One of the nice things about slow travel is the opportunity it affords to meeting people. Our good luck started when we were lost in Golden Gate Park.
Our hero, Chelsea Roberts (who happens to manage San Francisco’s Electric Tour Company) swung round with her VW convertible, and delivered us to the appropriate bus stop.
Later, in Bend, Oregon, we shared a campsite with Bruce Hendricks, who directs outdoor education for the Strathcona-Tweedsmuir school in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies. He and his wife inspired us with their plans for a mountain biking vacation. We also were impressed with Tumelo State Park’s solar powered hot showers!!! We had ended up in Bend because the ranger at California’s Lava Beds National Monument insisted we had to see Crater Lake. He was right. And Crater Lake was amazing!
We want to take this moment to give a shout out to Milo Cress, who will be coming to Bend later this summer. In 2011, when he was 9 years old, Milo started the Be Straw Free campaign to reduce the use of plastic straws—in the US, 500 million disposable straws are used each day. The Governor of Colorado has declared July 11 to be Straw Free Day!
We are grateful to Deb and Jeff Forbes, members of couchsurfing.com, who opened their beautiful Idaho Falls home, kitchen, laundry and pets to us.
In Rawlins, Wyoming, we discovered Davis and Mavrick, who were performing at the all-school reunion – a big party the town was throwing for all the high school’s alumns, to celebrate the demolition of the old building and the construction of a new one.
And at the super-friendly and comfy Bivouac Hostel in the high-altitude town of Breckenridge, we bunked with Haden and Mason, doing their own cross-country trip before starting college at the University of North Texas, and blogging about it at http://un-chaperoned.blogspot.com/
Made for you and me 