“This does not suck.” ~Craig, Pend Oreille River As most of you know, whenever possible, we like to plan our travel so that the journey is also the destination. But sometimes that doesn’t work and the journey is mostly a journey. That doesn’t mean that we don’t find fun stuff to do along the way, but the path is what it is. Planning for this summer’s post-Grand Teton area route had two goals: (1) we had to be in San Jose to meet up with friends over Labor Day Weekend and (2)

The best full view of the lake that I could get - it is 5-6 miles across and almost 2,000 ft deep. The end of summer 2026 gave us the unexpected opportunity to take a couple of short detours to two national parks that are a bit off the beaten path. Crater Lake NP is the only national park in Oregon and is about 4 hours south of Portland. Crater Lake was stunning and totally worth the detour we took. The photos don’t do justice to the blue of the lake (though they came close

After leaving Yellowstone National Park, we headed due south to the Jackson Hole area and Grand Teton National Park. We ended up staying in Victor, a very nice small town just across the border into Idaho and only a few miles outside of Jackson. Fun Fact about Idaho - it is a completely made up name. The Teton Valley area was truly beautiful everywhere we looked, and we just loved it. Our airbnb condo was in a large, mostly new construction community that was pretty and had

Old Faithful - our first stop in Yellowstone National Park, natch. Yellowstone is so different from other national parks, in a variety of ways. First, it’s the original US National Park, established March 1, 1872 by President Ulysses S. Grant. It’s also the second largest national park in the contiguous 48 states - only Death Valley and a handful of Alaskan national parks are larger. Last, at least from the perspective of parks we’ve visited, the area has been and still is