Today we drove to Eugene, OR, which is at about halfway to our start point in Vancouver.

We managed to get the house ready, load up, and get rolling by about 10 am, which was as fast as I could reasonably expect.

Once you get a bit north of San Francisco, I-5 actually has quite lovely scenery. There are fields, hills, mountains, overviews of lakes, and more. We hit pockets of rain, some pretty hard, but never for very long.

When we started to get close to Oregon, I realized that we’d be passing near where we did our Cascades tour in 2013. I would like to take some time to drive some of it, like Aufderheide.  Sadly, our driving days are already pretty long, so we can’t take the time.

Ruth spent a lot of the day alternating between saying we should already be at the hotel, and that I should get off the highway to take other roads. I stuck to the highway. Max contented himself by smearing the coating from yoghurt pretzels all over his face.

After we checked in at the Broadway Inn, we walked down the block for dinner. While we waited for food, Ruth, who is on the cusp of reading, invented a game of copying words around her. It started with Baños, then moved on to Pepsi, and culminated with trying to get the name off an awning across the street, but she couldn’t quite get the line of sight angles right to pull it off.

Getting the beds set up was a bit exciting. While Max bounced around the room, Ruth wanted the bigger sleeping pad, since she’s the big kid. They are the same size. After some rearranging, everybody got to a bed.

Tomorrow is another full day of driving, although we’ll break it up with a visit with Ruth’s friend who moved to Seattle a couple of months ago.