The endless road trip

This was a first, in what will be a long line of post-retirement "firsts." It's fitting that the first "first" is all about our love for traveling the backroads. Road trips are the best way to travel, the best way to really see, at ground level, exactly what you're traveling through.

This morning we left for a week in Hood River, Oregon, a great small town on the Columbia Gorge, the home base for world-class wind surfing. It's also home base for some pretty good mountain biking. We've done a bit of the latter, but this trip is for geocaching. There are more than a thousand caches laid out in several strings, most of them on back roads and logging roads.

This road trip is our first... ever... with no end date. We don't have to be back on a specific date, and aren't limited by number of vacation days. If we don't have a good time, we can come back early. If we're having a blast, we can just stay longer. It's an amazing feeling!

Because the trip can be as long (or short) as we want, we can also take our own sweet time getting there. Which means we can indulge our passion for back roads. There's a whole string of small towns just west of I-5 in Washington that are connected by fun twisty 2-lane roads.

Besides, who can resist a detour to see the world's largest egg?