This is only exactly a year late, but this is the extended version of the Pacific Northwest Adventures of 2014.

It all started with an idea to road trip up the cost with my California stationed sister. My sister Felicia is always up for adventure, so of course was down. I don’t know exactly how the conversation developed, but we soon arrived at the idea of seeing if the whole family would want to join us. This for me felt pretty crazy since my family is pretty frugal with money and we’ve never done anything similar to this. I was also skeptical that our whole huge family with everyone having different jobs and things going on would be able to travel to the west coast  for 10 days at the same time. But then…

Everyone said yes!

After that, a sketchy craigslist RV, and a bunch of Southwest credit card sign up bonus miles later, we were off!

Our chronological destinations included:

• Whiskeytown Lake in Redding, CA (swimming, paddle boarding)
• Crater Lake (sunrise hike, exploring & hiking)
• Silver Falls State Park
• Portland, OR (visited some good friends, ate some good food)
• Vancouver…WA. Meant to make it up to the Canadian Vancouver, but we didn’t want to rush the rest of the trip to do so. A quick drive across Portland’s Columbia river brought us to a town of the same name. So yes, I’ve been to Vancouver.
• Cape Kiwanda beach, OR. The whole coast south of there is the most wonderful stretch of road that I’ve driven — Hwy 101. I was constantly blown away by how beautiful everything was on this stretch. We probably pulled over 5-10 times for different pretty stops along this highway. I mean…I wasn’t going to just drive by! :)
• One of these unscheduled stops–that happened to be one of my favorite places ever–was Cape Perpetua and Thor’s well. Such a cool place.
• Redwoods State Park (lots of hiking & exploring)
• Finally, back to Nevada City -> Sacramento -> Home

It was grand. I absolutely recommend a trip like this to everyone. :)

Here’s the photo diary of the trip…

This took a lot of planning and was not without problems and dilemmas, but these 10 days turned out to be some of my favorite travels of my life. Looking back on all the good memories and seeing my family so happy makes it all worth it.

I guess you could say that this trip kinda brought back the trend of having a yearly family vacation. This weekend we got back from a week in the Smoky Mountains. I plan to blog that in less than 12 months. :)

If you’d like to see part 1 of my favorite images from this trip, here’s the post Pacific Northwest Abridged.

Invest in memories, not things.