We took a few road trips this summer & early autumn when the weather was right for it. One was a trip to Sun River, Oregon with a large group of Kenyan friends. Then there was the trip to Port Orchard (on the Olympic Peninsula) for Javan’s All-Stars baseball tournament. Later, we did a family road trip to Whistler, BC (check out that view from the side of the highway!) And, in late September, Chelly and I drove to a wedding in Spokane.

Sun River, Oregon

The Sun River trip happened because Chelly and some of her friends bought a weekend retreat package as part of a church fundraiser event.

Chelly and I, and our friend Jecksen, drove East and then South through the mountains of central Washington, stopping briefly to visit the Greek Orthodox monastery of St. John the Forerunner in Goldendale, WA. From there, we headed South through Bend, Oregon, arriving in Sun River in the middle of the night.

Sun River is a vacation town, a planned community of getaway and retirement homes built around recreational activities such as skiing in the winter, hiking in the summer, a golf course, aquatic center, spas, and many miles of bicycle trails. We didn’t have the best weather for our visit, but we enjoyed several of those activities, and I also managed to complete a challenging jigsaw puzzle back at the room. We went into Bend a couple times, including a really fun night club experience where one of our group convinced the DJ to play some Kenyan music and even got his hands on the microphone to sing along!

Port Orchard, WA

The Port Orchard trip happened because Javan made it onto the All Stars baseball team (in his last year of Little League) and that team won the District tournament, earning a spot at State.

We took the ferry over at Edmonds and got there just in time for J to warmup with his team for their first game. Even though they were better than the team they faced (in my opinion, based on their performances at Districts), they made a lot of mistakes–cooking in the hot July-4th-weekend sun, and choking on the dust from these dirt fields–and ended up losing the game. It wasn’t their best showing. The second game on Sunday went pretty much the same way.

But, the highlight of the trip was really the quality time all the boys got to spend together on their State Championship travel weekend: Running through the halls of the hotel, making a big campfire out back, playing games in the dark, dunking each other in the pool. These are the memories that will outlast those lost games.

Whistler, BC

The Whistler trip happened because we wanted to do something fun with the boys over Labor Day weekend.

It was a last-minute decision, but we lucked out with the inexpensive booking of a 3-bedroom townhouse with hot tub and full kitchen. The drive was a nightmare (7 hours through bumper-to-bumper Vancouver traffic, on what was normally a 3 1/2-hour drive), but it was all worth it when we got to those gorgeous mountain views. Still plenty warm in the late summer sun, we had a lot of fun in a short time exploring Whistler’s bustling village of shops, restaurants, bars, and mountain sports.

Javan and I rented mountain bikes on Sunday and spent four hours riding the lifts up and the bikes down on winding routes through the woods. It was fun, but maybe too much fun, because I didn’t want to stop and kept getting braver with the jumps. Then, in our last 15 minutes of rental time, at the skills park down in the village, I wiped out on a jump and was pretty badly hurt. Covered in blood and dust, I hung around for another two hours so I could take Nathan to do some of the kids’ activities, like the bungee jump trampolines and inflatable water rollers.

Spokane, WA

The Spokane trip happened because one of Chelly’s friends from growing up back home in Voi was getting married to an American girl, and he invited us to the wedding.

We drove over the North Cascade’s pass in the dark on a Friday night, getting into Winthrop around 10 or 11pm. We stayed at a great little BnB there, enjoying Mexican breakfast at a diner down the road in Twisp the next morning. Then it was several more hours of driving under skies filled with wildfire smoke.

In Spokane, we toured the Riverfront Park and stumbled upon a Chinese heritage street fair. We went way out of our way for BBQ, and then headed to the backyard wedding in the suburbs. It was so sweet and touching, as weddings always are, and we ran into several people we knew–some from Chelly’s hometown back in Kenya, and some we’d met in the Seattle area. That night we went out to a Kenyan nightclub. I met a friend for a hike in the morning, and then we spent the day driving home through all that smoke.