Day 1 of Ashley and Jason’s excellent road trip adventure! It’s been a while since we’ve had a totally unplanned random long road trip to nowhere. As usual, we had no real plans as to where we were going.. only a few places we wanted to visit if we ended up down that way, etc… So we woke up at 4:30ish in the morning on a bright beautiful Saturday and begun the haul south towards Bend. As usual no stop to Bend is complete without also stopping for food at the One Street Down Cafe in Redmond. They have a cinnamon honey latte that makes me a very happy girl.
The first stop on our road trip took us just south of Bend, OR on the Cascade Lakes Scenic Byway. Exactly as advertised, it was pretty darn scenic! We found a random side road to set up camp for the night right off the road backing up to a little stream.
Turns out this night would be the coldest one we would have the entire trip. It was definitely below freezing and the roaring wind made for a not very restful sleep. We were awake at the crack of dawn for some coffee and breakfast.
We’ve found that comfort goes a long way into turning camping from a cold miserable experience into something fun. The tent we have on top of our trailer is by CVT (Cascadia Vehicle Tents) and folds out with enough room for 4 close friends or a roomy space for 2. The mattress is also way better than an air mattress and I find that I sleep 1000% better when I’m up high and out of the grasp of ground-based creepy crawly critters. We also bring along the full cast iron cooking assembly and make some pretty epic food. After a few days of clif bars I’m ready to murder someone for a hot sandwich… chocolate chip pancakes etc keep that from happening. 😉 More on that all later… The sun started to peek over the mountains as we were packing up to leave and I had fun playing with the lighting.
We just traded in our fullsize Chevy truck for the little Jeep Cherokee Trailhawk. Which meant that we had no way to use our tent for a long time! We don’t actually own a ground tent anymore, so Jason and I worked pretty hard for a few weeks and fabbed up this sweet little offroad trailer so we could bring all our supplies and our tent with us. Finished it up the night before we left! So far it’s working out pretty awesome!