Twelve Feet, Six Continents, One Year

The second reservation we made for this global adventure was for a recreational vehicle (RV). About 11 months later, we stood in the driveway of RV Northwest in Tigard, Oregon holding the keys to a 2019 Forest River FR3. This beast sits on a Ford truck chassis with a V10 engine. It is 34 feet long (not including our bike rack, which has never looked smaller), almost 13 feet tall and just over 8 feet wide. After Elise drove this monster to our house through nearly an hour of rush hour traffic and after she parked it on our block and after friends and neighbors popped in for a tour and after we loaded it with everything we had carefully prepared and after we spent a full day running around Portland acquiring more stuff, making two and a half trips to Target, and after one of those nights of sleep shaped by anxiety and excitement, we pulled away from the curb at about 7am. RV Driving Lesson #1: There's a $95 limit on pay-at-the-pump gas transactions. This isn't relevant, eve...

Today was our first big day of driving. Mostly, it went very well. We were on the road around 10am, on a ferry at 11 but not at lunch until after 1. (As usual, lunch cost $150 and about half of what we ordered went uneaten.) Another accomplishment: there was zero screen time. The credit for this goes to the miracle of audiobooks. We previously stumbled across a title called, "Mystery of the Third Lucretia," which features a 14 year old heroine. So on this trip we started the sequel, "Rescuing Seneca [something]." It's obviously captivating for the kids! I had been looking forward to this drive because it significantly retraced the route that Elise and I biked in 2001. We had independently signed up for a tour run by a group called Cycle America. The first week was from Everett, WA to Missoula, MT, which are the origin and destination of these first two days of driving. We got to see a lot of familiar scenery, including some specific sites (and sights) that w...

Somebody's mother, possibly everybody's mother, said that if you don't have anything nice to say then you should say nothing at all. So this will be a short blog tonight. On the up side, Elise built her first cairn (which I'm teaching her is a one-syllable word and not two) and it is MAGNIFICENT! In other news, Elise is getting really good at using portrait mode on her new phone/camera. On the up side for me, I had a haircut today. This isn't a likely highlight but I'm excited to get my head shaved in barber shops all over the world. Today was exceptional. Hot towels, great conversation and a very quiet, very calm hour. My barber was C'Bo, or Charles III, and his father, Charles Jr., was hanging out in the shop for most of the time I was there. Here's the after shot: We had a great lunch in historic downtown Coupeville at a place called Front Street Grille. Their specialty is mussels and the preparation Elise had with a saffron broth was incr...

Let's roll some sweet footage: That was made possible by re-tresspassing, by a different route, to the destination of yesterday's illicit run. We enjoyed the wide open tarmac, an adjacent playground, and zero traffic. Both girls did great, even biking up the very moderate slope of what must have been a parking lot some time ago. The rest of the day was sort of on-again, off-again. We went into town (Oak Harbor) to treat the kids to the local candy store and to fix a broken key on our brand-new laptop (shame on you, Asus). There's an extraordinary almost-open waterfront park that deserves the highest recommendation available by some kids standing at a construction fence looking in. It's definitely going to be fantastic. Later in the afternoon, I took Ali, Cate and Henry on a hike around Joseph Whidbey State Park. Including the beachfront traipse back to our house, it was about two and a half miles. It had the desirable effect: they might actually be asleep bef...

I'll tell you the story of jumping over barbed wire to leave a military installation but first let's talk about Deception Pass. Whidbey Island is separated from the mainland by a pair of bridges over Deception Pass, a waterway that separates Skagit Bay, at the north end of Puget Sound, from the eastern end of the Salish Sea, which generally separates the Olympic Peninsula (USA) from Vancouver Island (Canada). Our first approach to our vacation on Whidbey was from the north, using Deception Pass. It's a grand gateway, which made more sense when I learned today that it was a WPA project from the 30's. On the way in on Sunday, we spotted a sign for Deception Pass Tours ; on Monday we booked a reservation for Tuesday. The timing was fortunate because the waters today were perfectly flat instead of choppy, as they had apparently been recently. The boat is the same kind they use for Jet Boat Tours in Portland, and we were expecting a lot of full-throttle touring around the ...

Dear Reader, As long as I've known Elise, she has craved Big Water. Not the kind of big water I've heard surfers covet. You see, Elise grew up on Lake Superior, which has this massive effect on you simply because of its, well, mass. It evokes calm. No, it commands calm. For most of our 20 years together, we made frequent trips to where her late grandfather lived on Bainbridge Island, looking out on Agate Passage, which separates the island from the mainland Kitsap Peninsula. Elise always took a specific kind of deep breath whenever we arrived there. So now, here we are on the western side of Whidbey Island, near the town of Oak Harbor, facing another large body of water. If you've ever encountered Big Sky Country in Montana, presumably as a visitor, you probably know this feeling of awe. Whatever it is, Big Water means something special to Elise. Today was a good day. There was quiet reading on the sofa (quiet for us, the kids were wrecking havoc on the beach at low t...

First, a quick recap: We pulled away from the curb in front of our house at 10:18am, having set 10 as an ideal and 11 as a realistic target. Pretty good! We got stuck in our first traffic jam of the day because the Interstate Bridge (which carries I-5 over the Columbia River between Oregon and Washington) was lifted for boat traffic. Elise found us lunch at Tugboat Annie's on the waterfront in Olympia. After we ate, we explored the marina and saw schools of fish and a few jellyfish. Apparently we had missed a seal having its lunch just an hour earlier. We had about 3 hours of driving after lunch, including our second major traffic jam (construction-related), which took us through Seattle and Everett and finally over Deception Pass and onto Whidbey Island. We arrived at our beautiful rental home near Sunset Beach, outside Oak Harbor (Washington). Henry and Lily immediately began hunting from crabs under rocks on the beach while Ali and Cate discovered the hot tub. Dinner was...