Columbia River Gorge

  Portland, Oregon, United States
Sunday, July 27, 2008

The trip East out of Florence to Portland was an easy drive. The lanes were nice and wide, and they had shoulders too. Not too many of either for the past week, so they were welcomed. Diesel is still under $5 p/gal since Oregon has no sales tax.

We stayed in an RV park in Wilsonville, OR; about 15 minutes South of Portland, and one exit away from the loop we'll take when we leave. The park is nice and clean, but once again the advertised wifi is questionable. I have one recurring complaint on this trip, and that's rv parks who put in a very poor wifi system to justify their rate, and the inability of the office staff to be able to reboot their system when it goes down. It's irksome to pay for your stay, unhook your trailer, and set up your camp site just to hear My Precious say "Crap, the f'n wireless is just crap here."

During our stay we met up with some more of Pat's bird friends Sheri and Tai. Sheri was having medical problems and supposed to stay in bed, but she came out to the trailer to meet our birds. Then they took us out to luinch at Giant Burger. The place is a local favorite, and its owner is famous for his grumpiness. We weren't disappointed by either. Then we went over to their house to meet their birds who were very entertaining. Sheri told us how to get to the Columbia River Gorge, and what we should see as we drove along.

We have this thing for fog

Just a little fog here

Texas rivers are, for most part, barely too wide to skip rocks across. Texas really has no waterfalls at all. We were driving alongside a navigable river by barge traffic, and it appeared to be at least as wide as the Mississippi. It also contained several hydro-electric dams. We were on the scenic route just off of the interstate we would travel on our next leg. The waterfalls were majestic and a bunch of other descriptive adjectives that Professor Pat will use in her blog - and justly so. I had never been this close to a waterfall before that wasn't in an amuzement park. What sights. You'd think my eyes would start hurting with all of the things they'd had to look at.

Vista house built by women

Pretty waterfall

It's something to see

More runoff

Two tiered waterfall - top

PHOTO_ID_R=another-fall.jpg]We had decided to drop a day of our planned stay in Portland, so I spent some time contacting the places ahead of us to see if we could move our times ahead. Got that done and we were ready to leave the next morning.

We headed into Eastern Oregon driving the interstate alongside the Columbia River. The landscape was mountains filled with giant trees and the river. I'm not sure what happened, but, just like going to the next slide, the scenes changed and now we were in West Texas with rolling hills. Driving to our stop for the night, Hermiston, OR, Pat noticedd that there was an Army Depot there and that our atlas noted that there was also a bombing range there just outside of town. We also decided to just spend one night instead of the 2 I had planned. After we got hooked up at the cookie cutter rv park Pat got an email from Portland Sheri telling us that the Depot housed chemical weapons from WWI & WWII, and that the bombing range had unexploded ordinance laying around. I crossed of the scenic tour from the list of things to do and thought about getting a lot of bottled water. This was not the place to have stopped, and the damn planner should be talkked to. We did find a decent Mexican Food place to eat. The food was almost as good as the Mexican place Melissa took us to in Bloomington, IN several years ago.

We left the next day for Spokane, and trip planning mistake two. We should have driven an extra 50 miles into Idaho to shorten the following day's trip up to Glacier NP. Oh well, the planner can't be fired so we'll just suck it up. Washington has sales tax, so the fuel cost is over $5 p/gal. Seamus, our wonderful cat, managed to escape for the second time on the trip, so we spent some time skulking around the park looking for the cat. Damn cat. We got him, and put him back in the trailer and got ready to leave.