Day by Day-Coping with a Deployment

Gus has been home for 4 weeks today and we’re so happy to have him here. Sometimes it seems like he was never gone and seems like a dream (or nightmare! lol) that he was gone for almost 7 months. He took the whole month off in case he needed it. I thought he would be ready to go back to work because he’s such a workaholic, but he said he’s really enjoyed just being home and relaxing. Our transition has been SO easy. They tell you horror stories about how it might be when they return, but honestly, it’s been pretty perfect. He seems like a calmer person since he’s been there and we’ve just loved spending all this time with him. I know that future deployments might not be so easy of a transition, but for now, things are good. We relaxed a little bit and then we took a short family vacation. We wanted to do something longer, but this is just a busy time of the year with soccer, Scouts starting up, etc. We won a vacation to northern Idaho, but no one wants to answer our emails or voicemails about redeeming that trip, so we headed elsewhere for now. We’ve never been to California and had the Redwood National Park as one of our bucket list items for when we live in Idaho! So we decided to head there! I’ll post the pics all in one gallery, but basically it went like this–we left Mtn Home and got to the Oregon line. From there, we followed the suggested route and I think we only saw about 5 hours in 3 hours! It was deserted. It looked a lot like our area of Idaho in that it was lots of buttes, volcanic rock, and desert. There was occasionally a river, but mostly just rock formations. It was pretty every now and then, but mostly boring. The very beginning of it was interesting near the Idaho/Oregon line-there was a town along the Oregon Trail called Vale that had lots of really pretty murals and that area was harvesting onions, so that was fun to watch but we decided that we will never go that route again! We got to Bend, Oregon and spent the night. It continuously got colder and was 50 degrees in Bend, but felt a LOT colder. They warned us that there could be snow in the morning.

When we woke up, it was mostly just on the mountains around us. You’ll see on the map that from Bend, we headed straight south toward Crater Lake. I remember learning about Crater Lake and how it was formed and how it’s the deepest lake in America and really thought it would be neat to see. It’s a little over an hour between the two places and the landscape changed dramatically. Most of the drive was through dormant volcanos and if we had more time, we would have liked to stop and tour some of them. Then you could tell you were going up in elevation. Our first indication that something was changing was on the sides of the roads. We thought for a minute it might be snow, but it honestly looked like sand every now and then. After 15 minutes or so though, we saw snowflakes and knew things were changing! It was so strange around Crater Lake. I’m guessing it’s maybe like Lake Yellowstone which they say produces its own weather conditions. The closer you got to the lake, the more wooded it got…..huge, tall evergreens that I envision when I think of Oregon. And it got snowier, too. The road wasn’t bad even though there was now all on it, but the trees were covered! It was the most peaceful, fluffy looking snow I think I’ve ever seen. It took a while to get around the Crater Lake area and after we saw that one entrance was closed, Gus was ready to keep driving and forget about it on this trip. I don’t know why though that I thought there may be a chance that we could see it, so we took the next entrance and drove the 25 miles to the visitor center. It was a pretty drive through there….but when we paid and went to the visitor center, they told us that the Rim drive was closed for the season and told us that there was one overlook that you could sometimes see it but that our chances were slim. Gus again wanted to just leave, but I couldn’t stand leaving and not knowing if I would have been able to see it! So we drove up as far as we could and we saw nothing. It was so foggy and snowy…a little disappointing, but maybe we’ll have to try it again. From what they said, this weather is typical and you have to go in July or August if you want a chance of seeing it!

So we kept heading south, again through lots of nothing and occasionally a town of 1,000 people or so. The snow was gone pretty soon after we left Crater Lake and it changed to more of a rolling hills type area with some trees here and there. The kids had been feeling kind of sick because of all the curves we had gone through earlier in the day, so had stopped and bought some dramamine and had a quiet little drive. Then we got to California! It was so weird! When you grow up on the East coast, California seems sooo far away! We couldn’t believe that we were there! And after that, the scenery realllly changed. It was beautiful-lots of curves and trees and gorges. In fact, we passed an accident that had just happened and someone had driven their car off the edge and the car seemed to be caught in trees about 20 feet below. It was scary and I never could find in their newspaper or online whatever happened to the person, but it was sad. It flattened out a little bit, we entered the Redwood National Park, and we just couldn’t believe it. We said several times that if you were on the outside of the forest looking in, you’d never know that they were so huge. It just looks like a normal forest of trees. But when you get there, they’re just unbelievable. Words can’t even describe it and it seems funny to be amazed by trees, but they are HUGE! We immediately pulled over and walked around, just touching them, standing inside them, etc. We took a little trail and drove around in them. They were amazing. Gus had me take a picture of our huge Suburban beside one just to show how big it was!

Then we kept driving through them and finally found a decent sized town, Crescent City, CA. We saw that there were 2 or 3 hotels and then explored some more. I was ready to see the Pacific Ocean and the town sits right on it. We pulled over to a beach area and again, we were just in awe. It’s soooo beautiful and nothing like the East coast or Gulf coast at all. The sand there was almost black, I’m guessing because of all the dark rocks there. The shore is not even like the East….it’s rocky and full of cliffs with huge rocks in the ocean, too. The water was FREEZING but that is normal for there. We saw surfers in there with their wetsuits, just like you would imagine in California! That area constantly stays between 40 and 60 degrees year round and we learned that it is why the redwoods grow so well-something about the temperature and the constant sea mist. Even the way the water came up was different-you would see a wave break and then the water would creep onto shore…but it would just keep creeping and creeping and creeping until we had to run away from it because it seemed like it would never stop! Another weird thing was seeing all the tsunami warning signs! They are normal there and all up the Oregon coast, so there were signs to warn you to go up to 100 ft above sea level if there was an earthquake! Being on the beach was just surreal though. I couldn’t believe that this NC girl was now on the other side of the country staring at the Pacific and I felt very, very blessed to be able to see the things I’ve seen. Then we drove south a little bit through some more trees, along the coastline, and in search of a tree we could drive through. That was the main thing Gus wanted to do! lol We found a place (there are only a few of those trees left) and paid our $5 to do it and Gus was very worried that we weren’t going to fit. So I stood at the other side of the tree and guided him. It was close, but there was still plenty of room for us. So we looped around and did it again with me in there this time. lol After that, we headed back to Crescent City, got some dinner, and went to our hotel. It was soooo peaceful being on the ocean!

The next morning, we went to the Redwood Park offices and got more information. We knew we needed to start heading north (we had to be back a certain day for Ethan’s soccer game) but didn’t want to go that way if there were no more trees. He told us of a drive to take before we headed that way and promised it would be worth the time. Again, you would have no clue they were even there! We had driven by that area already! It was about an hour though because we kept stopping, staring, taking pics, taking video (I’ll try to upload later) and just gawking at these huge trees! It was like something out of a movie. We stopped outside the park and bought a small box made out of redwood to remember it by and headed north along the coast.

It didn’t take us long to get to Oregon and we stopped at the visitor center and took a walk on the beach. We were kind of mad at ourselves. We wanted to get a little bag of sand to take home while we were in California and forgot but thought we could get it in Oregon. The sand was completely different there, just that short distance north. It was more tan like the East coast but that particular beach was full of rainbow colored rocks, so we chose some of those. I’m thinking of making a shadow box and putting them in the bottom. Then the next few hours were spent driving up the Oregon coast. I could go on and on about that too, but it was like every time you turned a corner, there was a new beach landscape out of a movie. The Oregon coast is one of the prettiest places I’ve ever seen. Huge cliffs and rocks jutting out, a low fog around it all. We kept driving and driving, stopping to see a lighthouse at Cape Blanco. We were hoping to see cranberry bogs in harvest-we saw the Ocean Spray factory in the town of Bandon and saw some that were already harvested and one that was full of water but looked like it had JUST been harvested. We found out later that if we had driven off the road a little bit, we would have seen dozens of farms.Eventually, we knew we had to stop driving the coast because it was taking a while. The roads are curvy and the towns are very sporadic again-just little sea towns every 30 minutes to an hour and not much in them. So we headed east the next chance we got and went through a bunch of nothing again! We hoped to stay in Eugene, Oregon for the night but found that every hotel was booked because the Ducks were playing a football game! We kept driving north to Corvallis, OR and found a VERY nice hotel for very cheap…and got to spend it with all the soccer and swimming teams from a California college. lol (the Bears?)

The next day was a lot of driving because we needed to be home that night. We had chosen to not go the same route we came, so we drove toward Portland so we could get to the interstate. After seeing most of Oregon, I’m amazed at how everyone in Oregon lives there in the Willamette Valley. There was hardly ANYONE throughout the entire state but I guess there are 2 million there around Portland? I also learned that after playing the Oregon Trail game on the computer all those years in elementary school, I pronounced Willamette wrong. I was saying Willa-”MET” and it’s actually Wil-LAM-ette.We never saw Portland-we drove around it and I don’t think we would have seen it anyway. It was extremely cold, rainy, and foggy. We couldn’t even see Mt Hood anywhere. We hit the interstate and stopped in Oregon City. This was the end of the Oregon Trail where people would go to get their land claims after the long journey. There was a huge Oregon Trail museum there we wanted to see but because of funding, it was shut down. They had a small visitor center instead and it was really interesting! It was very hands-on for the kids and they got to dress up, pretend to pack a wagon for the trip, etc. And after that, we just drove. We passed Multnomah Falls and would have loved to explore it, too, but it was so rainy and foggy that we could barely see it from the interstate. It was neat to follow the journey that the Oregon Trail pioneers would have taken-floating down the Columbia River….saw the Dalles…saw signs for the Barlow Toll Road….very neat! Then Oregon eventually lost the evergreens and started looking like Idaho again! It turned to desert and small hills and mountains-we were able to go to one overlook and see a little of Mt Hood, OR and Mt St. Helens, WA in the distance according to the map. And then from the pictures, you can see that we made it back to Idaho just in time for a pretty sunset and to see that it had snowed on the mountains all around us while we were gone!

SUCH a fun trip and again, we always feel so blessed that we are able to experience so much while we are living here in the West!