Holmes Harbor, just down the hill from our rental house, the morning after we got home

We’re back on Whidbey Island after driving through appropriately sunny California and appropriately rainy Oregon and Washington.

We visited family in Huntington Beach and San Martin, Calif., and Eugene, Ore. We set up camp in the rain and dark in Eugene and survived record rains driving north through Washington.

We ate a lot of Mexican food on this trip, in Texas, Arizona, and California. On our last day, we stopped for lunch at a nifty old restaurant called the Columbia Inn, in Kalama, Wash. They brag that both Elvis and Jack Benny ate there, presumably not at the same time.

The motel next door says Elvis stayed there in 1962 but doesn’t mention Jack Benny. Maybe the rates were too high for Jack. The motel did not appear to have been updated much since Elvis stayed there. You can read more about Elvis’s visit here.

Final statistics on the trip:

• Miles driven: 4,284 (which breaks our previous record of 3,914)
• Average speed: 61 mph
• Days on the road: 15
• Actual driving time: 70 hours and 11 minutes
• States traversed: 12 (North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Oregon, and Washington)
• License plates seen: 46 U.S. states (all except Connecticut, Hawaii, Rhode Island, and West Virginia) plus D.C., six Canadian provinces (Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec, and Saskatchewan), and two Mexican states (Chihuahua and Sonora).

It’s good to be home. The photo above explains why.