Two Roses © 2010 Bo Mackison

Still wading through many photograph files, pulling out special ones from my recent trip to Seattle, Vancouver and the Olympic Peninsula. There are so many photographs that I would love to share — why take photographs if you don’t share, right?

While we were on the Pacific coast, my younger daughter and I visited our 47th (Washington) and 48th (Oregon) states. Sherpa and I always believed that we should introduce our three children to the wonders of their own country first. Then they could take on the world when they were ready to explore further. When our youngest child turned 5, we started going on three week summer vacations, pulling a pop up tent everywhere we traveled.

We concentrated on the sites in the National Park System, but we balanced our trips with visits to some of the major US cities, too. (A few of our favorite National Parks — Yellowstone, Craters of the Moon, Acadia, Padre Islands, Glacier. A few of our favorite cities — New York City, Philadelphia, Boston, San Francisco, Santa Fe, Chicago.)

When we stopped our travels – yep, the kids grew up and moved away and got jobs and took on other commitments — we had all visited (not just flown over, but visited) 46 of the 50 United States. Well, for the sake of full disclosure, Sherpa was at 47 because of a quick business trip to Seattle, but the rest of us had yet to see Washington, Oregon, Alaska or Hawaii.

When I offered my daughter an after-graduation-before-starting-big-job trip, she immediately proposed a vacation to the Pacific Northwest to capture States #47 and 48. And so the trip we just completed was planned.

I’ve posted photographs from Washington state – we traveled over 1,000 miles in Washington — but nothing from Oregon.

Nothing against Oregon, really! But we only had 10 days and we couldn’t see everything. Especially after we added a few spontaneous stops to our original itinerary. In order to visit our 48th state, we crossed the bridge from Longview, Washington to Rainier, Oregon on the last day we were there. (We had intended to go to Portland, but that was still miles away and we had a plane to catch in Seattle later that night.)

To make the state “count” according to family rules, we had to eat something while there and we had to do an activity, preferably something unusual.

We stopped at a little place not far from the bridge and ordered ice cream cones. I had blueberry cheesecake ice cream, delicious, one of the biggest single dip cones I’ve ever had, real blueberries, of course. We were in Oregon, right? Manda had pumpkin, a solid choice, too. Then we bought a lottery ticket and played lotto. (It was only the second lottery ticket I’ve ever purchased, and Manda’s first, so it counted as something unusual.)

Then we checked off #48, turned around and headed for Sea-Tac.