Mini Road Trip: Oregon Bound

Spring break came to an end the other day, and yesterday was back to work for me. I find myself very thankful for the time off I do have with working for a school district. I am really blessed to get all that extra time with my family, sure I do not get paid over that time and that takes some figuring out with finances, but it will be worth it especially once we have munchkins in school. We knew we wanted to get away somewhere, but we wanted to go some place different. So we decided to do a mini road trip to Oregon. We lucked out in finding a good deal for a hotel. After debating between a vacation home rental or that, we went with a hotel because of price and because it had a continental breakfast.

We packed the night before for this trip, NEVER doing that again, and left early in the morning. We are now a complete Nexus family, no more waiting in long line ups for us. We zoomed through the border and were on our way. We made a pit stop at Target to get some groceries we would need. Mostly stuff for Everly that we were not sure if we could bring down, plus the prices are much better down there for some things she likes to eat. We lucked out on a huge sale for the squishy food packs and stocked up on those! We also decided we needed some tunes for the road, and grabbed the Frozen sound track. We had that blasting for a lot of the drive down. Jason did the majority of the driving down. Poor guy, we were not much company for him as Everly and I actually both fell asleep for a good chunk of the traveling.


Fast asleep in the car. Even through a pit stop to fill up on gas. Evie is the cutest when she falls asleep in the car, she will grab her bunny or baby doll give them a big hug, and settles in to go to sleep. We always have a sleep sheep attached to her car seat that we can easily turn on and we flip it up over the seat so its playing white noise near her. We have found this really helps on long drives if she is sleeping. She seems to get a much better rest.

A needed cheesy cell phone selfie of the two of us while driving, actually the three of us you can see Evie in the mirror.

We stopped at Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge to get out and stretch out legs for a bit. It is beautiful there. So much wild life to see, and a great walking path. A gentleman even pointed out some turtles in the pond. There were many people here with incredible cameras and lenses to photograph the different animals. I can only imagine the quality of photos they get, sorry but you will have to settle for my little cell phone photos here.

Evie was stunned to see all of the birds flying over us. She just kept looking up. It really was a sight to see.

We drove a bit more, and I kept Evie entertained for a bit but she was getting very restless so we put on a movie for her on our tablet. We also made a little detour to stretch our legs again and went to the Mount St. Helens Visitor Center. Another great place to stop and move around, with great walking paths. We will have to do another trip some time in order to go see the Mount St. Helens area.

Walking on the path, and looking for the animals she kept hearing.

We made it to our hotel in the early evening. We purposely left with lots of time to be able to make stops, and have a relaxing drive down. We went for dinner at the Shari’s Restaurant next door to our hotel. If you have not been to one, go! They are open 24 hours a day and have very reasonable prices. The first time we went to a Shari’s was on our trip to Seattle. You can easily find a meal to share to really keep things budget friendly.

Evie loved the big red chair in the hotel room and claimed it as hers as soon as we went in. Little did we know that our evening would be spent trying to get this little monkey to go to sleep.

More on that with the next post.