First hike in Seattle

For the past month, we've been busy setting up our new lives here in Seattle: going to the DMV, buying furniture, unpacking boxes, and making multiple trips to Ikea and Home Depot. This weekend, we finally felt like we could relax a little and start to explore our new surroundings. Matt picked a 4 mile hike on Cougar Mountain, one of the local county parks just outside the city. After hard rains for the past couple of days, the trail was muddy and mossy.  It reminded us of the redwood forests in California before the drought hit. We trekked through fields of ferns, over mossy logs, and dodged big slugs on the trail.

Seattle! ...And a few reflections from the road

We made it!! After two days of driving from Banff, we landed in Seattle. By now, most of our readers know that we've been settling in for a few weeks, and so far we are enjoying our new home and getting to know our new neighborhood.

Downtown Seattle from Kerry Park

Banff and the Canadian Rockies, Part 2

After our hike near Lake Louise, the following day was slated to be rainy and grey. We decided to spend the day driving the famous Icefields Parkway, a scenic highway through the Rockies that connects Banff and Jasper National Parks. We first stopped in the Lake Louise tourist center for a handy map and got a few suggestions for which pull-offs to see. The first part of our drive was pretty wet, so we didn't stop, but by the time we reached Peyto Lake, the weather was starting to clear.

We decided to hike up to see the Peyto Lake overlook. The path here was less a trail and more a maze through mossy forest  -- the trail frequently split two or three ways, only to split again just a few steps ahead. In the more open areas of the forest, you could see paths criss-crossing each other every few feet. Everywhere you looked there were baby evergreen trees, lush patches of moss, lichens, and wildflowers. We meandered along several paths and eventually we made it to the overlook for stunning views of the lake.

Peyto Lake trail 

Banff and the Canadian Rockies, Part 1

Our final stop on the road was Banff in Alberta, Canada.  We camped for 5 days at Two Jack Lakeside, a beautiful little campground on Two Jack Lake with free showers and, to Matt's delight, free unlimited firewood.  We got one of the best walk-in campsites (#32), right on the water and with good site separation from the other campsites.  From this vantage point, we could keep an eye on the pair of loons that were nesting nearby.

Site #32 at Two Jack Lakeside

Yellowstone

Yellowstone is a huge park (over 3,400 sq. miles), so we planned to camp there for about 4 days to get to see as much as possible.  The main park road is actually two loops, connected in a figure 8 (handy map here). The southern loop contains most of the park's popular volcanic features like Old Faithful, whereas the northern loop has more open prairie, forests, and wildlife viewing opportunities (at least in the summer). For the first half of the week we stayed in Grant Village, which is on the southern loop, and explored the sights in that region. For the second half of the week, we camped in Canyon, which is on the northern loop, and explored northward into the Yellowstone Grand Canyon and the Mammoth Hot Springs. 

The volcanic areas were on the top of our list to see, so as soon as we'd set up camp on our first day, we headed out to the Upper Geyser Basin. This basin is the most famous for Old Faithful, one of the more frequently erupting larger geysers, but there is also an extensive network of boardwalk trails that meander through the prairie and visit countless smaller geysers and colorful pools. At first we aimed to just scope out the landscape and identify hikes or features that we wanted to come back and see later, but we quickly got sucked in to walking almost the entire thing. We ended up spending several hours visiting all the different features, taking photos, and enjoying the sunset. 

Family portrait in the geyser pools

The Grand Tetons

After Custer, we met up with Matt's parents to explore the Grand Tetons and Yellowstone together. They rented a camper van and met us at the Signal Mountain Campground in the Tetons. I'd never been to either park before this, so I was looking forward to seeing the iconic landscape that I'd heard so much about.

Grand Teton National Park wowed us from beginning to end, and we packed as much in as we could. We enjoyed many picnics (breakfast, lunch, and dinner), scenic drives through the park's prairies and forests, strolls along the Snake River, a day hike up into the mountains, and numerous wildlife sightings. Matt's dad and I catalyzed each other into a frenzy of photo-ops that was unparalleled previously in the trip, going to great lengths for that perfect shot. Matt and his mom were good sports throughout the entire trip; they endured terribly long waits at scenic pull-offs, woke up at the crack of dawn for sunrise shots, and one evening at the Jackson Lake Lodge sat patiently staring at delicious, uneaten desserts as we abandoned them for sunset photos on the balcony. Thank you for being such good sports!

Jenny Lake Campground

Custer State Park

Custer State Park is located in the Black Hills of South Dakota, and it is a very scenic and popular part of the state.  Being a few thousand feet higher in elevation than the Badlands, and being mostly forested, the park was pleasantly cool in comparison to the punishing heat of the Badlands.  Custer is also extremely well-maintained and well-equipped (free showers!) for weary campers like us. There are lots of different campgrounds, lakes, streams, scenic drives, and trails to choose from here; it would take weeks to see and do everything that this park has to offer.

We decided to break up our time between hiking and scenic drives. First we checked out the Cathedral Spires Trail and the Little Devil's Tower Trail, both of which came highly-recommended for views of the pinnacles and spires at the higher elevations in the park.  Many of the rocks in this area are packed with huge chunks of mica, so as we hiked, the ground literally glittered under our boots.  Afterward, we headed over to Sylvan Lake to eat a picnic lunch by the water.

    
Along the Cathedral Spires Trail

The Badlands

The Badlands was the first stop on the final leg of our journey. The trip from Minnesota through South Dakota was one of the longer drives of the trip, and we made it to the Badlands by evening. The landscape in this park is alien and strange; after driving for endless miles through flat farmland, the Bandlands rise out of the horizon and dazzle you with bands of colored, rippling rock formations. The eroded buttes and pinnacles are punctuated with prairie grassland, which makes for a stark contrast. It can also be blisteringly hot in the summertime, and even though the sun was quite low, the temperature was still hovering around 100 degrees when we arrived in the evening. We pitched our tent and then went out to explore a little. We were only staying in the park for one night before moving on to Custer State Park, so we made the most of the light we had left.

Eroded buttes of the Badlands

Catching up with the Clay Coyote

Our next stop was Hutchinson, MN, to visit my aunt and uncle at Clay Coyote Pottery. We had a few relaxing days on the farm catching up with Tom and Betsy and resting up before the last leg of our road trip -- a whole month of camping in the west. Tom made us his signature sourdough pancakes for breakfast, we took a few walks through the corn fields and prairie, grilled out on the porch, browsed the gallery, and learned a little more about the pottery business. We left feeling refreshed and ready to tackle a couple of long-haul drives through to the Badlands.

Uncle Tom, hard at work

The Northwoods

After Chicago, we made a quick stopover in Milwaukee to visit a good friend from our California days, and then we continued on to Northern Wisconsin. My dad's family has been vacationing in the Northwoods, as they are called, for many generations, and we were lucky enough to be able to stay in the same cabin that my dad grew up visiting.

I'd been to the Long Lake cabin several times as a kid and then once again while I was in college.  I was excited to show Matt the area and happy that my parents were flying out to meet us for a week on the lake.  They arrived on July 4th to a tiny regional airport in Rhinelander WI, and we drove out to get them.  As we learned later in the week, Wisconsin has no restrictions on fireworks of any kind, so there were huge fireworks displays were going off all around us as we drove to the airport and back.  It was a colorful welcome to the area to say the least.

Our week at the lake was a great time relax, but we also managed to squeeze in quite a few activities. Some of the highlights included: walking through the woods on old sugar camp roads, making friends with the local animals, baking cookies, fly fishing from the dock, visiting Lake Superior and hunting for agates on the beach, getting a tour of Long Lake from our hosts, shopping at the local farmer's market, visiting Whataview Farm, and killing swarms of mosquitos with our new electric fly swatter. It was a great time for everyone!

View looking from the dock back towards the cabin

Hello Chicago!

After Ithaca and the Finger Lakes, our next stop was Chicago.  We didn't have nearly enough time to explore all that the city had to offer -- all-in-all we had about a day and a half -- but we did our best to see as much of the city as we could.  We started out in Millennium Park, where we walked through some of the gardens, visited Cloud Gate (the bean), and strolled along the Lake Michigan waterfront.

Welcome to Chicago!