West Coast Vacation - Part 1

I would like to write a series of posts about our vacation, and share some photos so I can look back and remember our time away.  I think if I wrote it as one post, it would be a small novel, so I will try to sort it into a few manageable categories, and write a few posts.

A couple of months ago we started to think about our summer holiday.  Since we didn't do much of a holiday last year (Drumheller and the lake) we wanted to do something fun this summer.  We threw around the idea of going down to the states, or Calgary or Edmonton.  But we have done Calgary and Edmonton a lot and looking at driving upwards of 12 hours just to see Mount Rushmore seemed kind of underwhelming.  I talked to a client who has been living out in Victoria off and on for a couple of years, and she drives back and forth to Saskatoon quite often.  She said she can usually drive to Vancouver in about 17 hours in good weather.  We started to talk about it, and thought that if we could handle the driving, that we would love to see a new city, and see the west coast.

It took a lot of consideration, because 17-18 hours of driving just to get there seemed like an awful lot.  But the more we talked about it, and were able to figure out a way to make Jay comfy as a passenger in his van, so we could share the driving, we decided to go for it.  We had initially thought that we would go to Vancouver then on to Victoria then down to Seattle before heading home.  When we started looking at the number of days we would like to spend in each place, our trip was starting to look more like 16-18 days long, which seemed like too much.  We ended up settling on a 15 day trip that included two days of driving to Vancouver, four full days in Vancouver, driving to Seattle, four full days in Seattle, then a stop in Spokane, Great Falls and Lac Pelletier (at the cabin) before heading home.

It was a bit overwhelming thinking about packing up and leaving for two weeks because I think the longest we have ever been away is for a week.  It took some planning, and we wrote many lists, but I think the only thing we ended up forgetting was an umbrella that I had purchased especially for this trip!  (Thankfully we had almost perfect weather, and didn't need it!)  When the trip was done, I realized that I had over packed in a few places, and could have packed more in others.