This year’s summer vacation brought us to the American Northwest. First of all, it was a surprise in multiple ways for our kid - he did not know where we are going until we arrived at the gate for the final flight in Frankfurt. He did not know that we are going to visit his favorite mountain. And he did not know that there will be a concert of a band he likes.
We did plan this vacation around three basic parameters:
- The kid wants to see Mount St. Helens
- There is a The Piano Guys concert in Seattle
- We want to go on a #PGBackPacking trip
Everything else we’ve seen, visited, and experienced is a nice add-on.
The following blog posts show what we have seen during the time:
- Geocaching HQ in Seattle
- Seattle
- Seattle Museum of Flight and Chihuly Bridge of Glass
- The Twilight Tour
- Olympia, Washington
- Mount St. Helens
- Yale Park and Ape Cave, Washington
- Portland, Oregon
- The Piano Guys and Multnomah Falls
- Whatcom Falls, Bellingham
- Monte Cristo, Washington
- Silver Lake, Washington
- Back from Monte Cristo
And because I get the question a lot: everything on this trip was planned on our own, from the flights to the hotels and the places we visited. There are a few things on the list which we did not visit, sometimes because we had no time left, sometimes because we decided otherwise, and sometimes because it was planned as a fallback. But all in all we managed to have a nice vacation, we’ve seen plenty of new places and enjoyed some family time.
Some of the tools we are using to create our own awesome vacation:
- Tripit: Store every detail, address, reservation in one place, details are shared between the three of us.
- Wikipedia: It’s helpful to find additional details for almost everything.
- Roadtrippers: Enter the route you are driving, and it will show you additional highlights along the way.
- RoadTripRadar: Another website which shows highlights along your way.
- Geocaching: Rule of thumb - if there is an interesting place, someone already placed a Geocache there. Just go and find it.