Travels

When I initially booked our visit to Morro Bay, one of my goals was to use it as a jumping off point to drive a particularly scenic portion of the Pacific Coast Highway.

In a continuation of our strategy this past pandemic year of staying longer term in places that feature nice weather and plenty of things to do outside, we decided to head to the Central Coast of California.

Unlike so many other national parks we've sworn we'll return to, we were happy to check this one off the list and admit: we're not going back.

This year, we spent the entire winter in San Diego.

Recently, Kevin, Thor, and I took a drive to Borrego Springs, a small town located about two hours east of San Diego in the Southern California desert.

The first time we visited Bend, in Summer, 2018, smoke from nearby wildfires blanketed the region through most of our visit. This time, wildfire smoke drove us to Bend when we canceled our Fall travel plans and found ourselves with nowhere to go.

7,700 years ago, Mount Mazama, one of several volcanoes in the Pacific Northwest, erupted violently and with enough destructive force that the 12,000 foot tall mountain collapsed in on itself.

Soon after we crossed the border from Washington into Oregon, we watched as our plans, as well as our sense of security, went up in smoke.

There's this couple I follow on Instagram who travel fulltime and their entire Instagram feed is just happy pictures of them. They are, according to social media, the happiest people in all the land.

An oft heard complaint these days is it's hard to get away from crowds in the National Parks. Thanks to Facebookers and Instagrammers and bloggers and vloggers and Instagramming-blogger-vloggers all of whom won't stuff a sock in it, just about every big national park is absolutely overrun by hordes of tourons* trying to ride a bison to TikTok glory.