Our destination was the small beach town of Manzanita, Oregon, but the vacation started the moment we got into the rental car in Portland. With startling quickness, we were out of the city and into the woods, careening our way through old-growth conifer forests on roads that belonged in a car commercial. My husband, Leon, was driving, and I was in the back seat with our year-old daughter, Tess, who seemed to love as much as I did the dense dark green out the window. Brambles of blackberry bushes grew along the shoulders and wildflowers bloomed. What appeared at first to be thorny branches were elk that scampered into the thickets. The sky shone. Even the businesses (an improbable-seeming quantity of lumberyards, a purveyor of exotic meat jerky housed in a log cabin) contributed to the soaring, pioneer-like mood.

I’ve spent the last 20 years—my entire adulthood—living in New York, and I long ago became desensitized to the dreary logistics of East Coast vacations: the need to travel through unrelenting ugliness to finally arrive at beauty and peace. But on the West Coast, where I grew up, the journey can be—and often is—at least as good as its end. We arrived in Manzanita having been invigorated by the drive rather than destroyed by it.