When you travel with friends and family, you get to take dorky photos.
This isn’t travelling. To me, travelling is when you have to constantly push your boundaries and don’t allow yourself the luxury of becoming complacent. It’s a learning process where you experience everything for the first time without the influence of others so that you can discover what you really love and hate. It’s a means of discovering yourself and learning to modify your habits and ways of thinking to become someone better than the person you were when you left. This is a vacation.
I’ve gotten used to having to figure out where I should go next and how to get there by myself, getting to the next destination on my own, eating at a table for one, sightseeing by my lonesome, and talking to myself. Now I have three other people to talk and laugh with, take dorky photos with, order and share food with… etc. One person drives while a second looks up the cities on the map, a third figures out which hotels are viable options at each destination, and a fourth distributes car snacks. I don’t think it could get any easier! It could be comfier (we’re pretty crammed in the Prius), but not easier.
Oregon Caves
Paradise Lost
Today we visited the Oregon Caves under typical West Coast weather: rain, rain and more rain. I don’t have proper hiking boots so I wore my runners. My shoes and socks were soaked right through. Poor Kim didn’t have a jacket with a hood or proper walking shoes so he wore an emergency poncho and was soaked from head to toe by the end of the tour.
Oregon Caves is definitely worth a stop in my books. It’s only $8.50 US per person for an hour long tour of the caves and you get to go really far down the caves and up the mountain from within. You get to see calcite deposits and structures that are hundreds of thousands of years old as well as the remains of the markings made by tourists back in the 1930s which are now permanently embossed under a layer of limestone.
My favourite part of the tour was probably the damp cave called Paradise Lost. It’s a small area with a high ceiling covered in these giant limestone structures that look like “claws” (if you’re Ang), “jellyfish” (if you’re Morten or Kim), or “the Grinch’s hands from Dr. Seuss” or “parachuters” (if you’re me). You get dripped on quite a bit in here especially since you’re facing upwards to look at the structures, but it’s worth the look.
It absolutely poured in San Francisco yesterday. It’s actually the first time it’s rained here since I moved here in July, not counting two occasions when the fog turned into drizzle.