The Long Road Home
Reading this headline, you might be asking “Hey! What happened to the rest of the tour?”. Rest assured, I will post more about what happened in between Waco and coming home, but I thought it prudent at the moment to let you know that we are, indeed, back home once again. As you might imagine, the outbreak of Covid-19 was behind our decision to come home early, but I am getting ahead of myself. I will start from the middle and add the rest at a later date.
We had been enjoying this second half of our tour so much. We were taking our time, enjoying the sights, sounds and smells of new places and taking the time to explore many of them. However, a drum beat, soft at first and then growing louder each day was coming from up north. We knew that the Covid-19 virus was spreading worldwide, but assumed that we had time to enjoy the remaining month down south before we had to think about heading north. Our son, Colin, however, had been watching and was growing more concerned about our timeline. His repeated suggestions that we cut our travels short and head home fell of deaf ears, I’m sorry to say, but eventually he got through to us how serious the situation was becoming. We made the sad decision to skip some places, cancel family gatherings (in the Seattle area!) and head north as quickly as possible. It was a good thing, too, as shortly after we arrived home, the closed the border. I’m sure we would have been allowed back, but we would have been putting everyone through more needless worry.
Our quick trip up the coast still allowed us to visit some favourite places from our bike trip down the coast a few years ago. We found it amazing that we actually rode up and down all those hills! The opportunity to stop in at Elk Creek Park was just too much to pass up, so we stopped off for a quick hike through the beautiful Redwoods. So peaceful and inspiring – just think how much human history these trees have seen and still there they stand, magnificent and tall. What a perfect antidote to what’s going on in the outside world. I wish everyone could go and sit in a forest for a day!
Once we finished with Elk Creek, we drove on up the coast, stopping in Bandon, Oregon to spend the night at the campground there. We had camped here on our bike tour, but I don’t remember seeing turkeys – cool!
We had some time before the end of the day so spent it checking out the rocks from above. The beaches and rocks at Bandon are quite beautiful and the town itself is charming and much less busy than the more well-known Cannon Beach.
As we continued north, we were finding more and more places closed or operating as take-out only. It was odd to go into Starbucks and see the whole seating area cleared off – it looked like they were preparing for a dance!
We finally reached the border and with that, the end of this tour. It will be pretty strange having to stay in for 14 days after having so much freedom to go where we wanted for so long, but hopefully I can use the time to catch up on the blog and relive some of the beautiful, amazing places we were able to visit over the past 6 weeks. We hope that you all have a safe place to be during these unsettling times and that you take care of yourself and your loved ones. Thanks for coming along! Jim and Sue
