Always Onward Adventures

We decided to do a day hike on Bainbridge Island and the trail was super cool so I decided to do a post about it. It’s a 5 mile trail point to point that goes from one side of Bainbridge Island to the other. The first mile was on a road and the first half mile was not super fun (small shoulder) but after that the hike was super fun. Old growth forests, open meadows with views, interesting landmarks, etc were all available. Angela dropped Sara and I off at one end and came to meet us at the other end (she was planning to hike in to meet us but got a little lost).

We did it! First overnight van trip was completed on Dec 22-23. We (Sara and I) went to Wenachee state park and camped in the campground there. It got cold… Down to single digits and I didn’t quite have the camping system optimized for that weather yet so it was a cold night for me! (Sara did fine, she just burrowed down in the middle of my sleeping bag). And during the day she had her backpack to keep warm!

Spoiler Alert! I picked the Chrysler Pacifica. Why you might ask? Great question. That’s what this blog post seeks to answer. Two primary reasons and a handful of secondary (nice to have) reasons. I’ll start with the standard pro/con analysis. Let me start off with my requirements The first question I had to answer was whether I wanted a compact/minivan vs a full sized sprinter van. For me, I decided to optimize for a perfect 3-4 day expedition vs a full time live onboard. This meant I didn’t need as much space and I could avoid the full size van - making it easier to drive in the city, better gas millage and allow it to be quite a bit cheaper. Cons are less space (obviously) and you can’t stand up inside. If I start looking at month long trips in the future (if my work situation changes) then I would reconsider. The rest of this post focuses on the mini/compact vans vs full sized vans.

Way back in 2019, I had this great idea to travel to Glacier NP via train from Seattle. The real idea was to bring our backpacks on the train with us and then just go backpacking straight from the railroad station, but a small child and the desire to do other stuff besides backpacking sent us on a different path. Instead, we took the train and Angela’s parents drove out to meet us. Angela and I were going to go backpacking for a few days, and then tour around the park for the rest of the week before boarding the train back to Seattle.

Back in 2019, we decided to take a trip to Roatan in Honduras. Angela had a dream of staying in an over-water grass hut - and after some searching I found a place in Roatan that had over-water huts (they weren’t grass, but they did have AC!). So we booked a weeklong trip at Anthony’s key, left Sara with my parents, and headed out. I wasn’t doing this blog at the time, but I did keep a journal during the trip - so my memories from this trip were relatively good as I’m writing this 6 years later.

When Sara was just a few months old, I took her and my mom on a train trip down to Eugene OR. 2017-08-22 We took off in the morning of 8/22 - heading to king street station to catch our train. The cascade line runs down to Eugene OR and up to Vancouver BC. We were taking the train down to Eugene and then back the following day. ‹ › Boarding the train was nno issue and we were treated with amazing views of the coastline for the first part of the trip. Once we passed through Tacoma, we were inland for the rest of the way. The trip was fun - there was a observation car that we spent quite a bit of time in and we grabbed lunch in the middle.

Back in 2017, Sean, Golden, and Brian headed up to the PNW again to climb Mt Baker this time. I, in my infinate wisdom, decided to join them. This was to be my second time up Mt Baker and I found it to be a truely amazing climb - Big mountain with tons of snow and glaciers, and only 10k feet of elevation. ‹ › Unfortunately, August in Washington can be very suspect with all of the wildfires in BC trowing smoke up in the air - and this weekend was supposed to be a rough one.

Sara is here! 2017-05-05 Angela woke me around 2a because her water had broken an hour earlier. She took a shower and put on some clothes before waking me up - probably because she knew I would be excited and she wanted to have a calm start to the day which would certainly be fully of excitement. We left around 2:15a and headed up to Ballard. The day start off fairly slow, but the contractions started to get painful around 10a or so and there was some panic for half an hour or so before she could get an epidural put in. After that, it was pretty relaxed for a while - we played cards and chatted about everything ahead that we had no idea how to fathom. Then, at 3:09p, it all went down.