Tag: Travel | Pacific Northwest

last day in portland, oregon. it’s a gorgeous place… i will miss it wildly. which got me thinking…

i’ve been trying to move to get out of DC pretty steadily since 1998. i tried very hard to move to Oregon early in my failed marriage (she would have none of it) when I worked for a company out of Eugene. closer to the end of my tenure there, i was a week away from relocating when it turned out that a position I was jonesing for — in Eugene — wasn’t actually available.

not that oregon has a monopoly on my desires to get out of DC. i almost pulled the trigger twice on Vermont, once while working for Bernie Sanders — Vermont’s Representative in the U.S. Congress — and once shortly after my divorce.

being on vacation outside of the political, type-“A” rat-race that is DC has reminded me how much i still want to get out of here before I start firebombing politicians.

I don’t remember anything more than fleeting before i was a teenager — not world events, not personal experiences … nothing. Well, except for thinking that a volcano erupting in the Pacific Northwest was pretty dern cool.

Obviously, I was a little young to understand or appreciate the tragedy associated with a natural disaster (I had just turned 5 the monthe before the eruption) but I was about 2 classes away from being a Geology majory, so it must have done something for me.

Mount St. Helens is only about 2 hours from Portland, and half of that was on the mountain access road itself. The trip was devistatingly gorgeous, though it was one of those days (that I can never explain) where the photos just don’t do the day or the subject justice.

Drove the length of the old historic Columbia River highway, and took in half a dozen (or more) of the waterfalls that line the river. Most of them were bigger than any that I had ever seen before, and all of them were VERY photogenic.

After driving through the Columbia River Gorge, we set off for Mt. Hood. After decades of east coast mountains, it’s hard to put a 11,000 ft volcano into perspective. Spent the latter part of the day wandering around the Timberline Lodge, a ski-resort on Mt. Hood that is operated by the U.S. Forest Service.

Just outside of the Japanese Garden is a HUGE Rose Garden, which serves as a kind of public square for Portland families. The garden has hundreds of different kinds of roses, each layed out in 8 foot by 2 foot plots, side-by-side and end-to-end across acres of land. It’s simply overwhelming.

Summer vacation, finally, and I am hanging with the hippies of Portland, Oregon.

Part of the Oregon Zoo complex on the outskirts of Portland is a Japanese Garden, which is maticulously maintained. It’s rare that I feel like something was worth the cost of admission, but here not only was it a steal, I felt that my $8 was actually being folded back into the park itself. I can’t imagine how much they spend to keep this place up, but it is certainly more the cost of admission.