Las Vegas -> Seattle Road Trip

As I mentioned in my last post, I recently took a road trip up from Las Vegas to Seattle. The primary reason was to drive up with our friend who moved to Seattle from Vegas, but it worked out to be a great excuse to hit amazing country and take some pics. And I was already in Vegas for work so everything just came together. :)

We left Vegas and went first through Death Valley, somewhere I've always wanted to go. I would definitely go back...but man it was hot, especially at Zabriskie Point. Then we drove up past Mono Lake and through Yosemite. Yosemite was actually a bit of a disappointment after living in the NW for so long. It was basically like our National Parks up here except many, many more people and cars. We actually got in a traffic jam in the middle of a National Park. Didn't seem right. So we went from planning on staying there for possibly two nights to just driving right through in a day. And that turned out to be a great move.

We left Yosemite and headed straight up to Mt. Shasta for a night. I've been through Mt. Shasta once before on our road trip a few years ago to Reno and Lake Tahoe (same trip we stopped at Burney Falls and Crater Lake). I'm not a huge fan of California, but Shasta is definitely somewhere I could spend a lot of time. We then left Mt. Shasta on a straight shot to the Oregon Coast.

We weren't traveling with GPS or anything fancy, just a good ol' fashioned map. Good thing because it was much, much more detailed than anything I could find online after I was back. We took a tiny logging road from Grants Pass, OR, across the Klamath Mountains and the Coastal Range over to Gold Beach. Then it was straight up the 101 through Bandan (another place that's on the list for a re-visit) and Tillamook (oh yeah, I came back with a bag of cheese :).

And that was it. Sus and I are already planning an Oregon trip in May, once the snow melts and before the kids flood the coastal towns. I can't wait.

- Alan