Highway 101 Oregon and Redwoods National Park

Our family is headed to Arizona this month to watch Brandon compete in a half-Ironman in Tempe. Carole and the three boys decided to road trip their way there, visiting a few national parks along the way. 

Day 1: today we drove from home in Ocean Park, WA to Elk Prairie Campground in Redwoods National Park in Northern California. Since we live right on the coast in southwest Washington state it was easy to jump on Highway 101 and wind our way down the coast all the way to our destination. 

Apple Maps said it would be 9 hours of travel time, and it ended up taking us about 11 hours, but that included a stop for groceries, a wander at Devil’s Punchbowl in Oregon, and many bathroom stops. So many bathroom stops. 

Packing everything for our 3 weeks, including camping for 5 days and Brandon’s triathalon bike meant we were at capacity. My favorite thing about traveling using AirBNB or something similar is laundry facilities! We pack very lightly and do a lot of laundry. 

The drive down 101 has a picture worth taking around every corner, but all those corners aren’t great if you have someone prone to motion sickness. Our 6 year old doesn’t do great with planes, trains or automobiles (not to even mention boats) so this was a challenge and made for a slower trip to take breaks and give him a chance to get a breath of fresh air. 

Checking out the beach at Devil’s Punchbowl in Oregon. 

This is a stop I’ve wanted to check out for years, but I ended up a bit disappointed. The pictures online are obviously either from folks that are willing to go beyond the fence or from low tide views. This was the best we managed to glimpse when we went through. If you want to get the best of this stop I’d definitely check the tides and time it better than we did, but it was still a good leg stretch and we got to watch some surfers catching waves. 

Eleven hours later we made it to our campsite at Elk Prairie Campground near Orick, CA. Our goal was to get there before dark so we could set up camp in daylight and we kind of made that goal. Night was falling fast as we got set up, and we just beat the misty rain. Luckily we had stopped for a bite to eat earlier, so we just tucked into our tent and played card games until we could reasonably fall asleep. Doing this trip when there were longer days would have been great, but since summer is our busy time at work we tend to travel in spring, fall and winter. The advantage is fewer crowds!