DRIVING OUR VAN FROM CANADA TO MEXICO

Those mountains way off in the distance, that's Canada. And we're spending the next six weeks driving south all the way to the Mexico border.

Nate just saw an orca.

What a start to the Pacific coast highway.

We're Karen, Nate, and we've spent the last four years traveling to 100 countries. No way.

But 2020 brought us back to the.

Where we bought a converted sprinter van that we've spent the last four months driving from Tennessee to Washington.

I don't think it gets much better than this.

After a few days exploring the city of Seattle, we hit a little bit of a roadblock.

We have spent the last week living in a hotel while we fixed an unexpected power issue in the van.

So this is one of the batteries that needs to be recharged. And the other four under here somewhere, which means that all of this has to come out.

Well, I got it apart.

We decided to spare you from another repair video, but it actually went smoother than expected.

I think I fixed it. I have several screws left over.

Who needs them?

It actually ended up being a good thing that we were forced to sit still for a little while because it finally gave me time to study for my drone license test, which I officially passed yesterday. And the timing could not be more perfect because we were about to start the most beautiful road trip in the United States.

But first, we were heading in the complete opposite direction because we were told that we cannot leave the Seattle area without visiting Snoqually Falls. I am probably butchering that name.

So beautiful.

It was worth coming here just for the drive. I did not expect to see snow today, but the mountains were so beautiful.

Ah, it just feels good to be out and about again.

Back in the van, Back in nature. Back in fresh air.

I'm so happy.

Oh, this is a bummer.

Even with a license, I still can't fly here. Look at this.

That is so much water.

That's insane.

It's definitely worth the drive from Seattle.

It's so powerful.

I wonder if it's more powerful now because it's been raining so much. Yeah, we are in Seattle. It's probably like this all the time. Yeah. I think we forgot what nature was like after being in a hotel for a week. What is this Fresh air, these beautiful things.

All right, now we are heading north to officially start the Pacific coast highway from the very top.

According to Google.

Port Angeles is the most northern point of the Pacific Coast Highway. We could just start heading south from here, but so we can officially say we've done the entire thing. We're driving three hours north.

It's totally unnecessary, but we're doing it anyways.

It's a good excuse to get up on the Olympic Peninsula. Head northwest.

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Hello. How are you, Bainbridge? Is there anything special I need to know? We've never done this before. Your boat is on 205. Okay, thank you.

We've made a poor decision. We decided to take this slightly longer route so we could take the van on a ferry for the first time. But we are watching it drive away right now.

The next one doesn't leave for 50 minutes.

Darn it.

Everest. We were super bummed that we had to wait, and then we're like, we're in our house. We have snacks.

It's official.

We're on.

All right, we are off to Bainbridge Island. Ladies and gentlemen, as a reminder.

We met a local who told us it was about 35 minutes to the other side.

Wow, it's very cold up here.

Oh, please come back up. No, it was just. It's been. Look, there it is.

No way.

What are the chances?

How did you see that? We are getting so lucky with welds in Washington.

This is amazing.

Wow.

Whoa. What in the world?

Oh, it has a baby and everything. This is so incredible.

There's no wonder everywhere.

This is awesome.

Incredible.

That was worth every single minute. That we waited on this ferry and every penny we paid too.

Good pro whale watchers these days.

Emergency brakes on, newbie.

Wow. What a start to the day.

What a start to the Pacific Coast Highway. The other thing that makes it super crazy is we had just met a girl who watches our videos who is telling us how lucky we were to see the well in Olympia and that she on the island and she had seen a well once in her entire life on that ferry and then five minutes later, we were surrounded by orcas.

Just, like, made me appreciate the experience so much more to know what a rare opportunity it was. I'm like on a high right now.

All right, from here, we have about an hour and a half drive to Port Angelique.

We have just arrived in Port Angeles, which is the northernmost point of Highway 101. And.

Those mountains that you see across the water.

Oh, Canada.

That's Canada. And we're going to be spending the next six weeks driving south on the Pacific coast highway all the way to the Mexico border.

Yay.

We have nothing booked and our only plans are to be home for Christmas, which gives us about six weeks.

We also thought we were gonna make it here by lunchtime today. And.

Coffee.

Good morning. We ended up camping about 20 minutes down the coast from Port Angeles, but by the time we got to the campground last night, it was completely dark. So we didn't get to see this view until this morning. But check this out.

Right when I opened my eyes this morning, I was staring out our back windows with views of the Puget Sound and Canada just on the other side.

I'm not sure why, but there's something different about walking to a nice viewpoint and getting to see it and then getting to sleep there and wake up to it. The latter is so much more special.

That is so true.

All feels right in the world. That is the longest I've gone without flying the drone since we bought it at the beginning of 2017 to take to South America. Feels good to have new drone footage in the videos.

So we sent out a weekly email telling people what we've been up to and where we're heading next. And a couple weeks ago, I asked for recommendations for the PCH and I got flooded with over 300 responses. It took me an entire day to go through all these emails and organize them onto Google Maps, but now our route looks like this. The stars are interesting places to stop. The green flags are places we can potentially sleep, and the hearts are places to eat. Our goal as we head south is to hit as many of these places as possible.

We just had the best morning. It was so relaxing. We went on a walk through this gorgeous forest with huge ferns. What is that thing? And we stumbled upon an old military bunker from World War II.

It's pretty crazy from the front. Like, unless you're right on top of it, there is no way you would ever see that.

It is going to be very hard to beat the first 24 hours of this road trip. But we just left. And we are officially heading south.

But not stronger. I'm strong enough to kill you.

You are my life now.

Omg.

Reminiscing.

Yeah.

I wore my hair in a headband like that so I would look more like Bella.

So we're just passing through the little town of Forks, which is an old logging community that gained a little bit of fame after the popular Twilight series came out. And Kara's pretending like she's in high school again.

See, that's it. It's right there. Whoa, it's cold. This 16 year old me would be so excited to be here. This. This is Bella's truck. Those books came out while I was in high school and I'm a little embarrassed to say they're probably the only physical books that I have read from COVID to cover in my whole life. I was a total basic fan girl. Went to the midnight movie premieres and everything. So even though I'm not really in that phase of life anymore, it's still kind of cool to see.

Tried to convince Nate to spend the rest of the day on a Twilight tour, but.

Don'T think that's gonna happen.

I told her I owe her from the bike trip and if she wanted to redeem that debt now, that I would do it.

She didn't go for it? No. I think I'll keep that card until something really good comes my way.

Is that where we're going?

It was where we were going. Plan B. I don't really have one of those. I'd read about a rainforest that was was outside of the national park since we can't film in national park still. But I think this was the only way to get there. It looks like nobody's driven down this road for a long time. I found this on some random blog, so I guess it could have been a little outdated.

We were just driving down the road and there are two bald eagles just sitting on this log in the river. Wow. So majestic. No, please don't fly away.

I cannot believe we just saw that. One of them was just like sitting down on the bank eating something.

That Was awesome.

What a start to the trip with the wildlife.

All right, I guess this is home for the night.

You can't see anything.

It's so dark here.

Where's the light?

Okay, today has not gone as planned. It's pretty much been raining ever since we got back in the van. But we really wanted to make a quick pit stop at this place that we wanted to visit. But we can't share it here on YouTube, but we think we can share it over on our Instagram where it's not monetized. So if you're curious where afternoon went, head over there and check out our highlight. And because of that, we didn't make it nearly as far as we thought we would today. So we've ended up at a campground that we didn't know existed until five minutes ago. But I think, like, it's a gym. It's also pouring down rain, so we get to fall asleep to this sound.

Oh, it's gotta weigh 100 pounds.

That's a workout that almost felt too easy. I haven't found something that's not working yet. Has really surprised me. Oof.

In 800ft, turn left onto Seattle ferry terminal.

The cones are so tight.

This is, like, the ultimate driving test, mate.

I hadn't thought about whether our van was too big to fit on the ferry.

We did it. I had seriously just started complaining to Nate that I was cold and I was ready to go back to the van. And then he was like, orca.

Wow. I would have been so sad if we missed that. Thank you for not listening to me. I still cannot get over the fact that we just saw that many orcas coming out of the water.

Just orcas in general. One orca.

That was better than our orca encounter in Antarctica. And we were just taking a ferry from one place to the next.

Wow, that's a long way. That's a lot of map to cover. This is going to be really fun.

Up the hobby.

It was a bird. A bird flew out of that bush. I've never seen this.

I just yelped from the boat.

I have a bad feeling that I'm gonna be watching one of these movies tonight.

This is where she was standing when the car was about to hit her, and Edward jumped in between him and stopped it with his hand. And she was like, oh, wait, no, that one says Bella. But I'm, like, positive it was that one. But this one says Bella. Okay, so the front seat of this truck says 1953 Chevy. Bella's truck. Book version.

So let's take a second.

Maybe this was the movie version. I think this is the one in the movie book.

Movie. There you go. Riveting stuff.

Oh, look, they have their pictures on them.

It's gonna be dark by the time we get to our campsite again tonight. If you picture a block of air, that air has a certain saturation point. And so let's say you fill that block of air up with as much saturation as it can take. Well, when the temperature gets lowered, the air can hold less water, so it starts to condensate. And that's what causes fog and rain. And so I'm looking at all the fog around us. There's, like, four different ways that it can happen.

You learn so much.

This was another interesting thing. We definitely have a stable air mass.

Yeah.