#Oregonorbust, Let the adventure begin

After the initial excitement of picking our spring family road trip destination cooled, we realized that Oregon, although much smaller than our own California was still an ENTIRE state and without family to stay with or knowing the area very well,  we still needed to pick a town as our home base from which to explore.

After an attempt to do research on the internet and being inundated with information and destination reviews that held no context for me, I needed to get my bearings. I decided to take a less tech savvy approach.  I went to the bookstore for a huge road atlas, an old school folding map (that I can finally fold properly)  and some good guidebooks, the kind you can highlight, dog ear and stick general within reach items into to mark a must see attraction.

Books in hand, we read everything. Anything that even remotely interested us, we highlighted on our map.  Lonely Planet Pacific Northwest's Best Trips gave us day trip ideas for the whole state and our  Moon handbook for Oregon helped to fill in the planning details. 

We decided early on that renting a house made the most sense for us. We would be there a month and a dog friendly home would gladly accommodate our furry traveling companions, but where to go?   What if we chose somewhere  far from the places we wanted to visit?  We wanted to be remote but what if that meant we were 20 miles from a grocery store?  We were about to be rewarded for our efforts though, our abundantly highlighted map would tell us tell us clearly where we needed to be. There at the epicenter of the neon pink ink, would be our answer.  There was only one problem.  We had two answers.  It was very clear that we had a number of attractions on our wish list to see along the coast and an even great number in central Oregon.  

So we did both, allocating three weeks to Central Oregon where we found a great house on the river in La Pine (near Bend) and a week in Florence on Mercer Lake.  Our drive to our first destination in La Pine was a long one, so we found a third house in Jenner just north of San Francisco, to help break up the drive.

Houses booked, bags packed, bikes, paddle boards and animals loaded, with our now well work guidebooks and maps and Oregon playlist set to go, our adventure was ready to begin...