The Great Northwest Road Trip

 As Jason and I counseled together in January about our vacations for the year it became clear that our "usual" vacations were not what the family needed.  After a few days Jason came back to me with an idea, an inspired idea.  He felt like what our kids/family needed was to see and experience some different biomes that had never seen and have a long car ride.  We needed a good, old fashion American road trip.  This was Jason's brain child so he took the reigns planning almost everything himself.  I am grateful he did because not only would that have about done me in from a time constraint aspect, but I would not have had to courage or vision to do this.  But I knew it needed to be done.  The kids were very excited.  We termed it "The Herbert Great Northwest Road Trip", "Great Northwest Road Trip" for short.  

We went to 9 states: Colorado (duh), Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada (just to drive through), and Utah.    This trip would just be a "sampling".  We basically stayed in each place for 1 night.  We did just 1 thing every where we went.  We moved fast and covered a lot of ground.  We told the kids "if you really like it somewhere and want to stay longer, come back with your spouse and kids.".

Here are some stock photo's from the internet of some of the biomes we were hitting.  I will talk in detail about each place and activity.

Wyoming:

Montana:

Northern Idaho

Washington

 Oregon 

California (Redwoods)

Nevada