Pacific Northwest Vakay Day 3

Day 3: Well here we are folks. The next couple of days on our trip might have been my favorites! So let's dive in, shall we?

Day three brought us to Mt. Rainier National Park. Can I just say-WOW!!!!! I would say I didn't have huge expectations going into it because after all, the whole park was based on one mountain. I have seen countless mountains in my life, and they are all cool and unique in their own way. But why would one need a whole national park? We got to the first stop to stretch our outrageously sore legs and walked out to the back porch to enjoy the rocking chair. Look what we saw!!!!

Holy amazing!!! I was not expecting that! And I didn't even see it until I sat down! I was beginning to think this was going to be a pretty awesome day. We got to the first viewpoint and headed down to the creek. And again, another amazing view of this mountain peak.

There were many scenic point for us to get out and enjoy the view (and mostly try to stretch our legs!). 

Even though our legs were tired, we thought it was time for another hike. A helpful ranger laid out the rest of our day for us. He gave us a hike that had us climbing up Mt. Rainier. Remember the snow we saw the day before on our hike? That was NOTHING compared to this!!! And did you see we are wearing shorts!?! It was 75 degrees after all.

Almost the entire trail was snow packed! 

But check out this view!

Here is Mt. St. Helens.

This is how far we were able to hike. We made it about as far as we could before they recommended snow boots-which we did not bring along. 

There were waterfalls everywhere!

We hiked ran down the snow packed mountain. It was one of the neatest things we did on the whole trip. It was so fun running down the mountain together, in our shorts, in the snow.

Once we climbed down from the mountain we drove to another area of the park. It was also beautiful, but completely different than the mountain view.  

Matt took the time to skip some rocks in the river. 

We saw some really tall trees.

Matt basically saved the park.

We were able to see pretty exceptional things.

Including a gorge that was 115 feet down to the water.

Then we drove up to Sunrise Lodge. The ranger told us we had not lived until we saw Mt. Rainier from Sunrise. I couldn't believe I had yet to live all these years. So we knew we had to get up there-I was ready to live!

All kidding aside, it was a pretty spectacular view! We were able to see a couple glaciers from this angle. 

The wildflowers were also gorgeous!

Two full days of hiking gave us some very tired legs. We stopped to eat, and I must say the people of Covington, WA are some of the nicest people I have ever met. They gave us a recommendation we cashed in later during our trip... Stay tuned for the next leg of our trip-we leave the national park tour for a couple days and check out the city life. Enjoy!

Pacific Northwest Vakay Day 2

Day 2: We knew we were in Oregon when we saw these.

TREES!! Everywhere! As we were driving through the forest I couldn't help but think, what if one of these fell down right now? I decided to quit thinking about that! So I changed directions and began singing Ke$ha's "Timber". Looking back, that was probably not the best idea either. Nevertheless, we made it! We started our national park tour on day 2 of our road trip with Crater Lake National Park. 

It was beautiful! The water was so blue.

We decided to go for a hike up Garfield Peak so we could get another view of the lake.

 As we were hiking, we got a good view of the Phantom Ship.

It's really just an island popping up, but it does kind of look like a ship, don't ya think?

 As we were hiking, we discovered something unbelievably crazy to us Arizonans-snow, in July! I hadn't seen snow all winter except for the couple days I was home around Christmas. 

Then we got to hike through the snow. Little did we know hiking through the snow would become a regular occurrence on this summer road trip. 

 We hiked to 8054 feet and made it to the top!

Look who else made it.......................

OLAF!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

We hung out at the top for several minutes, 

snapped some pictures, 

and took a step back to really revel in the beauty that is America. 

To head back down, we had to use the same path we used to get up which meant hiking back over the more snow. Basically, this is how we got down. It was kind of a mix between sledding and surfing. And it was a little bit cold! 

Then we checked out the rest of the park which included a pretty spectacular waterfall, 

and more incredible views. 

Then we took a hike down to the bottom.  

It was amazing!

That completed our journey at Crater Lake so we headed north. We were able to cross off another state-Washington!!

Normally I don't mention the hotels we stay in, but I had to share this one. It was the most adorable place ever! 

We stayed in this little tiny Washington town that was built around the hotel. 

It was so cute-inside and out! 

Day 2 was one amazing day. Cannot wait to share day 3 with all of you. If you can believe it-each day gets better! Stay tuned!! :)

Pacific Northwest Vakay Day 1

Well friends, here it is-today I start my journey of telling you our amazing road trip story. It was incredible. I think I should keep my thesaurus close by because I need multiple synonyms for words like: beautiful, amazing, and fun. But I am not going to do that so feel free to insert your own synonyms when you reach those frequently used words!

Day zero: I call this day zero because this was an extra day not totally planned into our trip. I came back from my amazing trip home, made some snacks, packed my bags and we hit the road. 

We got a pretty early start and were able to stay the night in California between LA and San Francisco. 

Day one: I must say, we did not get off to the best start. We had some extra time and thought we should go for breakfast at Denny's to get a good start to our road trip. We were seated almost immediately. We ordered our drinks and food as soon as we could. After about 40 minutes of waiting, we were getting a little antsy. We knew we had some extra time since we started out so early the day before. We finally found someone, not our waitress, that we could ask to check on our food. No answer...Fifteen minutes later we had mustered up the courage to tell the manager we were leaving. After a few minutes we found him and told him we had to leave. We had not been in a time crunch but were now indeed in a time crunch since we had waited over an hour to get our food. Good news-I got my orange juice for free!! We still are not sure if they had even started making our food or if it had been sitting under heat lamps for 30+ minutes. Also, maybe our waitress decided to quit after she took our order?? Not sure, but I did see a huge bug roaming around during our wait so it was probably best we did not eat there. Instead we drove through Burger King and still had to wait about 20 minutes to get our food. It was not our greatest start, but you know when they say things can only go up from here-it was true. We got to Napa 

and headed to our first winery-Silverado Vineyards. 

How gorgeous is this view?!? It was so beautiful!!!

I would definitely recommend this vineyard. It was very relaxed, but the servers were very helpful!

Then we headed to the Beringer vineyard. It is the oldest continuously operating vineyard in the Napa valley.

Since it was the 4th of July Matt thought I needed to show my patriotism. This is what we found-

Then we took a tour of the vineyard. Where we learned some very interesting facts, 

saw some really cool things, 

and were taught the appropriate way to sample wine.

Following the tour we took our own tour around the property. 

It was so beautiful!

Then we headed north. One cool thing about a road trip is you never know what you are going to see. A nice surprise, we got to see Mount Shasta. It seemed so tall standing on its own.

Sorry, the pictures are really blurry-we were driving.

That night we made it to Oregon and were able to cross off a new state for us on day one! Hope you enjoyed my first look-back onto our trip. Stay tuned for more :) 

For Day 2 click HERE.

For Day 3 click HERE.

For Day 4 click HERE.

For Day 5 click HERE.

For Day 6 click HERE.

For Day 7 click HERE.

For Day 8 click HERE.

For Day 9 click HERE.