While we usually travel to very exotic destination in summer, this year was different. My daughter Gal, who is 15, really wanted to visit California, so we decided that for once, we’d skip the exotic and try get under the skin of the classic road trip. Vancouver to San Diego is about 2250km one way, and we’d be driving both ways.
Now, we’ve traveled to various parts of the West Coast many times, as any reader of this blog will have seen. So this time we would be driving straight through Washington State, and then spend a few days in Oregon before heading for San Francisco.
Heading out, we made good time down the I-5 and ended the day in Salem, Or. Salem is the state capital and apparently is a cool town to visit, but instead we headed through bucolic countryside to Silver Falls State Park, widely regarded as the finest park in the State and well known for the Trail of Ten Falls.
As we arrived, we noticed a very strange procession of vintage cars and their drivers , all dressed up as if it were the 1920’s. Amazingly, these cars were all steam powered – so very “green” and incredibly unusual.
Even the best laid plans can go awry, and Daniel had been stung by a wasp between his toes, so three of us went hiking instead of the five of us.
The hike was great – we took a short cut and only hiked to 7 of the falls, but they were really beautiful, and we could even go behind a few of them. This was very much off the beaten path America, and it was awesome.
