Road Trips

It doesn’t make any logical sense to pig-out in the car on a road trip. We obviously sit on our fannies all day and should eat virtually nothing!

Other than junk food, road trips for me are all about deep conversations with no distractions.

I really love road trips.

Last month I was lucky enough to have two road trips in one week so my adventures took me South to Bend Oregon with my hubby for a business meeting, (and a hair cut for me because my favorite hair genius, Alicia, had the nerve to move far away to Bend…sad face)!

Bend is a 3 hour drive. After one day and night there, we drove back home for a day and then I popped into the car again with Gavin and headed north to Vancouver, BC to move Gavin into his new home for the next 10 months or so. 

These road trips were so great for many reasons. First…I just got a new camera for Mother’s Day so I am excited to learn how to use it.  I usually use an Iphone for my photos, which I am a huge fan of and honestly did not think I needed a new camera.

I mean I took this epic shot with an Iphone, so…

My husband, Dave, tells me that I need a more professional camera so I’m going to need to learn how to use this complicated looking beast.  I argue that my Iphone pictures are lovely and it’s just so darn easy to shoot. There are only a couple of decisions to make like: shall I shoot live mode or portrait mode?  Easy.  Done!

That, as opposed to my new camera which requires decisions about:  aperture, ISO, depth of field, shutter priority, and then there are all those menu items to consider….Can’t I just point and shoot? 

I think I’ll leave the dials of my new Fuji XT3 set to A, for auto, until I figure this all out! 

She’s a beauty, eh?

In all seriousness, I’m super excited and up for the challenge. 

I can’t wait to share beautiful pictures with you.

I’ve already posted my first photos with my new camera in this post about my pups in the garden. Check it out and let me know if you see a difference!

Dave sends me all kinds of videos from expert photographers so, YouTube classroom, here I come! 

Also, Gav gave me this book: 

Read This if You Want To Take Good Photographs by Henry Carroll

My men have my back!

Anyway, this post is not about my new camera. Back to the road trip…

I’ve said this before but I can’t say it enough…

The Pacific North West is stunning this time of year. 

The hills are the greenest of greens, wild flowers bloom on the side of the highway, the sun is bright, the sky is blue and every picture I take looks so colorful it appears that I have over-used the edit button on my Iphone to give the pictures too much glorious color! 

The mountains on the way to Bend are bright white with snow and the rivers and streams along the highway are milky turquoise blue.  The scattered clouds floating gracefully in the sky add magic to the whole scene. 

I love the clouds. When I see them I can’t help but get trigger finger with my camera and take way too many pictures.  Why are they so magical? 

I vividly remember, as a small child, noticing that cloud magic for the first time.  I was on my back in the grass in my backyard and those clouds inspired the deepest of 5-year-old child thoughts like: How do they float?  Do they make the wind blow?  I want to take a nap in their soft fluffiness!  Where does the sky end?

Deep thoughts by baby Jill! 

Clouds also remind me of my friend Liz who loves clouds as much as I do.  When I see a beautiful cloud, I think of Liz, snap a picture and text it to her…technology keeps us close!

Anyway…this post is not about junk food, cameras or clouds! It’s about…

Wait what was I talking about again?

Oh yeah…Road trips…

This is beginning to sound like one of those essays you write in school where you need 1,000 words and you can’t possibly think of 1,000 words to write about a subject so you just babble on and on about nonsense…I’ll stop that now and get to the point.

Take a look at this beautiful drive to Bend. 

Road trips…The beauty and the long chats. 

Being all settled in to a long drive gives you the chance to really connect as long as you don’t get sucked in to the rabbit hole of your cell phone. I am as guilty as the next guy. It is an addiction. There are just so many things to keep you occupied from small, furry creature videos to Instagram to Wordscapes! Back in my day you sang the song, “100 bottles of beer on the wall…” and you looked at the license plates and played all kinds of games that had to do with the scenery, to pass the long boring time! It’s not long and boring to me anymore.

Anyway, this is not about the cellphone rabbit hole or old-time road trip games…

Back to the story…There are no distractions, while you are on a nice long drive, and you can dig deep into hopes and dreams.  You can analyze the world together.  You can reminisce about wonderful memories.  On the way to Bend, Dave and I chatted about so many of those things.

We like to fantasize about what our perfect day to day life would look like if we could do anything we wanted.  We think it would be fun to keep working and live in different places all over the world for a short time.  We’d like to have a boat in Seattle, WA that is big enough to live and work in for a week here and there.  Then go to an Airbnb in Monterey, CA and work for a week, then go to Boston, MA and Spain and Italy and, well, you know, just see the whole world…you get the idea!  Dave would do most of the mortgage work, (we are both in the mortgage business) and I would write stories to my heart’s content, from blogging to you guys to writing children’s books, (my next goal).

Then reality sets in and we think of our dogs and other critters at home that we need to care for not to mention my garden that requires a lot of love, water and weeding.  In reality, we are home bodies.  It’s hard to leave. 

As we drive along we, of course, have road trip junk food and we also chat about the new camera.  Dave researches EVERYTHING to the max!  He is an expert on anything he is interested in from Cameras to Cryptocurrency to mortgage backed securities to the perfect dog food brand to garden irrigation and wine…just to name a few.  So, I don’t need to research anything.  He is a walking encyclopedia! 

The problem with this is that he becomes such an expert that he rattles off all the camera jargon and the words just blur into jibberish.  I’m a hands-on learner.  I’ll get good at this, but I don’t learn from hearing the words, I have to either read myself or touch and do. 

So as we are driving along and I ask, “how do I get a picture of that hawk without it being blurry?”  I want him to say, “turn that dial on the left to 1,000 and the one on the right to ….  Anyway, instead of that, he speaks a foreign language like aperture priority ISO shutter speed jibbersih, mumbo jumbo, blah blah.  And then my brain blurs and I just take a blurry picture.  HAHA. 

But not this picture…see how clear the running horses are? This had nothing to do with camera skills. It’s nice and clear because they are a metal sculpture and not real running horses…pretty cool though, right?

I do appreciate all his research so that I don’t have to do it!

It’s fun to have a partner in life who is interested in so many different things like I am and it’s fun that we always want to do them together.  Having that in common, this curiosity for life, makes for a great partnership and great road trips.  We are the best of friends. 

In my first marriage, my husband and I had very few activities that we enjoyed together.  I think that is the reason we drifted apart.  He’s a good man, we just didn’t click.  Lesson learned from this: If you are looking for a partner in life, find someone who likes the same day to day and casual weekend stuff.  A top priority!

When we arrive to Bend, Dave and I enjoy the hotel on the river.  We really like this place, Riverhouse. It’s on the Deschutes River. We eat outside. I always get the truffle French Fries because I’m on vacation and I can eat anything I want!

So glad I kept it healthy and got a nice Kale salad to go with the fries and beer! (Insert fatty eye-roll!)

Dave had a terrible cold so we took it easy on this trip so he could recover.  But, we had a nice time in the hotel restaurant and the next day went downtown.  He had a meeting and I had a haircut!

Downtown Bend is lovely.  The hair salon is called Lemon Drop. How cute is that?  There are unique coffee shops and quaint little flower shops. The town is just plain artsy and cool!

The drive home was lovely and relaxing and I took too many pictures.  We stopped at the town called Sisters. It is another one of the worlds cutest small towns. We had some lunch and a little shopping.

What do you think? Shall I get the pants?

After performing my most awkward poses and riding in Cinderella’s coach, we continued on.

Dave pulled over every time I said…”ooooh, I need a picture of that!”

 And…I needed more pictures of clouds!

He’s a good sport!

It was a lovely, relaxing, low-key trip. There are so many things to do in Bend which I didn’t do this time. There will be another post in the future in which I’ll share all the awesome activities.

Last time we were in Bend it was to get our pups, Charlie and Bailey from a breeder there. That trip was not relaxing but very exciting!

Mount Hood tells us we’re almost home…the sun starts to go down and the sheep farm is the finish line!

Home Sweet Home…

This road trip was a quick one but I love little adventures so much. I really need to get off the farm now and then…I’m way too much of a home-body. But, if I’m away too long, I miss the critters and the garden and of course, the family…whomever may be home at the time!

I have a few more road trips ahead this Summer. Can’t wait to take you along.

Part 2…Road trip to Vancouver and deep conversations with Gavin …coming soon!

Don’t forget to appreciate the little things like road trips and nature and flowers and critters (and, of course junk food, but only now and then!)

Lots of love, my friends…xoxo Jill