HEADING FOR THE WEST COAST : JULY 2010

For those of you who don’t know my husband, he teaches English at Wright State University. He often teaches summer classes, but when he told me he wasn’t teaching summer classes this year, I said that this was the summer we were going to Oregon. Why Oregon? Because on the second Saturday in July, the town of Sisters holds an outdoor quilt show, where they have over 1000 quilts hanging around the town. They have quilts hanging on porches, over railings and on the sides of the buildings. Sisters is located in the “high desert” where it’s sunny 300 days out of the year, they can feel fairly confident that it won’t rain on the second Saturday in July.

I didn’t want to just go see the quilt show, I wanted to have a quilt in it. The guidelines aren’t difficult, but they do only accept quilts over 36” x 36”, and I don’t have many that size or larger, so I made a quilt just to enter in the show. Once the quilt was finished and accepted, we started planning our trip.

Me and "Twilight Descends" hanging out with some other quilts at the Sisters Outdoor Quilt Show

Since Sisters is 2200 miles from Yellow Springs, we decided that we also wanted to visit Porland and San Francisco. Then we found out that Yosemite National Park is less than a 4-hour drive from San Francisco, so we decided go there, also. While I was researching places to visit between San Francisco and Portland, I discovered that Corvallis, home of Oregon State University, holds a festival called “DaVinci Days” where one of the main attractions is a Kinetic Sculpture Race. And of course we wanted to see the Pacific Ocean in both California and Oregon, so we planned to have some time at the coast.

After deciding all these places were must-sees, we realized that our trip was going to take almost three weeks. Here’s what the schedule ended up as:

- Fly from Dayton to San Fran, stay at Pigeon Point Lighthouse
- Drive to Jamestown, stay one night there
- Go to Yosemite, stay one night there
- Drive back to San Francisco, stay four nights
- Drive along the California coast up CA-1, stay in Ferndale
- Drive to Oregon, stay in Grant’s Pass
- Visit Crater Lake, stay in Redmond
- Visit the Sisters Outdoor Quilt Show
- Visit Silver Falls, drive to Portland, stay 3 nights
- Drive to the Oregon Coast, visit Astoria, stay in Seaside
- Drive south, stay in Depoe Bay
- Drive to Corvallis, visit the DaVinci Days Festival
- Drive to Seattle, fly home to Dayton

I plan on posting about the above places, including some of the 600+ photos we took, so check back in a few days!