First Post Yurtastic!

I started this blog to journal our future yurt camping adventures. We are a very non-outdoorsy family of four. John, Michelle, Daniel and Sarah. We went camping once with friends and slept in our own tent. There are pros and cons to camping with a tent. We decided we liked the camping part but not the tent factor. Yurts may be our solution!

Here's the story...in June 2010 we took a church hike to the Ice Caves. We all LOVED it! Then in August we went with some friends for our first camping trip. All we had to do was "show up with a tent". We bought a large tent at Target and drove to the group camp site at a state park. What a fantastic experience! Our friends made it super easy because of their 17 years of camping experience.

Then in spring 2011, while John was between jobs, we had some time to take a trip. We quite spontaneously rented an RV and traveled to the California Redwoods. We booked the RV and left town 5 days later, reading the RV operation manual as we pulled out of the rental lot. Everyone LOVED it! What isn't to love about driving a $90K rig down the coast!?

In July 2011 we decided to make an effort to get outdoors more. So we set about to schedule some hikes. This led to setting a goal to visit all the lighthouses of Washington state. After our 3rd hike, we started brainstorming about possibly doing some more camping. But we agreed together, we really didn't like camping! We started discussing the pros and cons of tent camping, RVs, trailers and hotels. We don't like tenting for many reasons, RV rental is expensive and owning is not something we desire, our car can't really tow anything but an ultra lightweight trailer  (with no cargo!) and hotels are convenient but expensive.

In the course of our ongoing discussions, we took a drive through a local park in the rain one weekend to check out a park with a campground (since our first camping trip we find that we're addicted to driving through campgrounds and that's how we discovered our first local yurt village)! A few months later, we met some friends at a local park which also had a yurt village.

Our first official 2011 Weekend Getaway was to Long Beach, Washington to visit the Cape Disappointment and North Head lighthouses. On the way home, with lots of time to chat, we again discussed our "getting outside" options. That got us thinking about the benefits of yurt camping so before we unpacked our backpacks upon arriving home, we booked a yurt for 7 weeks out. Our first yurtcation will be 7 weeks from now and we're all very excited!

In spring 2012 we plan to visit the lighthouses of the Oregon coast and we're going to see if we can yurtcation up the coast instead of renting the RV again. This would save over $1,000!

This blog will journal our future yurtcations! Stay tuned!