it took this to land here.

MY WORD!. i need to tweet or something..I swear..we crammed so much into our roadtrip that its only very slowly coming back to me as I am typing now. We are back and running on the blog! I'm gonna try and bring us all up to speed.

SO! Point Reyes was only the super beginning of San Fran. After we left Muir Woods National Monument we camped a stones throw outside of the city so we could wake up and make coffee uphill of the Golden Gate Bridge. This was an AWESOME view of the city. We've never been much of paying parkers :) so we parked up at the overlook and walked down across the bridge and into the city. Loooong bridge it turns out. We hit up all of the NPS sites including Alcatraz. Bam. Touring the prison was soooo cool. We boated out, saw the campus for a half day(seriously we will spill in person, way to much to tell on this blog) took an audio tour that was narrated by old prison guards and convicts and boated back into the city.  We covered a ton of ground, stopped in some sweet neighborhoods and bookstores, had an awesome time accidently busing around the city for an hourt and a half(my bad) and walked back(breaking pedestrian curfew..silly) over the bridge to camp out once again. Three cheers for that city!!!

We hopped up and beat it for Big Sur. On the way we saw Rosy the Riveter National Historic Site and a few Spanish Missions. We ate at the bombest Falafal place in San Jose that Tyler found off of Diners Dives and Drive-ins or something rather. We left happy. We camped in Pinnacles National Monument(beautiful) for a night and headed further south. We LOVE Northern California. Such amazing countryside.

We drove the entire coast down Big Sur. Hands in the air for California not allowing development on this coastline. awesome. We also ran into a few colonies of migrating Elephant Seal. Thats one big pile of Seal...I thought someone poisoned the Pacific and we were approaching piles of carcass...seriously..this was a weird site. With great luck, all alive...mostly. We went to the National Steinbeck Center to learn about one of Tylers favorite authors and stopped down for a walk on Cannary Row..This was before the Sur..but who remembers the order anyway..We went the the Santa Cruz boardwalk which houses the oldest wooden coaster on the west coast. We also went to John Muirs home..another NPS historic site in our jumbles of sites and missons. Muir was a major contributor to the Park movement years ago,Tyler got a wild hair in his booty and decided to drive south until he couldn't stay awake any longer. I woke up in a parking lot in Compton outside of LA. eeeeeek.

We ditched the LA idea and went to San Diego. We were damn near first in line for the San Diego ZOOOO!!! awesome!! we saw all sorts of stuff..elephants getting manicures..hippos pooping..it was a dream :) We hung around in the Old Gaslight District and had some beers then went out to Point Loma to see Cabrillo National Monument in the morning. After the point we fled east to Stone Brewery and took a tour. Good beer. Alright tour. We will give our sweet lives for Sierra Nevada. :) No but really it was cool...we camped in the desert and inched over to Arizona. 

Before jumping states we went to see Salvation Mountain. This man has put half of his lifes work into building this monument of bible verse and message of God for all who can stand the heat to come and see. It really is kind of insane and incredible to stand in front of. After some fruit here we went to see what Slab City was all about.  This old pice of property previously owned by the government..owned by now..nobody really knows. People just live out there..have a whole community...rent free..law free..ish. We stopped in and talked to some folks that have lived off the map for 8 years in this made up town..they invited us to church. We went. We sang..and then split for Joshua Tree National Park.

In JTree we climbed and camped..Jtree is really awesome for climbing and for the weird gardens of cactus that it houses. We split from here to Flagstaff where we saw the best concert ever!! We lucked into the city the same night that Split Lip Rayfield was playing!! Our favorite bluegrass band right now. Gas tank bass equals. we love you guys dont forget us! After Flag we went to ThE GRAND CANYON! Tyler took me for three days since Ive never been....he's toooo good. GC was incredible..we hardly saw any people. magic. After The biggest red hole ever..we drove up into Navajo Nation and woke up early by the jeep to pop out of the sleeping bags and go to Canyon de Chelly...interesting NPS site. Beautiful...cliff dwellings were awesome...odd relationship between the Navajo and NPS.

We shagged booty north across his monument highway where all the old western movies were filmed. We made it to Colorado National Monument by night!! ahhh...where life really began...me and Tylers first park together is still home to Charlie and Annie. Really great friends of ours that need to migrate north. My old band got together to play some music(including Charles Runde) and the night was SO much fun. After Randys Southside Diner Breakfy ! whoop whoop!..we made a straight shot through the night up to wyoming. EXCUSE ME! we also went to Dinosaur National Monument. Everyone quite there job now and fall back in love with the coolest prehistoric animals again! GO THERE.

After some housing confusion at midnight...we slept..woke up in the Grand freakin TETONS and moved into our 2 room cabin in Colter Bay. Ive worked for 2 weeks. and Tyler for 1. We celebrated his 25th birthday(big boy) He took me to Yellowstone last weekend...and Ive lost count of how many Elk, Grizzley, Moose, Bison and Pronghorn that we have seen. We havn't stopped moving and we are going full throttle. Here we are. We are happy. We are back in the the mountains...

ill post pictures soon. -r

Road Trip WY: Week 1

Wow, it's hard to believe it's been over 3 weeks since we left Salem on our roadtrip for Grand Teton NP. It's a lot of ground to cover, so I'm gonna try and sum it up fairly quickly and let the pictures do the talkin.

Week 1

Our first stop was Smith Rock State Park, only a couple hours east of Salem. We stopped at a couple falls along the way, and got to Bend fairly early in the afternoon. The weather wasn't looking to good so we decided to hit up the Deschutes Brewery and buy a couple of pieces of climbing gear that we needed.

Smith Rock is a sport climber's dream! Sport climbing is basically this, climbing with gear that is already pre-placed (bolts). So basically you just climb, and clip your rope in along the way with a double ended carabiner connected by some nylon webbing. Not much equipment needed: Harness, helmet, rope, 10 quickdraws and climbing shoes. We had alot of fun and ended up camping in the park for 2 nights.

Then we headed down south towards Klamath Falls where my uncle Kurtis lives. During this time Rachel had her 2nd major experience with handguns, shooting my newly acquired Springfield Armory XDM .40 (thanks illinois), and Kurt's .22 1911 and custom made AR-15.

On down south we went to the Sierra Nevada Brewery in Chico, CA. The tour was free and lead by a really energetic dude who gave us more info about the company and beer than we could ever remember. We got to play in some dried hops and drink 8 different kinds of beer! Heres what the hops looked like, they smelled delicious! And Rachel with our VIP passes ;)












Why stop at beer? We headed to Sonoma and Napa Valley's to try out some of that wine we'd heard all about.

It was beautiful country and they were having somewhat of a heatwave at the time, I think it was even hitting the low 90's. We searched all the local brochures and papers in search of free wine tastings, I think we found 3 or 4 places that  were having free wine tasting specials. The rest charged up to 30 dollars! All that world renowned wine has gone to their head. The first winery we hit up was Sutter Home, which might sound familiar to you, they're known for the large 1.5 liter bottles of wine that you can pick up in the grocery store for about 6 bucks. Yes, we set our sights a little low after seeing some $30 tasting price tags, but it was still wine and did the trick, as you can tell by this photo.

Sonoma seemed a little more down to earth than over-developed Napa, and is where we started our Mission Trail Journey. There are 21 missions built from San Diego to Sonoma, CA that were built by the Spaniards way back when to convert the native people to the Catholic religion. I had a loose goal of seeing all of them, which didn't happen. Hear is Rachel trying to see what it feels like to be an old Catholic 200 years ago.

Away we headed to the coast north of San Francisco, home of Point Reyes National Seashore. We tried to visit every park site we could along the way, and this was the first one saw. We managed to see Elephant Seals, Grey Whales, a lighthouse, beautiful scenery, flowers in bloom and then Rachel's favorite.....a cow birthing! If you don't care to see an image of the latter, well, stop reading here.

We also hit up Muir Woods National Monument, preserving some of the few Redwoods left on this section of coastline. None of the pictures really turned out. Week 1: OVER.