The Oregon Trail Trip Plan

We are heading off on another trip, our longest yet. Three months!

We leave July 7 and our target date to return home is October 3.

This may seem odd for a trip titled "The Oregon Trail" but we will start off by blasting up I-35 (more or less) to Wisconsin where we will spend a month volunteering at Apostle Islands National Lakeshore.

AINL is an archipelago in Lake Superior in the extreme northwest corner of Wisconsin, about 80 miles northeast of Duluth, Minnesota.

We will be helping the NPS staff a small visitor center at the park four days per week, conducting tours of an old fishery and living on site in our travel trailer. We’ve been thinking/talking about volunteering at a national park for some time and this opportunity just seemed to work out. If we like it and they like us it is possible that we will go back next summer and, possibly, reside at one of the lighthouses on one of the islands and conduct tours.

However, our gig this summer is at a secondary visitor center at Little Sand Bay which is about 15 miles north of the main AINL visitor center in Bayfield, Wisconsin. Both of these visitor centers are located on the mainland but the bulk of this huge park is contained on 21 islands in the lake and we are looking forward to exploring them on our days off.

Our last night at AINL will be August 6 and we will go from there to Des Moines, Iowa for the Iowa State Fair. From Des Moines we will drive west to Nebraska where we will join up with (more or less) the Oregon Trail which we will follow (more or less) to – surprise, surprise – Oregon!

The drive from Iowa to Oregon will take about a week and we will stop at several Oregon-Trail-related sites along the way, camp mainly in state parks and attend both the Wyoming and Idaho State Fairs.

We will enter the great state of Oregon on August 17 and remain there for about five weeks. This is another chapter in our ongoing effort to “really get to know a state” and we have "really been looking forward" to this one.

We will stay exclusively in Oregon state parks, usually in stints of four nights per park.

We will start out in the remote northeast corner of the state that borders Idaho along the Snake River. From there we will move to a park on the Columbia River between The Dalles and Hood River.

The next stop will be in the Wilamette Valley (the destination goal for most of the travelers on the Oregon Trail) where we will stay at a park that is situated about halfway between Portland and Salem. One of the things we will do during that time is attend the Oregon State Fair.

From there we will move into the mountains south of Bend and north of Crater Lake. This is a bit of a diversion from our original counterclockwise route plan but it was necessary because many of the parks were already booked for the Labor Day weekend.

After Labor Day we won’t need reservations and the remainder of the trip will be more open and flexible. From Bend/Crater Lake the general plan is to go to the southwest corner of the state and work our way up the coast to the northwest tip where Lewis and Clark wintered at the mouth of the Columbia River.

From there we may go back to the Portland/Salem area for a few days and we will probably leave the state for a day or two to attend the Washington State Fair.

We’ll get back to Oregon as quickly as possible and start to work our way eastward and then south toward Nevada. We will probably leave Oregon sometime in the last week of September.

We are considering coming back to Texas via Buena Vista, Colorado (my summer home last year) and we may stop in to visit friends in New Mexico en route from BV to Texas.

Our target date to arrive home is October 3.