InVader of the North

So, from time to time I go on random trips with my family. Just my wife Joy, my son William, and I heading out for an adventure. The idea to is to go to random new places and make new discoveries. It usually involves getting in the car, heading in a certain direction, and having no destination except for the journey.

In the past we've headed West, ending up as far as Newport and visiting a museum. In the South we went spelunking (well, not really) and in the East we searched for holes. For our first trip in a while we headed North. In this direction we've really only had three types of travel: Mount St. Helens, Seattle, and Vancouver, BC (again, an adventure for another time). Only having an afternoon to explore, we stayed on the I-5 corridor.

The first location that really attracted attention was Vader, a name that called to our Star Wars fandom. You have to head couple miles out from the freeway, and along the road are houses with yards so full of debris they seem destined to end up protagonists on Hoarders. The nicer ones had decks. My wife and I got into a conversation about how much she likes decks. Big decks. Long decks. Just so long as they weren't those old decks that no longer stay up.

Once we got to "downtown" Vader we made a turn at the first thing that caught our eye, the historic jail. Seems that it's a part-time museum, but in a town this small, it doesn't really have hours of operation. Probably have to call the town council to set something up. But in the adjacent park was a bit of an interpretive center with some placards going over the history of the town.

Turns out this was a turn of the century boomtown. It was once called Little Falls, but the North Pacific Railway company already had another town with that name on the line. They named it Vader in honor of a one time mayor. The population was almost entirely employed by two different lumber companies. When things started taking a down turn (company moving out or going up in smoke), the citizens took out home insurance policies and burned down most the town (of course, this is mere speculation, if the insurance companies ever found out for sure, they'd probably hunt down the descendants to get their money back).

We explored the town for a bit, but with a population of about 600 and a foot print less that a square mile, there's not much to see. We hit the road again and found the Little Falls graveyard. Many of those buried in the section we explored were born in the late 1800's. Most of the tombstones had pentagrams attached, took a while to realize these were Masonic in origin. Just before leaving, William found a pipe leading into one of the grave plots. The inside was filled with beetle-like bugs I've never seen before. That was creepy enough for us so we took off.

Following the road out a bit further, we found some Burma-Shave jingles at a tree farm. Continuing we made it to Ryderwood, a community for the silver linings crowd. By this, I mean that you had to be over 55 to live there (although we did find a house at the end of town that had an exception to this rule). Just as you enter, the first thing you see is "Deer XXX" (offering new meaning to "reindeer games"). We also saw a poor little house who's massive front lawn tree had fallen across the porch, bounced off the house, and crushed the front walkway. This town was literally the end of the state highway we were on, so we had to turn back. On our way through Vader again, we stopped at a little store that probably doesn't see a lot of business, considering the rack of out of date sodas they had on sale near the front counter. Then again, this could be explained by the death march you had to take to get to the coolers, way in the back, through a store that largely looks like the aftermath of the apocalypse.

We hit the freeway once more and headed toward home. Made a quick stop over in Castle Rock but it had little to offer except a couple murals celebrating the boom era from the early 1900's (although the per capita number of hair salons was astounding).

Our final stop was in Battle Ground. Biggest town we'd seen all day, but it turns out their state park costs too much for a short stop over, though we did see alpaca on the way out. Heading back through town we found a gaming/comic shop and browsed. Got myself a couple more Boba's for the collection and William picked up a couple packs of Magic cards (for all you nerds out there, one pack had a foil rare dual land, worth about $25). We had dinner at a small pizza buffet place and then made our way home with the setting sun.

What have you discovered while being spontaneous? Ever redeemed a disastrous vacation by adding a flavor of the random? Tell me about your road trip adventures in the comments below!