don't know." After getting over her disappointment, she entertains herself by sleeping, eating, and putting her toilet seat on her head in what I'm sure is a form of metaphorical protest.
In 2 year old speak (which is basically all we speak these days), we are turtles, carrying our home with us for the next 6 weeks. Our home is our car, our tent, each other, and the cozy beds and homes that our friends and family have been gracious enough to invite us into (only for us to taint everything with the smell of campfire).
We stopped in Amarillo the first night of our journey at a cheap and dirty hotel with no A/C in half of the building, where our car was broken into overnight in the parking lot. The damage could have been worse, but still stings. We were relieved of: $10 in quarters, our checkbook, and all of our many gift certificates. Mike was henceforth fired from booking our accommodation.
We rolled into Denver the next day to stay with Mike's cousin Andy, his wife Melissa, and their two kids, Sophia and Joshua. Sybil really enjoyed playing with their daughter Sophia in their basement toy wonderland, and our streak of pretending like the soundtrack to the movie Frozen doesn't exist quickly came to and end. Syb carried around a Frozen karaoke machine and sang into it like a drunk bachelorette, off key but enthusiastically, for a good chunk of the day.
We went to the Denver Botanical Gardens with Melissa and Sophia, and then went to stay with Matt, Mike's oldest childhood friend, and his wife Crisnna. They're expecting a child the exact same time we are, early October, so Crisnna and I commiserated about being pregnant and Mike and Matt dutifully nodded. Hudson was in dog heaven going to a huge off leash dog park (Cherry Creek Reservoir) and playing and lying on the couch with their incredible horse-dog and 80's hair band impersonator, Chase.
After Denver we booked it through Wyoming to northern Utah and found an awesome and secluded spot in the Cache National Forest off a logging road and pitched our tent for the night. If you don't know about dispersed camping on public land, you should. It's free, secluded, dogs are allowed, and it's typically stunningly beautiful.
We left Texas for the summer partially to escape the heat and mosquitos, but weren't quite ready for temperatures in the upper 30s and mosquitoes the size of quarters. Thankfully, someone had camped off this road before and built a nice fire ring that we took advantage of. And the only one to be phased by the mozzies was Hudson, the worst camper in the family (by far).
We wanted to camp for the next few nights in southern/central Idaho, but constant rain was in the forecast. Hudson was having none of that, so we booked a hotel in Boise for the night. We decided to try to get ahead of the weather front and camp in Oregon the next few nights.
We ended up in the Deschutes National Forest, just south of Bend, after some excellent research by Mike (who was afterwards rehired as our accommodation booker on a probationary basis). It was still cold, but no mozzies, and it was gorgeous. We were surrounded by a Ponderosa Pine forest, one of my favorite trees, in an area called Pine Mountain. Sybil and Mike were enthusiastic and skilled wood collectors (another benefit of dispersed camping is that you can collect wood), and Syb had a blast making a Father's Day card for Mike and doing acrobatic moves on the sleeping pads in the tent.
We explored the Newberry National Volcanic Monument the next day, a caldera with beautiful lakes and waterfalls. We were a bit ambitious in our hiking goals, and were reminded that trying to make an all day hiking/exploring agenda with a 2.5 year old is a futile endeavor. Humbled, we scaled back our plans and settled for a short waterfall hike and lunch by a beautiful crater lake.
More campfire time, short hikes, delicious camp meals, not one but TWO different flat tires (Bend Tire Shop is the shit!), and card playing ensued.
Since we're depriving her of her normal routine of school, friends, and normalcy, Syb has taken to filling up her backpack every day and claiming she's "going to school".
On the particular day pictured above her school was in a stand of Ponderosa Pine trees. I was feeling conflicted about taking her out her comfortable routine of life in Austin at her current developmental stage (a typically difficult one for lots of toddlers to navigate), but if her school is among pine trees, mountains, far away friends, and extended family, I can happily live with that.
