BootsnAll Travel Network
Add this blog to: MyYahoo, Google, Bloglines, RSS


Archive for the 'Oregon' Category

« Home

Portland, OR

Monday, August 8th, 2011

July 18th

Portland is on the hot-list right now for west coast cities… It is very bike and pedestrian friendly and very ecologically-minded. It’s also the home base of a number of high tech and outdoor goods companies. I think Fabien was in love with Portland before we got there. There are just two downsides: the weather (it rains all the time) and it’s a little bit isolated from the rest of the world.

We didn’t devote a lot of time to Portland…just an afternoon and evening, but it was enough to get a little flavor of the city. We drove in through some pretty neighborhoods with old Victorian houses and then explored downtown a little bit. We stopped at Powell’s Books, the largest independent bookseller in the world, and I restocked my used book collection…next on the list is Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. We took a walk along the waterfront and then had a beer in a local brewery (Oregon is capital of the micro-breweries.) For dinner, we went to a little pizzeria in a “hippy” neighborhood. We sat outside with our beer and pizza marveling at the locals taste in fashion. We must have seen 20 bicycles ride by as we were sitting there. Of course we had a bit of drizzly rain that turned into a torrential downpour the following morning. It was the cliché ending to our Oregon experience.

Posted in BIG TRIP 2011, In English, Oregon | No Comments »

Mt. Hood and the Columbia River Gorge, OR

Wednesday, August 3rd, 2011

July 17th-July 18th

So it was time to get on the road again. It actually feels like more work travelling sometimes than actually working. I wouldn’t trade this experience for the world, though. Our first destination was Mt. Hood, the pretty mountain you can see from Portland, Oregon, that has the only American ski resort open year-round. Our destination: the Timberline Lodge. (It’s also famous for being the setting of than unforgettable Kubrik move, The Shining. Today, the weather was not on our side. We drove up through a cold, misty fog (actually somehow appropriate for the site of a horror movie.) The Timberline Lodge from the outside is a little bizarre.  It’s more gray stone than log cabin, but the interior is very inviting with its huge fireplaces and basement pub. The parking lot was full of vans from ski schools and training camps and the lifts were running on July 17th. The first thing that came to mind was…gee the weather was better in January in France than it was here in July, but I guess this was fluky weather. From Timberline, we drove down to Government Camp, a little village built in the 20s to house the workers who built Timberline Lodge (it was another CCC project.) It’s hard to imagine where our country would be today without Roosevelt’s New Deal, so much of our American “legacy” was preserved through those projects. The weather was just as dismal in Government Camp, so we decided to continue our drive towards Hood River, where we were planning to pick up the Columbia River Gorge Parkway.

Our instincts were on our side, and we found a dry picnic area that was also the trailhead to a four-mile roundtrip hike to a beautiful waterfall. We took the opportunity to stretch our legs and set off for a couple of hours. After the hike, we drove towards Hood River through the Oregon Fruit Basket. We stopped off at a couple of roadside stands, but were disappointed at how expensive the fruit was (we realized later that the season was severely delayed due to the weather…so the prices were marked up.) When we arrived in Hood River, we wanted to visit the Full Sail Brewery, but had just missed the last tour. We took a short walk down the main street to peak at some of the shops and then picked up the highway along the Columbia River. We found a little campground up the road from Horsetail Falls and decided to stop for the night. We hiked up to the falls through a dense, humid forest before dinner. One thing is certain- there is a lot of water in Oregon!

The following day, we were ready to explore the Columbia River Gorge. We started at Multnomah Falls (the most famous of the gorge and the fourth tallest in the U.S) and hiked up through a beautiful forest with other hidden waterfalls. From there we stopped off at the historic Crown Point viewpoint over the Columbia River (which starts in British Columbia) and then finished the road to Portland. I did the same trip last year when I was visiting family and was lucky to have a beautiful sunny day with views of Mt. Hood. Unfortunately, we had an overcast (but dry) day and missed out a little bit on the charm of this road.

Posted in BIG TRIP 2011, In English, Oregon | No Comments »

Cascade Lakes and Cove Palisades SP, Oregon

Monday, August 1st, 2011
July 15th- July 17th As we were approaching the weekend, Fabien reserved a campsite in an Oregon state park to insure that we would get a spot. We were looking for something between Crater Lake and the Columbia River Gorge- he ... [Continue reading this entry]

Posted in BIG TRIP 2011, In English, Oregon | No Comments »

Rogue-Umpqua Scenic Byway, Diamond Lake and Crater Lake NP, Oregon

Saturday, July 30th, 2011
July 13th-15th We woke up at six in the morning the day we left Coos Bay. We wanted to get an early start to be able to fully enjoy the drive to Crater Lake. Coos Bay was cloaked in a fog ... [Continue reading this entry]

Posted in BIG TRIP 2011, In English, Oregon | No Comments »

Coos Bay (where I was born) and the Oregon Coast

Thursday, July 28th, 2011
July 8th- July 12th As we crossed the border between California and Oregon on Highway 101 (the coastal highway), the weather seemed to magically improve. The fog burned off to a beautiful sunny afternoon with blue skies. We stopped at the ... [Continue reading this entry]

Posted in BIG TRIP 2011, In English, Oregon | No Comments »