My Road Trip Essentials

Last week I was contacted by a representative from RelayRides and invited to participate in their Road Trip Essentials campaign. RelayRides is a peer-to-peer sharing car rental service that connects you (and/or your car) with other folks who need some wheels. While I have never tried their services, I have taken some road trips in the last couple of years, and definitely have some "must-haves" when it comes to hitting the road. (This isn't a sponsored post - I was just invited to participate for fun!)

Here is my list of essentials when it comes to getting in your car and GOING FOR IT like a pro!

Sunglasses. Obviously a long car ride warrants some eye protection. Nothing says "God dammit" like being blinded by sun while you're trying to drive. Personally, I can't be trusted with nice things, so when it comes to sunglasses, Forever21 is my sanctuary. Sunglasses that cost more than $10 can go pound sand, or find some fancy girl's face to hop onto.

Cardigan. The inability to regulate your temperature in a car is one of life's biggest biatches. Pretty sure it's one of Jay Z's 99 problems. A comfy cardigan that you can take on and off as the temperature fluctuates in the car is a must.

Comfy socks. Whether it's summer or winter, taking my shoes off in the car on a long road trip is necessary for me. As a passenger, I need to be able to kick off my shoes and get into a comfortable position. This makes a nice, cozy pair of socks a necessity. In the summer, if you've got the cool air cranking in the car, your footsies will get chilly and need some snuggles. In the winter, you'll probably be wearing comfy socks anyway because... coldness. Go the silly fuzzy sock route, or do what I do and bring along some SmartWool or cushiony hiking socks.

Water bottles.  One big one for every person in the car! If you're savvy and have a cooler in the car with you, bring a couple gallons of water and keep them chilled. Refill your bottles at every rest stop or gas station. 

Dunkin Donuts. If I had my way... Dunkin Donuts iced coffees and Coffee Coolatas would be a part of my daily diet. Unfortunately, Dunks don't exist in Canada - or at least not on this side of the country. It's still on my list of road trip essentials. Just because I don't have it doesn't mean I don't NEED IT. 

Maps. Because I have neither a smartphone nor a Garmin (because it got stolen), road maps and printed directions are kiiiiind of still part of my road game. No matter to me - it's a great exercise in building my directional awareness and map-reading skills.

iTrip or similar iPod connection to your radio. To play dose tunes doe.

A selection of your favorite CDs. Think you're too new-age to use CDs? Joke's on you. In the cities or more densely populated areas, your iTrip will be useless. This is where having your best selection of CDs with you will be a life-saver! Oh, what's that? Your car came equipped with an iPod player and/or auxiliary plugin? Well THAT MUST BE NICE FOR YOU. CONGRATULATIONS ON ALL YOUR SUCCESS. I suppose you're also taking your private jet for your trip, and thus don't even need my "road trip essentials"!?!

Full gas tank and general knowledge of where gas stations and larger towns are located along your route. Just keeping it real logical, guys. You don't want to be stuck out in the desert with no gas for 30 miles in either direction. You just don't. Keep an eye on that gas gauge, too.  Don't zone out and forget to notice when the red "E" is flashing. (David, I'm looking at you.)

Football. Well, why not? Bring along a football to have something fun and active to do when you get out of the car to stretch at rest stops. My personal favorite option is my Nerf Turbo spiral football with the whistle...

Camera. No matter where you're going, there are no doubt going to be some cool things to see along the way. If you don't think that's true, then YOU'RE THE PROBLEM. Sorry for yelling. But it's true. Take pictures, capture the memories you're making!

Snacks. WHOOHOO probably one of the most fun parts about a road trip - picking the snacks! Some good ones to include: Chocolate Turtle Chex Mix, granola bars, Freihofer's Powdered Mini Donuts, gummy candy, almonds, animal crackers, apples, and bananas.

Other less exciting things you shouldn't leave home without:
- fully charged ipods
- fully charged phones

- car phone charger

- paper towels/Kleenex

And just for fun, here are some pictures from one of the last road trips I took - a trip from Vancouver to all parts of Oregon and back again!

What are some of your road trip essentials?
What are your favorite snacks to bring on the road?
Where was your last road trip?

If you'd like any more information about RelayRides, check out their site here. Please note that I've never used the service personally and can't make any claims about how awesome it may or may not be! Poke around and check it out for yourself!

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Mini-Vacation: Visiting, Hiking & Camping in Oregon

Last week was David's Spring Break from school, so we headed down to Oregon to visit our friends in Portland and do some camping/hiking out in the desert.

On Valentine's Day we left Vancouver after I got out of work, stopped at Red Robin along the way for a *romantic* little V-Day din, and arrived at our Portland hotel around 10:30ish.

After I put in a workday from the hotel room on Friday we went out to dinner at Grain & Gristle with our friends Simon and Emily. I had their burger, which was deeee-lish, and my dinner companions enjoyed their $2 craft beers. [There was one total "Portland moment" when our server was describing a ridiculously terrible-sounding, served-at-room-temperature beer with oysters and truffles in it that made us all chuckle.] We dinner-capped next door at the bar Tiga, where I boldly ordered a virgin Shirley Temple, continuing my tradition of doing what I want.

On Saturday morning Dave and I went to the Prescott Cafe for breakfast - this was on Simon's recommendation because he knows that Dave and I can be slightly turned off by the over-the-top, exaggerated menu items at many of the "typical Portland" breakfast places. I don't need a softly poached egg served with braised pork belly and plum sauce on top of a bed of shaved kale (is that even a thing?). I just want some over-medium eggs and bacon. Turns out that Prescott Cafe is exactly the kind of down-home place that I like to go to for breakfast... the food there just happened to suck, unforch. Ya win some, ya lose some.

After breakfast we scooped up Simon and went out to do some adventure gear shopping at Next Adventure and REI. As a Valentine's Day present, David got me an AWESOME new soft-shell jacket, which I got a ton of use out of over the next few days. #holla

On Saturday evening, we dropped Simon off at work (at Valentine's, which is apparently the place to be, y'all) and then headed to Target for a massive haul because it's so much cheaper to buy our basics in Oregon than it is to buy them in Vancouver. We bought sooo much awesome stuff like canned tomatoes and black beans and pasta and peanut butter. So much peanut butter.

Also while in Portland, doughnuts were definitely on the agenda. Me boo and I both have definite sweet tooths (sweet teeth?) and when we first moved to Portland in January 2012, we went a little overboard with buying doughnuts several times a week. The habit cooled off eventually but never died completely. Everyone hypes up Portland's Voodoo Doughnut, and while I do enjoy their doughnuts, the place is really more of a tourist trap than a necessity. I might have gone there if the line wasn't literally down the street when we drove past it. But why wait for that when you can just get Tonalli's anytime of the day, with hardly any wait at all??

.  get ya donut noms on, ladies!  .

Tonalli's was our go-to doughnut place while we lived in Portland - especially since it was sort of on our street... I mean, what's a mere half hour walk when delicious doughnuts are at the other end of it? So on Saturday after our Target trip, we headed to Tonalli's and then took our doughnuts over to our friend Doug's house to visit with him, drinking tea and getting our laugh on for a couple of hours before heading back to our hotel.

On Sunday morning we checked out of the hotel early and headed over to Simon's house to scoop him up again. From Sunday morning to Wednesday morning, we'd be adventurrrring!

Our big plan was to drive east/southeast from Portland to the desert to see what we could see of the John Day fossil beds (which had been on my list of "things to see in Oregon" for almost a year), and then southwest from there to Smith Rock State Park to camp and hike for a couple of days.

Here are some of my favorite pics from our drive to the desert on Sunday...  Definitely click on all of the images below to see their larger versions!

.  the A is a reflection in the glass from my UMASS t-shirt.
i don't want to talk about why this window doesn't roll down  .

The fossil beds have different sites, so we chose to drive to the Painted Hills... because doesn't that sound like a cool thing to see? Well they were:

There was a bit of excitement when we nearly ran out of gas as we were making our way to/from the bowels of the Painted Hills. The fact that none of us had service or even any battery left in our cell phones was a nice touch to this challenge, especially since we were basically out in the middle of nowhere. We eventually cleared that hurdle, finding a gas station in the nick of time.  Dave ended up needing to put 14.93 gallons of gas into his 15-gallon tank. Eesh. #closecall

From there we headed south to Smith Rock State Park, where we had plans to camp at a Bivouac Camping Area - meaning that you'd park your car in the parking lot and then bring your camping gear from there out into basically an open field intended for random tenting. In the darkness we could barely tell who else was staying in the field and had to use our head-lamps to locate a place to set up our own tents. Did I mention that there were no open fires allowed at the site? Because there weren't.

We set up our tents in the darkness, unable to see our surroundings at all. I knew that when we woke up in the morning we'd be surrounded by some pretty sweet shit... 

... And we were: 

Ooh. La. La. Geology!! Nature! State parks!

And deer! 

On Monday we made a luxurious breakfast of eggs and bacon at the picnic area of the campground and set out for a late morning/early afternoon hike to check out the enormous and stunning rock that was surrounding us. Dave had gone rock climbing at Smith Rock State Park several times before, but this was the first time that Simon or I had seen the place. I was surprised to realize that it was all basically one huge continuous rock formation, rather than lots of separate rock formations like I think I'd expected. #Duh #ItsNotCalledSmithRockS

There were a ton of people rock climbing all over the rock that day, which for me was a bit insane to see. Tiny figures scattered across a dominating, sheer rock wall, hundreds of feet in the air, trying their best to pretend that it was totally normal for them to be doing so. A real trip, for a non-climber like myself.

We walked along in front of one side of the rock before beginning to make our way up and around it, via a switchback-filled trail called the Misery Ridge Trail. Here's a view of the switchbacks, as seen from a totally different area of the park:

.  switchbacks in the lower left  .

And here it is from the top, looking down at it:

This ascent kicked my ass, for some reason. It was steep, but it was short. I had to stop a few times to catch my breath, and I wasn't even hiking quickly. Once we made it to the top of this part of the trail, however, it was mostly just fun adventuring from there.

.  boys and rock  .

.  simon and i.... and rock  .

.  views on views on views  .

After our hike we were a little beat and the weather was getting a bit chilly. So what did we do? Well we went to go see A Good Day to Die Hard. Because nothing says, "You're on vacation!" like Bruce Willis and binge-eating Reeses Pieces.

We decided that night that we'd leave Smith Rock the next morning (Tuesday) - rather than Wednesday morning as we'd originally planned - because it was starting to get pretty freaking cold and without being able to have a nice roaring fire at our campsite, that was slightly less appealing. No matter - we had a secondary adventure planned in no time: We'd head out to the Oregon coast to try to snag a yurt at Cape Lookout Campground in Tillamook, OR. A yurt is a cabin-esque structure with canvas walls, bunks, and - most importantly - heat. Basically like a hotel, when you're used to camping in a tent. 

We woke up early on Tuesday morning, shook the snow out of the inside of our tent (condensation from our breath froze on the tent walls during the night) and immediately started making some coffee to keep us warm while we broke down our camp and packed up the car. We had a long drive ahead of us to get to the Oregon coast!

We arrived at Cape Lookout Campground late afternoon and picked out a yurt from the remaining available:

.  zee castle  .

The campground is right next to the beach so after we'd unpacked our stuff from the car we walked over to enjoy the waves 'n sand 'n stuff for a bit. 

I tried to avoid being roped into their "homerun derby with a plastic bat and ball in the raging seaside wind" game, but alas, this happened:

.  definitely a swing and a miss  .

.  dave and simon  .

I literally didn't hit the ball once, but I swung at it many, many times before finally announcing that this was "no fun" and running off to take more pics.

We spent the rest of the evening hanging out at our yurt around our fire, making different versions of delicious camping food (grilled ham and cheeses, fire-roasted hot dogs, s'mores made with Reese's new peanut butter candy bars in place of the standard Hershey bar... #campingheaven) and trying to scare away the five or six raccoons that were very carefully scoping out our campsite all night long.

.  rascals  .

I love camping in tents - I've been doing it my entire life - but I gotta say... the yurt was prettttttty nice to sleep in. We could even hear the ocean all night long, right from our beds. It was a perfect way to spend the last night of our vacation. 

On Wednesday morning we packed up and it was back to Portland to drop Simon off at his apartment before Dave and I had to drive home to Vancouver. Friends, geology, adventures, pictures, lots of eggs 'n bacon, sleeping bags, mix CDs and 1300+ miles. Not a bad time!

A Christmas Road Trip to Banff - Part III

Hey there! You've just entered the third and hopefully final part of a recap of our pre-Christmas trip from Vancouver to Banff, Dec 21-24. If you didn't read the first two parts, then you should only continue reading if you're one of those people who likes to pick up a new book and flip straight to the last chapter. If that's not you, then read Parts One and Two before continuing. If that is you... weird.

When we last left our heroes, Bailey and Dave were just falling asleep to the soothing sounds of the Ghostbusters movie, cozy in their bed in the King Edward Hotel in Banff on the night of Saturday, December 22...

We turned off the movie (still un-finished) around 10:30, hoping to get a good night's sleep before our early rise to climb Mt. Rundle the following morning.

Around midnight, some bros came home from (I assume) the bar, wasted and inconsiderate as could be, arriving in the hallway outside of our hotel room with flourish. Turns out we were so fortunate as to have reserved a room on the same end of a small hallway as a whole group of 20-somethings whose three rooms literally surrounded us on all sides. For the next three G.D. hours I listened to them going in and out of different rooms, slamming the doors, swearing at each other through the hallway, loudly calling out to one another "WHO HAS THE LIGHTER? DO YOU GUYS HAVE THE LIGHTER?" These guys were really acting like this was their first time staying at a hotel without their parents, although they sounded like they were in their mid-20s.

I was growing increasingly livid - as Dave slumbered seemingly quite peacefully beside me - but couldn't bring myself to get up to yell at them. Something about their shitty voices made me think that if I went out and yelled at them their behavior would only get worse. But the cherry on the proverbial cake was when some dumb broad started knocking on our door at 3AM and attempted to open it. That was the straw that broke Bailey's pissed off back, and I unabashedly hollered, "WRONG FUCKING ROOM!" at our door. Of note is that this is the only reason Dave woke up at all. The darling. I finally called the after hours service desk at this point and complained. The ass-clowns in our hallway chose this time to shut up. Finally with some peace and quiet, I was on the verge of falling asleep at last, when our telephone rang. It was the after hours service guy calling me back to let me know that he'd gone into our hallway to check it out but hadn't heard anything. Thanks, man. Getting this return phone call at 3:30AM when things had FINALLY settled down is exactly what I was hoping for. Exactly.

Needless to say, when the alarm went off at 7AM, Dave turned it off and we did not get up. No Mt. Rundle after all.

We woke up again around 10 and I ran down to Evelyn's to get us some bagels and coffees while Dave packed the car up with our snowshoes. If we weren't going to climb Mt. Rundle, we were at least going to get in some aggressive hiking - something to get our blood pumping after the stunning-but-leisurely snowshoe walk through the Cave & Basin Marsh Trail the day before. We decided to hike Sulfur Mountain, which would be a nice strenuous hike with supposedly great views of the Bow Valley.

The trailhead for the Sulphur Mountain Trail was right beside Banff Upper Hot Springs, but we did not stop to see those this time. They're probably awesome. The view from the parking lot:

.  view of cascade mountain from the banff upper hot springs parking lot .

It was a 5.5km hike (about 3.4 miles) to the summit, with 28 switchbacks winding us up to an elevation of 7,486 ft, for a total elevation gain of 2,300 ft.

Along the way, the trail kept swinging back and forth beneath a gondola that also runs up to the summit:

We exchanged several waves with gondola-riders. The lazy bastards.

The views along the path were really astounding, especially when the blue skies came through:

.  view of fairmont banff springs hotel from sulphur mountain trail . 

It was a perfect hike - challenging but not grueling. Exercise, definitely... but totally enjoyable! I was really hoping we'd be able to ride the gondola back down, slightly out of fatigue and slightly for the "riding a gondola down a big mountain" giddiness factor. At the summit there was much more of happenin' scene than I'd anticipated. I figured there'd be a small shack of a building for the gondola, but there was a pretty big building that had a restaurant, cafe, gift shop, plus the gondola loading/unloading area. It was bustling with all the people who'd been waving at us as we hiked the mountain from below them.

.  at the summit .

The coooooolest part of the summit was this long, doozy of a boardwalk system that followed a short ridge from the gondola/restaurant area to Sanson Peak, where there was an old weather observatory station that we could peer into.

.  boardwalk running from gondola up to sanson peak, in the distance .

There were multiple observation decks along the boardwalk where I was able to put my camera's panoramic function to good use:

.  click for larger versions  .

.  looking back at gondola/restaurant from sanson peak .

Dave treated us to grilled cheeses and hot chocolates at the summit restaurant, and we ate our lunch with more wonderful mountain views from the windows of the building. As it turns out, the good "folks of the mountain" offer free gondola rides down the mountain for anyone who hikes up during the winter. Bingo!

We enjoyed our leisurely ride down, snapping a few pictures and even spotting our car in the Upper Hot Springs parking lot as we neared the bottom of the mountain. Which was thrilling.

For dinner in town that night we found a real gem... The Old Spaghetti Factory. It's totally just a chain restaurant but it was probably the most affordable meal that we've eaten at a restaurant since moving to Canada. It was packed with families and kids of all ages - obviously where all the low-key tourist families flood to in Banff. All of the entrees were not only super cheap - they all came with a side salad or soup, warm bread, coffee/tea, and spumoni ice cream.

The ice cream was good and all but that didn't mean we couldn't shoot over to Welch's Chocolate Shop again for a nightcap of sweet, sweet diabetes goodies. I got another one of their homemade chocolate bars - this one was a swirled mix of mint and milk chocolate. David got what seemed to be a homemade version of a Crunchie, which is a chocolate-covered, honeycomb-esque, toffee candy bar that is readily available here in Canada. We walked around town a bit more buying a few souvenirs and Christmas presents, then took our treats back to the hotel and enjoyed them while we finally finished watching Ghostbusters from the warm comfort of our bed.

We woke up early-ish on Monday - which was Christmas Eve - because we wanted to make sure we got onto the road much earlier than we had on Friday. We had no idea what kind of driving we'd be able to expect along the way and preferred to not be driving in the dark if the weather was bad along that one horrendous stretch of Rt 5 (please read that tale here... although you really should have read that already, since you're now eyebrow-deep in Part 3).

I went to Evelyn's one last time to pick up another morning's worth of bagels and coffees while Dave packed up our car for the drive home. Sad to leave the winter wonderland but pleased to be facing what appeared to be fine weather for our trip, we made our way out of town and back onto Rt 1 in the early morning darkness. The 500+ mile drive home took about 10 hours - a solid 2 hours less than the drive to Banff had taken us, because the weather never turned ugly.

.  the only picture i took from the drive home  .

That night we wrapped up a ton of Christmas presents that we'd gotten ourselves and I arranged them beneath our tree...

FYI - Dave spent the entire next day on Christmas preparing me gobs of good food - from eggs and bacon in the morning to a roast chicken/veggies/stuffing/gravy dinner to real stove-top hot chocolate made with light cream for dessert. Mmmm.

Overall, a fantastic way to spend the holiday. Banff was breathtaking and I'm so glad that we went there. I hope that this long, drawn-out tale about our trip has inspired at least one person to put Banff, Alberta on their list of places to check out!!