Views Obscured by Clouds

Monday, June 20th – Mount Hood National Forest to Portland, Oregon to Mount Ranier to Millersylvania State Park, Washington - Day 129

The morning featured low lying clouds and a bit of rain that obstructed our view of Mt. Hood. We couldn’t see anything except the base of the nearby hills and a lot of forest. The drive was scenic, but we missed out on enjoying Mount Hood. We cruised downwards into Portland to visit the Crystal Springs Rhododendron Garden.

Lucky for us, the gardens were free on Mondays. We walked through the grounds that were originally constructed because the golf course next door created a dam. The resulting pond provided the water for the magnificent gardens. We ate a lunch of leftover charcuterie from Father’s Day on a bench before strolling ground.

With a quick drive through Portland, we jumped onto the 5 north on our way to the volcanic mountain range in Washington. All these weeks of rushing from place to place delayed the point where we had to miss a national park we wanted to see. We originally intended to spend a week in Oregon but this was reduced to two days; we did see Oregon’s only national park though. In Washington we wanted to see Mount Ranier National Park, Mount St.Helens National Volcanic Monument and Olympic National Park but we didn’t have time. Gen was in favour of cutting Mount St. Helens, I wanted to cut Mount Ranier. We debated and Mount Ranier won.

We drove the 2 hours to a green, hilly road that led us into Mount Ranier National Park. As soon as we entered into the park, we ditched the trailer in a parking lot. No need to drive a trailer up a mountain. We needed to get junior ranger booklets so as usual, a quick stop at the visitor centre.

With junior ranger books in hand, we walked the Trail of the Shadows, a beautiful 1.1 km loop around a meadow through a beautiful green forest with moss and ferns covering the ground.

To be continued...

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First Day of Online School

Tuesday, February 22nd – Grayton Beach, Florida – Day 15 We signed the girls up for online schooling and today was the first day. They were on their laptops at the crack of 9am EST (8am CST which is where we were). We have decided to have them attend class for an hour a day from 9-10am and see how it goes. It provides a bit of structure and we were tired of not yelling at them to stare at a screen. Kidding. I don’t know how it’ll work out. If it doesn’t, we will pull them from school and they will be officially home schooled. Mary decided she was left out when she lost the opportunity to see the Goodwill so Gen and her went off to the store while I took the kids to the beach. We had a pretty good time. I’m not the biggest of beach fans but I have to get use to it because we are in Florida and everywhere is beach. We kicked around the soccer ball, hit around the baseball, the kids collected shells and played in a tidal pool near the beach. The surf was up so the k...

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Wednesday, May 25th –Lake Mead National Recreation Area to Las Vegas, Nevada – Day 104 We woke up in our roadside turn out and got ready for the day. Our plan was to go for a swim at Lake Mead, see the Hoover Dam and head back into Vegas. The morning was stifling hot, we were looking forward to the swim. We drove to the visitor centre at Lake Mead Recreation Centre. We could see Lake Mead on the way. The water was well below the high-water line on the rocks. At the visitor centre we got our passport stamped, filled our water bottles, and received junior ranger booklets. The air conditioning was so nice we set up the kids to work on their booklets and hung around. The kids finished up enough activities that they were sworn in by a very nice ranger before we left. We decided to go see the Hoover Dam first. We dropped the trailer in the parking lot. We heard it might need to be opened at the security checkpoint and we couldn’t be bothered. The H...

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