August 2, 2021
The reason for the trip to the Pacific Coast is the 25th wedding anniversary for Jane and yours truly. When two fiercely independent and self-sufficient people get married, one thing is for sure, you have to be in love to survive. Thank God we are and we have!!!
Celebrating our 25th wedding anniversary
Well, here we are, the day before Jane and I launch from Greenville, IL on a 20-day round-trip, west-by-auto to the Pacific Ocean and back. This is a long-awaited trip taken to honor our 25 years of marriage in 2020. It was postponed a year due to COVID.
The idea for the trip sprang from the question, “Where would you like to celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary?” Anticipating hearing, “Hawaii!”, I was a bit surprised to hear “I want to go see my first cousins in Washington state.” The Northwest is the homeland of her father and, although she has been there several times before, the timing seemed right to go back “one more time”.
Motorcycle Stays Home
Simple enough, but should we fly or drive? Driving won out but what to drive? The Ford Escape was chosen because of superior speed and gas mileage over our Dodge van. Also, if we had taken the van, I would have been tempted to haul my Honda 750 motorcycle with a sidecar on our trailer, just in case I got the urge to tackle some of the spectacular mountains we would surely encounter. That would have really slowed us down, so, it was decided to travel “lean” and “motel” it all the way. The emergency accommodations “tent” also was left behind. I hope we don’t regret that move!
Make for the Coast
We will be angling toward a spot just north of San Francisco via Interstates 70 and 80, before turning north along the Pacific Coast-hugging highways (CA1 and CA101) to Long Beach, WA (West of Portland on the Columbia River). We’ll circumvent Seattle by island-hopping north of downtown to the family reunion location on Bainbridge Island and then turn toward home on Interstate 90 and, eventually, finish on I- 80 back into Illinois.
Trouble ahead?
Ahead on our 14-state route, we already know there will be some challenges, like: mudslides blocking I-70 in western Colorado; forest fires in several states, smoke hanging over even more states, and, potentially, 14 disparate sets of COVID restrictions. But those are “no hills for a climber”! Right?
Modus operandi
If you have been following our fledgling blog, you have learned that my “go to” mode of travel is to meander along on two-lane roads whenever possible. I use the internet heavily as a resource to find places of interest and supplement that with tons of literature picked up at state “welcome centers”, which are strategically located just as you enter each state.
My theory is, that if a site or event doesn’t think enough of itself to produce a good piece of literature or find their way onto some informative highway signs (You know; the brown ones.) or have a website; then they don’t really care if I find them. I then plot a mix of interesting and diverse sites to visit and head out.
More scramble less ramble
I am the TwoLaneRambler, because I like to travel at about 55 mph on two-lane highways or blacktop roads (often by motorcycle); drive for about 30 minutes and then stop and check out a site for about 30 minutes. This makes for roughly eight stops a day. Sometimes we can’t do more than one stop in the a.m. and one in the p.m., while other days we might hit a dozen or so in a day. We prefer to stop early enough to beat other travelers to a motel and a good meal.
Since we have so many miles to travel in a somewhat limited time frame, we will vary from our usual travel methods by spending most of this trip on four-lane highways, trying to find rooms far enough ahead of us each day so that we can log some substantial miles to reach our destinations on time.
This is not our favorite way to travel and we know that we should probably “label” this trip as a “scramble” rather than a “ramble”.
Therefore, we will not include these in our “Day Trips” section and will let it become more of a “diary” of the 20 days under a new subdivision of our blogs labeled, “Cross Country Trips” or something similar.
We’ll try to post an update every day or two, so bear with us. We hope to entice you to travel and see some of this great country. We don’t try to be all inclusive of every tourist site in existence, nor do we try to be a reviewer of every restaurant along the way, but if you feel passionately about some place along our trip route that you have experienced, please jump on our blog and make some comments. Anything you add to enhance the trip of another is a good thing and that is our purpose for existing in this space.
So, with all the bills paid; a granddaughter lined up to keep our bird alive; and my son and a neighbor lined up to keep our grass short, we depart on the longest trip together we have ever attempted. Pray for us!
Happy trails to us!
Preview of Day 1
We will make the long drive on I-70 west through Kansas City and be prepared to check out the Village West area and see how much it has changed over the past 20 years. Forward Ho!
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