Summer Road Trip: Northern CA/Southern OR coast (Update: pics added)
Update: See post #70 for TR and pictures.
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Edit (original post below): Looks like a 2 week vacation in July, probably heading to the Pacific Coast (northern CA/southern OR). Looking for ideas of places to stay or avoid, things to do or avoid, for a family with camper anywhere along the coast or on the drive to/from the coast.
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The Padded Room is usually good for some good advice or at least a laugh or two, so WWMD? Looking to take a one week (ie 8 or 9 day) summer camping roadtrip vacation. Alternatively, option 2 is go 8 or 9 days, and I fly home, and the wife and kid and dogs and camper continue on for another week or so. We live in Boulder.
We have a 17' hard sided camper, 2 adults, 4.5 year old child, 2 dogs. While we are up for adventures, the nature of the camper generally means "campgrounds", but willing to consider non-campgrounds if the roads are good with ample spots to turn around.
I don't want to spend the entire time driving, but the kiddo is a good traveler and we have a DVD player in the car, so we can go a good ways (I'd say max 12 hours of driving in a day, but less is better, because this is supposed to be vacation).
As one possibility, the wife wants to go to Yellowstone (though your suggestions need not include that, it's just one option). I doubt we'd want to do the entire time in Yellowstone if we went that route, so where would we go from there? She had a whole Yellowstone then to the Pacific Coast loop mapped out, but that is an insane amount of driving with a kid IMO (unless we had a at least 2-3 weeks, which I don't). I think I dissuaded her from such an ambitious plan in the time allotted, but willing to listen to whatever you got.
I'd rather just do a tour of Colorado, hit places that we can't get to easily from the front range. Wife is probably less into this idea, unless I have a very good plan.
Thoughts?