But there is no longer a John’s here. If you look closely at the pic you may be able to make out the outline of the old sign.

The dude behind the counter of the new restaurant recognized my Rothbury shirt, though, he was there too! That’s cool.

I-70 is impressive, as it moves into the mountains the east and west-bound lanes are for long stretches elevated on bridges, allowing them to be wider than they could be if the road had been build on the actual ground.  It looks cool, too.  Well done highway designers.

We made our way along, and it was fun to see the landscape change.  The rocky cliffs remained for a while, but green trees started to appear and the hillsides grew greener and greener.

We got hungry and asked the Garmin which restaurants were nearby, and lucky for Sarah Michael her favorite kind of food was just few miles ahead.  Sato Sushi was the place in Edwards, CO.  The food was good and town is cute.  It should be, it is quite near Vail and affluence clearly infects this place too.  If I could afford it it seemed like a nice place to live.

As we climbed the mountain pass higher, it began to rain.  This was a nice change.  We haven’t seen proper rain for quite a while and I missed it!  Then we climbed even higher and the rain started to change to snow!  The highest we got was just over 11,000 feet, there was more mountain still ahead of us but thankfully we were spared more climbing, the long Eisenhower-Johnson tunnel allowed us to start going back down.  This was good, the RV was really laboring to pull itself and the jeep up the steep grade and we were not able to maintain any speed at all.  By the time we reached the entrance to the tunnel we were down to 25 miles an hour.

As we neared the bottom of the mountain near Denver, we saw a couple of great freeway signs.  They came and went too quickly for us to get pictures, but RockyMountainRoads has pictures here and here.

We finally arrived our destination, St. Vrain State Park, after 10pm, though we would have been there sooner had the Garmin actually known where the place was.  I had preloaded the GPS system with our destinations based on addresses or other info we got when booking our stays, and we were sent about three miles off course.  Not a great distance, but when you’re driving a vehicle with a 100-yard turning radius that can’t back up because of its towed vehicle it makes correcting navagational mistakes more of a challenge.

Good night!

Thanks to the movie Cars, even little Sarah Michael is familiar with Route 66.  If you remember the song, one of the stops along the highway was Kingman, Arizona.  Good thing our path to the Grand Canyon went through Kingman, it meant a photo opportunity.  Another good thing, it was dinner time which meant a visit to a roadside diner.

The place was 1950s through and through, and I had to smile at the family from England who walked in with wide eyes and wider smiles.  They sat in the booth beside us and they all took pictures of each other using their phones.

The food was great!  Jessie and I both had burgers, Sarah Michael enjoyed a hot dog and afterward a root beer float.

After a nice dinner we hit the road to continue to the Grand Canyon.  We still had many miles to go, but it was a good day and we were all happy.

[See post to watch QuickTime movie]

We went to the beach and walked down to Haystack Rock.  The beach of Cannon Beach is always fun to walk on and since the tide was out we got to look at beautiful starfish in the tide pools.  I took several pictures of some of the life attached to the rocks, so be sure to see our pics up at Flickr.

[See post to watch QuickTime movie]

Unfortunately as we we were starting south down 101 out of Cannon Beach we had a bit of a mishap.  Sarah Michael was sitting behind the passenger seat in the chair beneath where I have the wireless internet router gear setup when I took one of the windy turns a little too fast and all the stuff fell down right onto SM’s head!  She started bawling and we quickly pulled over to fix her up and better-secure the equipment.  Later we got some velcro from Fred Meyer to hold things down and that worked well the rest of the day.

In Tillamook we stopped at the Tillamook Air Museum which is cool.  It is housed in an old Navy hangar that was built during WWII for K-class airships- blimps.  The building is enormous and is impressive to stand inside.  They have many different aircraft there including an F-14 Tomcat and a Mini Guppy.  This was really a fun place to visit.

Traveling even on the windy roads was fine, I really like driving.  Our jobs today were that I drove, Jessie passengered and Sarah Michael alternated between playing and singing along with her iPod.  She loves the songs she learned at Vacation Bible School a couple weeks ago and so we loaded the CD onto the iPod. Jessie and I got quite a laugh out of hearing her mis-sing the God of Wonders song, instead of singing “You are Holy” she would belt out “You are Hoe-y”.

When it was dinner time we were driving through Newport, so we decided to find a place to eat.  We parked the RV and drove the Jeep down to the historic bayfront area to find some seafood.  Parking was a bit of a problem, we saw lots and lots of restaurants, with lots and lots of cars filling every spot.  So we kept driving until we were nearly at the end of the strip when parking started coming available.  At that same time we spied a restaurant called Local Ocean Seafoods that had that level of busy-ness that suggested we were at the right place.  Jessie and SM shared some crab, I had fish tacos.  The food was great.

More driving after dinner and then we finally we ended up in our new location.  We’ll reveal all tomorrow.