Trip Ideas

Winter Outdoors: Ice Skating Rinks in the Pacific Northwest

Imagine skating in circles with your sweetie among gently-falling snow, a chill in the air and a mug of hot cocoa on your mind. Winter at its best. Got ice skates? If you don’t have a pair of your own, you’ll be able to rent them for the whole family at most of these outdoor […]

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Northwest Autumn Day Trips: Corn Mazes, Apple Orchards, and Pumpkin Patches

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Psst…. get our premier guide to fall travel – Autumn Escapes in the Pacific Northwest. Get inspired to spend your fall weekends combing rocky beaches, savoring the harvest, and hiking scenic mountain trails of Washington and Oregon. Get it here. It’s October, my favorite month in the kitchen and in the great outdoors. Let’s see… the past few days I’ve […]

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Four Autumn Weekend Getaways in the Pacific Northwest

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Psst…. get our premier guide to fall travel – Autumn Escapes in the Pacific Northwest. Get inspired to spend your fall weekends combing rocky beaches, savoring the harvest, and hiking scenic mountain trails of Washington and Oregon. Get it here.   I’ve saved some vacation days, and I hope you have, too. For fall lovers like me this […]

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Six Oktoberfests in the Pacific Northwest

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Psst…. get our premier guide to local fall travel – Autumn Escapes in the Pacific Northwest. Get inspired to spend your fall weekends combing rocky beaches, savoring the harvest, and hiking scenic mountain trails of Washington and Oregon. Get it here. Backdropped by the snow-capped peaks of the Cascades, Oktoberfest in the Northwest is the next […]

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Five Great County Fairs in Washington State

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It’s almost August, otherwise known throughout the USA as Fair Season! My childhood memories from the fair where I grew up in rural Illinois are coated in sugar. Puffs of blue cotton candy, popsicles colored like the American flag, a plate of funnel cakes dusted with a heavy coat of sweet powder. Go to any […]

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Great County Fairs in Oregon

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  I grew up in a small town in southern Illinois that had been settled by German Catholic farmers a few centuries ago. Instead of a county fair, we had a festival every August called Kirchenfest on the sprawling church parking lot, and my Dad was in charge of making the funnel cakes–platefuls of sweet […]

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Six Summer Day Trips from Seattle

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Summer is nearly half over. Does the approach of August give you a mid-summer crisis, too? Six weeks of summer left until school starts again, and I feel it’s passing way too quickly. It always does here. So I pull out my calendar, and I start scribbling quick trips in. Here are six sunny day […]

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Quick Escape: Sequim on the Olympic Peninsula

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Most people think the Olympic Peninsula town of Sequim (pronounced Skwim) is a retirees’ enclave with year-round sunshine set in a rural landscape dotted with fragrant fields of purple lavender. And indeed, it is. But Sequim is slowly changing, and offers more to its visitors than sunshine and lavender (not that there’s a single thing wrong […]

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Quick Escape: See the Skagit Tulips

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Why go: There’s something about rows upon rows of brightly-colored tulips that screams: Goodbye winter, hello spring! The time is now to catch the flower fireworks show that blankets Skagit Valley farmland each April. Festival of flowers: The Skagit Valley Tulip Festival runs April 1-30, 2018. Sprawling fields of technicolor bulbs dot the landscape from Mt. Vernon west to […]

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Weekend Escape: Depoe Bay on the Oregon Coast

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  Forget sandy beaches. This wild stretch of the Oregon coast is all about frothy waves crashing into basalt headlands, and passing grey whales. The small town of Depoe Bay sits between two Oregon Coast hotspots–Lincoln City to the north and Newport to the south, which may be why it’s often overlooked by travelers to […]

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