lifeguard booth

lifeguard booth, originally uploaded by west_berliner1.

fog and rocks

fog and rocks, originally uploaded by west_berliner1.

Cannon Beach, OR.

Day 15-Vancouver, almost home…

We left Patterson, CA and made the decision to drive all the way to Portland,OR. Patterson is in northern California, and Portland is in northern Oregon, practically right on the border with Washington state, so we had a while to drive. I was amazed by how many times the scenery changed on this day of driving. I quite enjoyed Oregon, although many times it reminded me of BC and Alberta, and the wilderness wasn’t anything particularly new to me. Mount Shasta in Oregon is a beautiful volcanic mountain, similar to Mt. Rainier in WA.  I took two shots of it at a rest stop off the I5. By this time it was

Day 13-Diego, Beaches and the City of Angels

The trip home has slowly begun, and we’re getting closer to home by the day. Today started off with breakfast at a waffle place near our hotel in Diego, after we checked out. After a good breakfast, we decided that we might as well see something more in Diego before leaving, so we headed up to the San Diego Mission, the first Catholic/Christian mission in California (they call it the birthplace of California, as it’s the oldest mission.) I took some pictures,and really enjoyed the old 18th century spanish colonial architecture. We spent about 45 minutes just wandering around looking at what the old site had to offer. After this we drove to

Day 12-around San Diego

Since we only had one day here in San Diego, we made plans to see as much as we could in the short amount of time we had. After having some breakfast, we drove down to Coronado, which involved driving across the San Diego-Coronado Bridge, a very long bridge which connects San Diego with the island that Coronado is found on.The weather was beautiful, so we parked the car and took a short walk to the famed Hotel del Coronado where we walked around the hotel itself, and the beautiful beach in front. The island of Coronado is also home to a Navy base, which naturally includes F-16s and F-18s zipping around in the sky every so often, making

Day 11-San Diego

Day 10 consisted of generally getting to Vegas, checking into the Luxor, grabbing a late dinner and relaxing. We went down the strip to the Bellagio fountains one more time before we left, and after that we called it a night (it was also about 37 C out at 11 pm, which was a little excessive, and very tiring.) The Luxor room was very very nice, although sadly it was not in the pyramid building itself.
This morning we had some “breakfast” (Quiznos haha) at the Luxor food court, after which we parted with my cousins (they headed back to Arizona, and we headed out of Vegas towards San Diego.) The heat in the Nevada desert at one point got up to 44 C. On the way to Diego,

Day 9-Lake Powell

We went out onto the lake in a motorboat today. the weather soon got crappy though, and we ended up calling it a day after an hour and a half because it stopped being any fun, with the water being very choppy and lots of wind blowing. The only benefit of all the wind and water was that we got to cool off a little. After the lake we decided to head back to the hotel and hop in the pool, since the lake wasn’t looking very good for swimming. After that we went for pizza at a local pizzeria and had amazing pizza. We finished off the night by grabbing a couple of beers and just talking. After my cousins went to bed i watched Jackass 2 on tv for a little bit before calling it a night.

Day 8-Rainbow Bridge, etc.

We took a half day trip to the 7th wonder of the world, the Rainbow Bridge National Monument in Utah. To get there you have to take a 2 hour boat trip across Lake Powell (or hike for like, 72 days through the desert from the Utah side…)
I took a bunch of pictures and will post them on flickr once I get home and sort through them. The two hour boat trip that way was nice, but the 2 hour trip back was painful, since it was hot, and we were tired.
After we got back to the resort, we picked

Day 7-Page,AZ

today was spent driving around showing my younger cousin (the one visiting my older cousin Tomek) the Page area since we’ve been here before. We had lunch at the resort after checking out of our room and then headed into Page, stopping at the Glen Canyon Dam and showed it to him. I took some pics again, although i’ve taken very similar/the same ones last year. I can’t resist taking pictures when i have the occasion though. We checked into our room here in town and relaxed for a little bit, stocked up on 

Day 6-Leaving Las Vegas…

After waking up around 10, we checked out, ditched our suitcases in the car and grabbed breakfast at Lucky’s downstairs at the Stratosphere. had a good breakfast with eggs, toast and bacon. We then hopped in our car and headed for the Las Vegas Outlets (again) to do some last minute shopping on the way out of the city. We had planned on leaving the city by 2 pm, but by the time we had breakfast and actually got going, we got to the outlets around 2. Though I hadn’t