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.