Even though we had recently gotten back from our long road trip, for my birthday I asked my family to spend ~4.5 hours in the car for one more national park adventure. We headed up to Diablo Lake which is in the area that contains both Ross Lake National Recreation Area and North Cascades National Park.
We did a hike up to an overlook with a nice view of Diablo Lake and stopped at the visitor center. We’ve been there before and even got the North Cascades stamp for Elijah’s book, but we failed to get the Ross Lake National Recreation Area stamp which was right next to it.
It was a lot of driving for a single day but it was nice to get out on one more hike. It wasn’t the perfect day since a fire in the area was adding smoke to the air. Plus, that area has become extremely popular over the years so the trail was overcrowded but we made the best of it.
Last year at Yellowstone, we were standing at the “Grand Canyon of Yellowstone” and Elijah commented how big it is. I told him that this was tiny compared to the Grand Canyon and he said, “Can we go there?” Yes, son. Yes, we can. But if we’re going to drive that far, we’re going to pack more stuff into the trip! The trip went through a few different iterations, but we ended with Bryce Canyon, Grand Canyon, Death Valley, and Crater Lake as the National Parks we would hit. It was a long trip, and this post will probably be so long that nobody will read it, but that’s ok. I want to record all the great memories for us to read in the future! If you scroll to the bottom, you can watch the video montage.
I know there are people who enjoy setting off on a trip with very little planning and seeing where the adventure takes them. I could imagine doing something like that, but when this trip is carefully fit into a packed summer with limited vacation days and a family in tow, that would stress me out. I get a lot more out of my vacation if I can have it thoroughly planned ahead of time and then just enjoy not making as many decisions on the trip. This year, I took that planning to the extreme.
I started by planning out what town we’d be in each night and making hotel reservations for each stop. From there, I used GitHub Copilot to help me a lot. Some of the things I used it for:
It would periodically look through all our hotel reservations, see if the price was cheaper, and then recommend whether we should rebook the reservation or not. This saved us well over $100 in total.
I fed it all our restaurant information from our credit card statements, had it figure out what we like to eat, and then had it pick ~3 restaurants close to every hotel. It included a link to the menu and an estimated price for the three of us to eat. This made it super easy to decide what we were hungry for without endless choices. Fun fact: the first time we drove ourselves to dinner was Day 7! Many of our dinners were close enough to walk which was very nice after so much time in the car. We packed all our lunches and ate in the car.
I told it to analyze our route and identify every Costco gas station that would require less than a 2-mile total detour. It also reported on how much of a discount that station was compared to the stations around it so I could decide if it was worth using Costco or not. It’s nice for saving gas but it’s not convenient for using the bathroom or cleaning your windshield. We still used them a lot.
It found at least one or two grocery stores near every stop in case we needed to restock.
I built a web page with an itinerary for each day along with the restaurant, gas, and grocery store information. It was accessible from my website, as an app on our phones, and printed in a binder that we carried in the car. Was it necessary? No. Did we love it? Absolutely.
You should be able to click on any of the images in this post to get a bigger view, but here was our route. I’ll explain it day by day with photos along the way and then wrap up with some other topics.
Day 1 – On the road
I tried to front-load the worst driving days. Some might say that this wears people out too soon, but I read that the way you finish your trip has a big effect on how you remember it, so I try not to make the end a slog.
Seventeen miles into the start of our big adventure, the lights on my dash lit up with a warning sign and an audible beeping. Thankfully it ended up just being the battery in a tire pressure sensor that was going bad, but that meant that throughout the trip, the error would pop up, give me a minor heart attack, and then I would dismiss it.
Other than that happening periodically, there wasn’t anything too special about this day. We hit the road by about 5:30am and chugged the 620 miles to Twin Falls, ID. We stayed at Best Western Plus hotels every night except for our days in the Grand Canyon (and Lone Pine, CA which was a regular Best Western.) We’ve stayed at that particular one multiple times, and we enjoy it. For the last couple hours of the drive, we could see a storm brewing and it was a race to see if we could get past the spot where it was going to cross the interstate. We stayed dry the whole trip and then the moment we went out to get our bags from the truck, it CUT LOOSE. It was so intense that I just ran out to get a couple things and then Tyla and Elijah went swimming while I waited for the rain to pass so I could bring in the rest of the bags.
Day 2 – Driving and Bryce Canyon
The second day was supposed to just be another day on the road, but we made great time thanks to 75 and 80mph speed limits. We covered the 486 miles to Bryce Canyon National Park and arrived there around 2pm. We checked into the hotel (the famous Ruby’s Inn) right outside the park entrance and decided to head into the park for the rest of the afternoon. Even though we were tired from the drive, it was fun to finally be in a park!
We did the drive out to Rainbow Point and then stopped at a bunch of the lookouts on the way back. It was a low effort way to get a lot of sightseeing in.
Day 3 – Bryce Canyon and Driving
I was super thankful that we got to the park earlier than planned yesterday because we needed to be on the road shortly after lunch to make it to the Grand Canyon around sunset. It is NOT enough time to spend in this park but we made the most of it. Most days of the trip we got up around 5 or 5:30 and were on the road ASAP and this was no exception. We made it to the trailhead before most people, but the trail was still plenty busy. It had some neat switchbacks to descend quickly into the canyon and then the trail had a ton of great views that changed quickly.
We were able to use our rewards status to get free late checkout. That was convenient so we could come back to the room after the hike, get changed, eat lunch, and pack up. Elijah was able to get in a quick swim too.
Then it was back in the car for another ~300 miles down to the south rim of the Grand Canyon. On the way down there, we stopped at Glen Canyon Dam, got a stamp and looked around. There weren’t a lot of places to stop for a restroom on this drive, and this was certainly a convenient one!
We got into Grand Canyon a little before sunset. We had splurged for a canyon view room right in the village. We were tired and hungry when we arrived and the parking situation was a bit overwhelming but we were super thankful to have a spot magically open up within reasonable walking distance of our room. We quickly unpacked and then walked to dinner before heading to bed early for another early morning adventure!
Day 4 – Grand Canyon
This was it! The park that started the whole idea of the trip! We had gotten a glimpse of the view on the drive in from the eastern gate of the park the day before, but now we could really soak it in. First up was breakfast though. The hotel didn’t have breakfast and the rooms didn’t have a microwave so we ended up walking about 20 minutes to the Maswick Food Court for a breakfast that was fine. Unfortunately doing that added quite a bit of time to both of our mornings. I’d probably do something different knowing what I know now, but it was fine for what it was.
The park can get very busy in the summer so they run a shuttle system. I wasn’t thrilled about it when I was reading about it before the trip, but honestly it worked out really smoothly. After breakfast we hopped on the red shuttle that runs from the village out to Hermit’s Rest. It’s a beautiful drive and we got out at most of the overlooks. We even hiked between a few of them.
As we were on one of those stretches, we were met by two big horned sheep! Cool but… augh! It took us a bit to figure out how to get out of their way but we were able to backtrack to a big enough area and they crossed the road so we could continue on.
Temps were in the low 90s while we were there which seems like a blessing compared to what it could have been, but it was still plenty hot for us. By the time we made it out to Hermits Rest, we were hot, tired, and ready for the air-conditioned bus ride back to the village.
We went to the room, cooled off, had lunch from the cooler, and took naps. But we couldn’t be done! We were at the Grand Canyon! So we took a hike recommended by the awesome Dirt in My Shoes itinerary that powered all our stops on this trip just like it has so many of our National Park trips before. This time it was a “secret hike” that wasn’t on the map but WOW! It was so worth it! The view was incredible with no railing and no one else around. We soaked that in for a while before returning back to the room and then walking to dinner.
Speaking of the food, none of our food was great in the village. You’re a captive audience and there’s one contractor that runs it all. It’s expensive and mediocre but it was good enough. We were really hungry after our days of adventuring anyway. I think the Maswick Pizza Pub ended up being our favorite spot.
I also learned that it’s really difficult to photograph the Grand Canyon. It’s so big that no picture can do it justice or even vaguely communicate the feel of standing there. A lot of my favorite pictures ended up having Tyla or Elijah in the foreground to provide a little perspective but the pictures ended up looking pretty repetitive.
One last highlight for the day was that we didn’t drive ourselves anywhere and we slept in the same place that we woke up!
Day 5 – Grand Canyon
Our second day in the park, like my basketball career, was spent below the rim. It featured our most intense hike of the trip. The route to Cedar Ridge was only about 3 miles and 1120 vertical feet, but the terrain is intense and punishing. You hike DOWN first and then you have to hike back up in the heat. We started as early as we could and ended up having a fantastic hike.
This trail was more busy than I enjoy, but it was still a huge winner. It started off with an enormous set of steep switchbacks and then had a great variety of views before finally making it down to Cedar Ridge. There’s a simple outhouse there along with a volunteer ranger who encourages people to not go past that point.
The rangers call this guy Vomiting Victor.
Can you spot Tyla and Elijah in this photo?
We were nervous about the hike back up but thankfully a lot of it was still in the shade and we made good time going back up. By the time we were back up there, a search and rescue volunteer was at the top of the trail chatting with people before they headed down. Hiking in the Grand Canyon is no joke! We packed a LOT of water but used most of it.
After that, we again headed back to the room for a quick shower and lunch from the cooler again. It was expensive to stay in the village but it was super nice to be able to make a pit stop in the middle of the day! After lunch we powered through our tiredness and took a drive to the Visitor Center and then out to Desert View Watchtower. Like Hermit’s Rest and much of the village it was built ~100 years ago and gave an interesting perspective on the canyon. Access to the top is controlled with free, timed tickets, but don’t worry, they sell ice cream while you wait. They know what they’re doing!
On the way back, we drove through rain for the 5th day in the row but it conveniently stopped every time we pulled off at a lookout.
We caught the tail end of sunset on our walk back from dinner this night just like the night before. It was another perk of having our hotel right along the rim. Someone graciously took a nice photo of us and we even spotted another bighorn sheep walking just below the wall. It was hard to call it quits on our last night in the park. We were all very enamored with it and there was so much more we could have explored.
Day 6 – Hoover Dam and Las Vegas
We were up with the sunrise and enjoyed a quick look over the rim for the last time.
We grabbed a quick breakfast at the cafe that was attached to the village grocery store and chugged out of town. Eventually we hit the interstate again for the first time since part way through day 2, but thankfully we’d be back on two lane roads the next day.
It was about a 4-hour drive to the Hoover Dam. We paid to park in the parking garage to get some shade in the 110 degree heat, but it was still an uncomfortable lunch from the cooler in the parking garage. (We’re fancy like that.) I also gained 5 driving points for getting my truck into that parking garage. The spiral up was so tight that there couldn’t have been more than a couple inches to spare between my front right bumper and the outside wall. I just kept my eyes pinned in my side mirror keeping the left rear tire as close as possible to the inside curb. We fit. Barely.
I didn’t have much of a plan here other than that I knew I wanted to stop. It was so hot that we basically just made a beeline for the first doors we saw and thankfully it was the air-conditioned visitor center. We didn’t really have time for the full tour so we opted for the museum, and it ended up being one of the best museums I’ve ever seen. We did the various indoor lookouts and then braced ourselves to walk out along the dam a bit to look over the edge. Then we beelined it back to the truck before we melted and enjoyed an air-conditioned drive across the dam and back. In nicer weather with more time, there’s more I would have liked to explore, but even with the quick stop, I’m glad we got to see it.
From there it was a short drive to Vegas (where we again drove through rain). Tyla and Elijah enjoyed the pool while I went to the grocery store to restock our fridge. We took our first family Uber trip into Vegas (it was cheaper and less stressful than paying to park the truck). I was thankful to be a passenger so I could actually look around. It was new for all of us.
It was still hot even though the sun went down but we enjoyed dinner at Favorite Bistro in the LINQ Promenade. I definitely felt like a dorky, clueless dad trying to navigate my family there. Thankfully the food was excellent and then we went on a quick walk. We successfully ended up in front of the fountains at the Bellagio right before a show started. That was super cool and it was neat to see the Vegas strip lit up at night, but it was late and we were hot/tired.
That was the point where I realized that there was no way an Uber was going to stop on the strip to pick us up. I had no idea how to get to a place where they could get us. Finally, we made our way through a casino to the dropoff and pickup area. It was a fairly long/hot wait, but we made it back to the hotel.
Day 7 – Death Valley
You know what a lovely place to go would be after the 110-degree weather in Vegas? How about Death Valley!
The drive to the park was a lot more interesting than I expected. I pictured that whole area as flat and empty but there was a lot of terrain to keep things interesting and it only took us a couple minutes to get off the interstate and back onto two lane roads.
Our first stop in Death Valley was Dantes View. The road up there had some intimidating signs about the final quarter mile being a 15% grade. And in that heat with nobody around I did think twice, but aside from the drive being interesting, the view was amazing! We crested the final rise into the parking area and we were on top of the world! As an added bonus, it was ~15 degrees cooler up there at 5400 feet. We took pictures and soaked in the view before heading back down.
Our next step was the visitor center. Depending on which thermometer you believe it was around 115 degrees. There wasn’t a ton to see there but we did go through the museum area and get our stamp. I was also very happy that the parking area there had a lot of covered spots so the truck wasn’t baking in the heat.
We then made our way out to Badwater Basin, the lowest point in the US at -282 feet. When we got out, the wind must have been blowing the 115 degree air at us around 20mph. It was… not fun. But we were there so we got out, made a determined walk down to the salt flats, spent about 30 seconds there, and then headed back. I know between this and the Hoover Dam we sound like wimps but, wow, the heat was INTENSE. There were signs warning you not to be outside your vehicle for more than 10 minutes.
Our route from there took us along a cool one lane road past Artists Palette and then we headed west towards Lone Pine, CA. Again, I was expecting just some flat boring two lane road but this was the most memorable stretch of road. We went over not one, but TWO, extremely steep and windy mountain passes. I was so thankful that the truck kept purring along as I forced it up those steep grades in the burning weather. There weren’t a lot of other people on around so I was able to take my time and try not to overwork the engine.
That all landed us in Lone Pine. Why would we stop there? And why was Elijah grinning from ear to ear? You’ll find out tomorrow.
This was the first night of the trip that we drove ourselves to dinner! We could have walked the ~2 miles but we would have walked through a bunch of construction and it didn’t feel worth it just for the gimmick of saying we walked to dinner another night.
Day 8 – Cerro Gordo and Reno
If you ask Elijah about his favorite stop of the trip, I think he would say “Cerro Gordo” and I expect most people would say, “What is that?” I’ve written about it before, but in summary, it’s a silver mining town from late 1800s that has been barely kept standing over the years and was recently purchased by a guy who is restoring it, exploring the mines, and documenting it on YouTube. Elijah and I love watching the videos and Tyla gets in on it sometimes too. The channel had such an impact on me that I ended up talking Tyla into redoing our itinerary to swap out Zion National Park for everything after Day 5!
The road to Cerro Gordo is just outside the small town of Keeler, CA, about a 15-minute drive from where we stayed in Lone Pine. This road is also the main reason why we drove the truck. It’s about a 7.6 mile road that climbs over 4000 feet. If you do the math, that’s an average of a 10% grade. While I people report making it up and down fine in AWD SUVs, I would not feel comfortable doing it in anything other than at least all terrain tires with 4WD. Given all the reports I’ve seen about cars and trucks overheating, we took our time getting up the hill. It was narrow, steep, and rocky, but we made it without issue.
Once we got to the town, we checked in with the town manager, Stephen who was hanging out on the porch playing his guitar. There were a few other cars there during our visit, but we didn’t bump into anyone else. We started at the museum and thoroughly enjoyed looking around at all the stuff Brent (the owner) had pulled out of the mines in his explorations. While we were looking around, we saw Brent step out of his house, and we waved, not expecting a big response from him. I felt a little weird being there and feeling like I was invading his privacy even though he says he likes to help teach people about the town. With all that in mind, I was really thankful when he came into the museum to say hi to us! It’s a bit awkward for me to meet people like this since I know so much about them and they know nothing about me, but we had a good quick chat. After we finished chatting, I talked to him privately and asked if he minded taking a photo with us and he seemed happy to do it. Super cool!
We explored the museum, goats and alpacas, two small houses (including the one he made into a library), the assay office, Lola’s, and the maintenance building/church/theater. While he does a good job of communicating the layout of the town, it’s neat to have been there and have the relationship of all the buildings baked into my memory. There were a few buildings that were off limits with the main one being the hoist house. You can barely even get to a point where you can see that, but given the 900 foot hole, I can understand.
After a couple hours there, we started back down the road. Except for the fact that I had experienced the road once already, I was more nervous about going down than up. There are insanely sharp corners with huge dropoffs. There are not a lot of good places to have a brake problem. So we crept down in 4WD in first gear and even that required a lot of brake action. It took us 35-40 minutes each way, but we made it safely back to Keeler and back onto paved roads. It was at this point that I acknowledged that maybe doing an offroad adventure like this with your family when you’re 1000 miles from home wasn’t the best idea. Ha!
We said a thank you prayer for the safe excursion and headed north. The previous night I had been looking at Elijah’s National Park passport stamp book and realized we were driving past another spot for a stamp. It lined up with a lunch/bathroom break so we stopped at Manzanar National Historic Site. After destroying the ecology and economy of the area by diverting Owens River to get water to Los Angeles, the government had a great idea to remedy the economic situation: put a relocation center there during WW2 to house Japanese Americans. Double mess.
It clearly was not the happiest place that we visited on the trip, but it was a very well done museum and it was interesting to learn about something we hadn’t expected to see. It fit in well with our trip because there were some mentions of Cerro Gordo, and the first group to be relocated to Manzanar was from Bainbridge Island which is very close to our house. While the Japanese Americans were there, they started a garden and some of the fruit trees are still going strong. The rangers were giving away free pears that had just been picked and we happily took some.
From there it was about 4 more hours in the car to Reno. The drive up Owens Valley was really beautiful with the Sierra Nevadas on the left and the Inyo mountains on right. We drove through a lot of very small towns (all two lane road), stopped at an old gas station that didn’t have any way to pay at the pump, and saw a herd of wild horses by a lake.
Reno was fine for an overnight stop. We had picked a Mexican place for dinner, but we didn’t realize it was in the bowels of another casino. The portions were about 3x of what we needed but the food was decent. It was my first time ordering from an iPad menu too!
Day 9 – Crater Lake
Our route from Reno to Seattle took us past Crater Lake. Sort of. Crater Lake is fairly difficult to get to on a trip like this but we crammed it in anyway. We got our usual very early start out of the hotel and made the 6-hour drive to Crater Lake. Thankfully it was mostly on 2 lane roads with good views.
We made it up to the rim of the lake in the early afternoon. In contrast to the rest of the trip, I had very little plan for what to do here. We started at the visitor center to get a stamp and get our first views of the amazingly blue water. Then we picked out a hike up to a fire lookout (The Watchman) which gave an even better overview of the lake.
After a few hours in the park, we made the ~1.5 hour drive retracing our steps back to Klamath Falls, OR. We found a delicious BBQ restaurant for dinner where I enjoyed something called a BBQ Sundae (mashed potatoes topped with beans, coleslaw, pulled pork, etc.)
Day 10 – Home
The final day of our trip arrived and while we didn’t necessarily need to leave super early, we knew we’d end up hitting traffic and we were eager to be home so we made another early start. It was about 8 hours of drive, and after fighting our way through heavy traffic for the last ~4 hours, we made it home with quite the collection of bugs on the grill and lots of Cerro Gordo dust in the bed and on the tailgate.
Stats
The entire trip was 3279.2 miles driven in 61:17:05 for an average speed of 53.5mph and we averaged 20.2 mpg. I had pessimistically planned for 20 mpg but we came pretty close to that due to some incredibly strong headwinds for both of our first two days which made the 75-80mph speed limits suck even more gas.
Speaking of gas, the highest price we saw for regular unleaded was $7.29. The most we paid was $6.25 and we mostly avoided filling up in California. We averaged right around $4.90 for our gas over the whole trip. Driving a truck on a trip like this isn’t exactly an efficient choice and there were many times I wish we had the Tesla, but the truck was worth it for the drive up to Cerro Gordo and packing in it was definitely convenient.
I plan our road trips at 60mph whether we take the car or the truck. That estimate is pretty close when you factor in our bathroom stops, but we made better time the first couple days thanks to higher speed limits and maybe a stop or two less than normal (65mph on day 1 and 67mph on day 2.) Our two lane days were a few mph slower than 60 but it still holds up as a good estimate for us.
I was surprised at how evenly our miles were spread across all seven states:
WA: 412 mi (13%)
OR: 639 mi (20%)
ID: 283 mi (9%)
UT: 526 mi (17%)
AZ: 444 mi (14%)
NV: 205 mi (7%)
CA: 659 mi (21%)
I keep track of all the counties Elijah has visited and he got 22 new ones on this trip. Over 2000 of our miles were in those new 22 counties. Nevada was a first for me too.
As I’ve mentioned multiple times with our county exploration trips and summer road trips, we really love getting off the interstate. I didn’t specifically plan for it this time, but it still worked out nicely. Here’s a breakdown of our road types:
Interstate: 1537 mi (52.7%)
4+ lane highway: 316 mi (10.8%)
2 lane highway: 987 mi (33.8%)
Dirt: 16 mi (0.5%)
Other: 63 mi (2.1%)
Wondering how I got all these stats? I wrote quite a few interesting map analysis programs with my AI agents to calculate all this.
Our road trip bingo game went well. Just like our Yellowstone trip, we found all the states except one: West Virginia. Do people there ever take road trips? We had 48 plates by day 2. Then we added Rhode Island on day 3, and Vermont was finally spotted on Day 10. We also got 5/13 Canadian provinces and 2 Mexican states.
Best Signs
This is maybe a weird category, but we saw two very unique signs. The first is one we saw twice on our Moab trip, but I failed to photo it. This time I didn’t photo it myself, but I was careful to mark the GPS location so I could find it online later:
OCCASIONAL BLINDING DUST STORMS
The other was on the way to Death Valley.
DIP, NEXT 20 MILES
How do you have 20 miles of dips? It turns out that when a wash cross the road, they dip down to make sure that the water can easily make it over the road without (hopefully) undercutting the road and washing it away.
Wrap-Up
I know this was super long, but I wanted to get this all written down to enjoy down the road. We have so many good memories that this post could easily have been much longer. And through the whole thing, I said a lot of thank you prayers. So many things went unexpectedly perfect that I literally ended up making a list on my phone of all the things we had to be thankful for. They wouldn’t all make sense to post here, but the weather was a giant one. How do you take a 10-day trip across the southwest in August and have ZERO SMOKE? There were many places where we saw signs naming mountains on the skyline and commenting that many of them aren’t visible because of smoke, haze, and smog, but we could see them all at every stop. Our trip could have felt much different if we weren’t able to enjoy those expansive views with such clear air.
These road trips to national parks are my favorite family vacation. We hadn’t planned to do another one this year after doing Yellowstone last year but I’m so glad we did! It felt very different from our Yellowstone trip since we were changing hotels most nights (and that got old), but both trips were super enjoyable in their own ways. I’m thankful that Tyla and Elijah not only put up with these trips but deeply enjoy them too!
I’m a little slow in posting this, but earlier this summer, we enjoyed another trip back to Indiana to visit family. This was a special one because we were celebrating (slightly early) my parents 50th wedding anniversary!
We had a new (for some of us) adventure this time when we visited Fair Oaks Farms. It’s a dairy farm with ~20,000 cows. It’s an enormous operation and the tour was very interesting! That’s also in the general area of my grandpa so we were able to visit him as well.
The rest of our time was filled with swimming, cornhole, croquet, watching Elijah drive the mower around, Dad teaching me how to drive 1954 Allis Chalmers, board games, target practice, and lots of good food.
For the last ~50 years, Camp 4 Star has been operating in our area and kids from all our area churches (and their friends) have been attending. Elijah has been going for four years now and Tim and Chelsea have been pouring their hearts and souls into running it. We really appreciate all their work! The photos and videos that we get from camp are already wondering, but I thought it would be fun to spend a day there with all my camera gear. The stakes would be low and I would certainly learn some stuff. I suggested that to Tim about seven years ago and I finally got around to doing it this year.
It was really neat to get to spend a full day at camp. We saw the whole schedule play out in person instead of just on a piece of paper. The choreography of the day was impressive! There’s so much planning and preparation that goes into it, and it all worked so smoothly.
I don’t know if I got anything that camp will end up actually using, but here are the shots I got:
And I also took a bunch of video:
So what did I learn?
If I’m going to make a video like this, I think I think I would do more of a promo style video where I interview people and use their quotes as the main soundtrack of the video.
I was nervous about keeping enough battery power throughout the day, but I carried a power bank in my pocket and ran a USB cable from that to my camera. I never had a problem and I could have gone multiple days like that.
I’ve never used this feature before but my tripod can also function as a monopod. One of the legs screws off and then the head can attach to that. While I felt a little silly using it, it was immensely useful. I would have had a difficult time getting through the day without it, specially when I was using my giant 70-200mm lens. Not only did it remove the weight when I was standing still, but it kept the camera so much more solid than hand holding it. I was able to get good pictures and video even at full zoom.
If I did it again, I would bring multiple tripod adapters so that I could quickly switch lenses without moving the adapter round. When I use the big lens, the adapter goes on the lens and when I use the smaller lens, the adapter goes on the camera.
I would also set up some secondary cameras (like a GoPro or two) to catch more continuous action at the beach or at campfire. I did have an audio recorder set up at campfire and that was fantastic, but I wish I had also done that with video.
All in all, it was a great day, and we got some fun memories out of it!
Every year we try to go camping with Tyla’s family. I’m pretty sure we’ve done it every year since 2008! This year we went to an old favorite: Deception Pass State Park. It’s a very busy place and we had to book right when the reservations opened up 9 months earlier, but this time we stayed on the east side of the park in the Quarry Pond campground. That seemed a bit more laid back and we could still access all the various parts of the park.
Don always brings his trailer and we congregate there for all the meals, but I was able to book a cabin that was right next to their site. When you go camping in June around here, there’s a decent chance that it will be cold and rainy so the cabin is nice to have. Thankfully we had almost perfect weather with temps around 70 and clear skies.
We watched beautiful sunsets every night down at the beach, walked across the bridge, explored the tide pools in the north part of the park, and hiked around the Quarry Pond side of the park. A huge thanks to Don, Logan, and Megan for getting the camper ready for this one weekend trip and then storing it again!
As I was watching the sunset one night, I wondered where it was rising. Stop and think about that for a moment. You’re sitting near Seattle in June watching the sun going down over the Pacific. Where is it rising? The answer surprised me: Paris!
They all left one day before us because of some family stuff, but we enjoyed our time with them and also the time with just the three of us.
Elijah was recently confirmed at church. Most people probably don’t know what that means, and those that do probably have differing definitions. My quick explanation of it has been that for the last two years, Elijah has been taking extra classes at church with Pastor and this is his graduation ceremony which is also part of the church service. I think that’s a decent surface level explanation, but I wanted to go a bit deeper here.
First of all, let’s talk about what it is not. Confirmation is not a sacrament, nor is it anything that is commanded in the Bible. It doesn’t save you. You’re not receiving Christ. While it is the point at which you start taking communion, it’s not the same as “first communion” in other churches. You don’t need to do this to get to have faith or get to heaven.
Instead, it’s a church practice where someone (usually towards the end of middle school) publicly affirms their faith. They are acknowledging that they have been taught what the Christian faith is and they are saying they believe that it is true. It’s somewhat similar to a wedding vow renewal ceremony. A wedding vow renewal doesn’t create marriage. The couple was already married, but it is still meaningful and publicly reaffirms what is already true. Somewhat similarly, confirmation does not create salvation. It publicly reaffirms the faith already given by the Holy Spirit through the gospel.
Confirmation class is a structured way to instruct people about what the Bible teaches. Various churches in our national church body handle it slightly differently, but our church does Bible History class in 6th grade, Catechism class in 7th grade, and then life application in 8th grade. The confirmation ceremony happens between 7th and 8th grade. So my quick “graduation” explanation is not at all what we want to happen. Your Christian training lasts your whole life and even the classes continue on next year as they talk about how to apply their faith in their lives.
We were happy that both Tyla’s family and my parents could be there to celebrate along with friends from church. It was a special day in his life, and we pray that it’s just a solid start to his life of faith.
P.S. I’m always happy to talk more about this if you have questions, or you can check out this quick summary of what the Bible teaches: The Great Exchange – WAJ. The rest of that site is great as well.
I don’t know how this started, but our family is trying to visit every county in Washington state. With our impending move next summer, we are trying to finish off the remaining counties soon. I divided them up into two trips, the first of which was an Olympic Peninsula tour. It was about 800 miles so we chopped it up into three days and did it over Memorial Day weekend.
Before we started, I added two doses of nerd to the trip:
I had GitHub Copilot create a nicely formatted HTML page with our itinerary on it and then I shared it with Tyla and Elijah so they could look at it during the trip. It had all our stops on it along with links to menus at restaurants. It also included the nice header image that you see in this post.
I used GitHub Copilot to build an app that lets me generate custom podcast. First it asks me how long I want the podcast to be. Then it researches a bunch of material about the topic and generates a two-speaker script. Then it renders that script into audio using my Azure subscription. Finally, it generates a podcast XML feed and uploads it all to my webserver. That gives us custom podcasts based on specific things that we’re going to see on our trip. It’s not as good as real humans but it’s fun to learn more about specific things we’re seeing.
Saturday
On Saturday, we left early to get in line for the Edmonds to Kingston ferry. We knew it would be very busy (and it was) but we got on comfortably to our target sailing. It’s a pretty quick ride across the Sound and then we made our way west to US 101. Our first stop was Forks, WA for lunch, but since we were doing good on time, I lengthened the trip a bit by taking SR 112 which follows much closer to the water. That road was wild! It had clearly been washed out in many different places and hastily repaired. The speed limit was slow but going any faster would probably destroy your vehicle anyway.
We ended up in Forks for lunch and I was happy to see that a lot of the Twilight-themed stuff had disappeared. There was still plenty of vampire tourism going on though. We charged the car and had lunch ate at the Longhouse Cafe. It’s an authentic Native American restaurant and everything they serve comes with or on Indian frybread. Delicious!
After that we continued on to our stop at the Hoh Rainforest Visitor Center in Olympic National Park. This is where we hit my big mistake in the itinerary. Visiting a national park on Memorial Day weekend? Duh. Huge line. We waited close to two hours to get through the entrance station, but thankfully we were in the Tesla so we weren’t stopping and starting our cars every few minutes like everyone else in line. We stamped Elijah’s National Park passport book at the Visitor Center and the rangers were very impressed with our idea to put a family photo next to each stamp. We hiked a few short trails but we didn’t stay long. Olympic National Park is a tough one to visit. It’s beautiful but it’s a huge area and each entrance is very far apart. So even though we’ve been to multiple parts of it, they’ve all been for short visits where we just see glimpses of the overall park.
From there we continued our trek down to Aberdeen, WA for our first hotel stay and we had dinner at Billy’s Bar & Grill which was also a winner.
Sunday
On Sunday, our first stop was the Historic Grays River Covered Bridge. It was built in the early 1900s and you can still drive your car across it today. I’ve never seen a covered bridge before so I was glad that there was basically no one around and we could spend our time looking at it.
From there we headed to Hood River by way of Jimmy John’s for lunch. For this stretch, we hopped back on the interstate and drove through Oregon. At Hood River we stopped for a round of disc golf and then had ice cream while watching the wind surfers. Then we took the toll bridge across the Columbia back into Washington to collect a few more counties on our way to Yakima.
We had perfect weather both Saturday and Sunday which gave us great views!
Monday
Our last day of the trip was just a ~2.5 hour drive back home, but since it was the Monday of Memorial Day weekend, we didn’t want to delay our start. We shot through Snoqualmie Pass before it clogged up and we were back home before lunch.
Summary
All in all it was just under 800 miles. A silly road trip like this would have been harder to justify at $6/gallon for gas, but the whole trip only cost us $87 in electricity. We stayed both nights in Best Western Plus’s (as usual) and got some discounts there from the rewards we’ve built up. Eating out was a big slice of the total cost and we could have cut that down by packing lunches like normal, but part of the fun was the food along the way.
Now we have one more trip planned to hit the remaining counties in southeast Washington.
As I mentioned earlier, we’re planning a move to Minnesota in the summer of 2027. During Elijah’s spring break, we flew out there as a family to visit all three of the high schools that our national church body runs: West, St. Croix, and Minnesota Valley.
It felt a bit odd to be exploring all three of those schools. We knew ahead of time that they were all great and we didn’t want to give the impression that we were shopping them against each other, but it was a big help to see them all and also to drive around the three areas. They have distinct personalities and ministries. Thankfully we left thinking we could see how attending each one of them would be great, and it also got Elijah even more excited about the move.
Before we visited Minnesota Valley, we stopped in for chapel and lunch at Martin Luther College. For being a “random”, tiny college 1500 miles away from us, it’s amazing how welcome we feel when we step on campus. As soon as we got out of the car, one of the staff members saw us and waved, and when we went into the cafe, we were mobbed (in a great way) by so many people welcoming us and giving us hugs. I was especially thankful to the students that got up to come over and say hi to Elijah. It makes such a huge impression on him.
We got a lot of practice explaining our move. I’ve learned to start with “I can do my job from anywhere” and “We’ve lived in this area before”. That gets through most of the initial questions. There was also confusion at MLC because some people knew Tyla and I were coming back the following Friday for a President’s Advisory Council meeting. We thought a lot about combining the trips, but it was simpler to split them up and to do it when Elijah was on break.
That trip the following week did go smoothly as well. We are so thankful to have the opportunity to give feedback on challenges the school is facing and plans for the future. The administration is full of amazing people who put everything they have into making it the best possible training school for every pastor, teacher, and staff minister in our church body. I also got to have a good chat with their IT team to learn how they are adopting AI in their software development process.
I’m sure there will be many more trips in our future as we zero in on a specific place to live, but this was a big checkbox for us!
Did you have a nice break for Christmas and New Years? Are you settled back in yet? Ok good, because we have big news: we are moving to Minnesota. (See? That title wasn’t click-bait!) It won’t happen right away though. We are planning this for the summer of 2027.
I realize that it’s going to be difficult for anyone else to understand the full picture of why we’re doing this, and honestly, that’s ok. We’re confident that this is a good move for our family. Some of the reasons are private of course, but here are some of the big ones:
A major, unique factor for our family is that I can work from anywhere. So with that in mind, consider it from the perspective of “If I can live anywhere in the country, why am I living in a busy suburb of Seattle?” I will need to get approval to work fully remote and talk to HR about the compensation changes that will come with moving to an area with a lower cost of living, but I’m hopeful that will all go smoothly. While there is an office in the Minneapolis area, I don’t expect I’d ever need to go there since nobody else on my team lives there.
In the summer of 2027, Elijah will be done with 8th grade. We’ve spent a lot of time researching high schools around here.
Our national church body operates a great high school down in the Tacoma area. We’d love to send Elijah there, but it would mean 5+ hours of commuting every day. If we moved closer, I’d still be within the radius where I’m required to commute to work at least 3 days a week starting in February so that’s unattractive too.
We’ve been through (literally) every Christian private school in the area and they were all rejected for adding/subtracting from the Bible. The current school we attend isn’t perfect either but it was close enough that we were comfortable working with Elijah as he went through it, but we couldn’t even find that situation for high schools.
We looked at non-religious private schools and mainly rejected those for cost. It’s not uncommon to find tuition prices north of $40,000/year.
Our public high school is very good, and this was our top choice if we didn’t move.
There are three great high schools in Minnesota that are affiliated with our national church body: West, St. Croix, and Minnesota Valley. We’ll be exploring those options more to figure out exactly where we want to land. Elijah has also lightly expressed interest in attending Martin Luther College so this will put him in touch with other high school kids thinking about that career path and also put us closer to the college if he does go there. If he chooses something else, there are plenty of other good schools to pick from (or we could always move again.)
In the big scheme of things, I don’t think we’d be called homesteaders, but we certainly want more land with room to have a big garden, an outbuilding or two, and maybe some animals. We currently own 1/6th of an acre and the bare land is valued at $700,000. That’s something like $4.2 million/acre if you could even find an acre of land to buy. We’ve always talked about moving further away from Seattle and Bellevue to spread out a little.
Tyla and I both grew up in the Midwest and furthermore, Tyla grew up southeast of Minneapolis. We feel at home in wide open spaces and empty two-lane roads. Contrast that with the view from our back yard where we can see 16 houses and endless traffic we sit in at all hours of the day on any day of the week. We are generally quick to say we love this area, but those feelings don’t always align with the current reality. The population has exploded in the last 20 years. That’s great for our property value, but bad for our comfort level.
There are definitely things we’ll miss around here. We have friends and family close by and there are few places in the country more beautiful than this area. The temperatures are mild, and our summers are incredible. We’re moving to a flat land of snowy winters, sweaty summers, and bugs. But, as cheesy as it sounds, home is wherever the three of us are. I’m hopeful that we’ll grow even closer together during this experience as we tackle this challenge together. And it’s also comforting knowing that wherever we land, there will be a church home waiting for us.
Why are we announcing this now? In a blog post? We don’t know how to do this. This has been something we’ve been praying about for months. We decided we would go through Christmas and New Years like normal and then tell everyone at once so there were no secrets or groups of people with mismatched information. We wanted to get the news out so that we can start sharing this part of our lives.
There are many details left to discover over the coming year and a half. The first big step will be a trip to visit all three of those potential high schools. The hope is that all three feel like a good fit for different reasons, but we’ll take our learnings from that and see what real estate looks like. I can already tell you that when I property search around those areas, I have my search set to “No HOA” and “> 2 acres” and that turns up a lot of options that seem to fit the style we are looking for. We’ll see how those dreams play out.
I imagine that a lot of friends and family reading this will have a lot of questions. We’re happy to chat about it but please know that a lot of the answers will be “I don’t know yet.” We feel like this is the right move, but there are a lot of specifics to work out.
Another year has come and gone. There are a lot of good memories shared below, but on a more global scale, I think when I look back at 2025 it will be the year of AI. Sure ChatGPT has been around for three years now, but this year AI was a force multiplier in pretty much every aspect of my life. Every few months feels like another level up and every step we take forward is bigger and bigger. While there are certainly challenges and concerns with using it, it’s impossible to ignore the positive impact it has had not just at work, but at home and at church too.
Zooming in from that global view, we had a lot of trips around the country. There was our annual trip to Leavenworth with Tyla’s family in January, visiting MLC with Elijah, a trip to eastern WA as we crossed off more counties, camping with Tyla’s family at Ike Kinswa State Park, my solo trip to the synod convention in New Ulm, a summer week in Indiana, our family road trip to Yellowstone, another trip to MLC, and a few days in Mazama with my parents. Looking back at that list, maybe this is actually the year of New Ulm, MN! I was there three times this year. It’s a lot of travel to that specific small town, but Tyla and I are both really thankful to be part of those meetings at Martin Luther College.
Church continues to occupy a lot of time on my calendar and space in my head. We spun up a new leadership structure last year that creates teams to handle a lot of the work that we used to handle on council. That has certainly helped and is going well, but somehow it seems like the work for council is still a very long list. Thankfully we are seeing a lot of growth and energy while record numbers of visitors are walking through the doors.
I’m thankful to have spent another year working from home. That will be changing next year when they bring us back to the office in February, but for now it’s nice to have lunch with Tyla while also not spending 1.5 hours in traffic every day. The return-to-work next year will be a big change for all of us, but I’m still thankful to have this job so I’m willing to make that commute even if I don’t know where that time will come from. It’s wonderful to have a supportive family that is willing to roll with the changes.
Woodworking remained near the top of my favorite hobbies even though the list of completed wood working projects feels very short this year. I spent a huge portion of the year playing with different ways to make coasters. I finally landed on a fairly repeatable process and I made a bunch of MLC coasters. I enjoyed being able to refine my approach and get better each time, but eventually I had to stop because it felt like I was just troubleshooting little issues and it wasn’t fun anymore. I also built a new desk top for my standing desk, finished a nightstand for Tyla, and built us our own nativity set. More recently I have been experimenting with machine a plastic called HDPE. It’s like milk jug plastic, but it has white material sandwiched between two layers of color so depending on how far down you cut, you reveal different colors. I started with an American flag in the shape of the United States and then also made an MLC logo and an eagle sign.
If I look at how much time I spend doing various hobbies, piano would probably be at the top by quite a big stretch. I don’t think of it as a hobby because I’m usually practicing for an upcoming church service, but even when I have a break in the church piano schedule, I still like to play every day. I like to record every song that I learn in MIDI and then render out a nice audio version. Sometimes I do video too and, in those cases, I throw them up on YouTube.
2025 was “just another year” without any grand events, but that’s something to be thankful for too.
2025 Year In Review
Another year has come and gone. There are a lot of good memories shared below, but on a more global scale, I think when I look back at 2025 it will be the year of AI. Sure ChatGPT has been around for three years now, but this year AI was a force multiplier in pretty much every aspect of my life. Every few months feels like another level up and every step we take forward is bigger and bigger. While there are certainly challenges and concerns with using it, it’s impossible to ignore the positive impact it has had not just at work, but at home and at church too.
Zooming in from that global view, we had a lot of trips around the country. There was our annual trip to Leavenworth with Tyla’s family in January, visiting MLC with Elijah, a trip to eastern WA as we crossed off more counties, camping with Tyla’s family at Ike Kinswa State Park, my solo trip to the synod convention in New Ulm, a summer week in Indiana, our family road trip to Yellowstone, another trip to MLC, and a few days in Mazama with my parents. Looking back at that list, maybe this is actually the year of New Ulm, MN! I was there three times this year. It’s a lot of travel to that specific small town, but Tyla and I are both really thankful to be part of those meetings at Martin Luther College.
We had quite a few fun day trips too. There was a Boeing Factory tour, seeing the Piano Guys in concert, riding bike/train things, our Leavenworth chocolate tour, and seeing another professional disc golf tournament.
Church continues to occupy a lot of time on my calendar and space in my head. We spun up a new leadership structure last year that creates teams to handle a lot of the work that we used to handle on council. That has certainly helped and is going well, but somehow it seems like the work for council is still a very long list. Thankfully we are seeing a lot of growth and energy while record numbers of visitors are walking through the doors.
I’m thankful to have spent another year working from home. That will be changing next year when they bring us back to the office in February, but for now it’s nice to have lunch with Tyla while also not spending 1.5 hours in traffic every day. The return-to-work next year will be a big change for all of us, but I’m still thankful to have this job so I’m willing to make that commute even if I don’t know where that time will come from. It’s wonderful to have a supportive family that is willing to roll with the changes.
Woodworking remained near the top of my favorite hobbies even though the list of completed wood working projects feels very short this year. I spent a huge portion of the year playing with different ways to make coasters. I finally landed on a fairly repeatable process and I made a bunch of MLC coasters. I enjoyed being able to refine my approach and get better each time, but eventually I had to stop because it felt like I was just troubleshooting little issues and it wasn’t fun anymore. I also built a new desk top for my standing desk, finished a nightstand for Tyla, and built us our own nativity set. More recently I have been experimenting with machine a plastic called HDPE. It’s like milk jug plastic, but it has white material sandwiched between two layers of color so depending on how far down you cut, you reveal different colors. I started with an American flag in the shape of the United States and then also made an MLC logo and an eagle sign.
If I look at how much time I spend doing various hobbies, piano would probably be at the top by quite a big stretch. I don’t think of it as a hobby because I’m usually practicing for an upcoming church service, but even when I have a break in the church piano schedule, I still like to play every day. I like to record every song that I learn in MIDI and then render out a nice audio version. Sometimes I do video too and, in those cases, I throw them up on YouTube.
2025 was “just another year” without any grand events, but that’s something to be thankful for too.
Previous Year In Review Posts: 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024