The Oregon Trail

We've spent the last few weeks in Oregon. Some of that's been covered in our last blog post. We finished our stay here by visiting the Portland area and the northern Oregon coast.

Portland is a very laid back city in a beautiful hilly setting. It has a great food scene, including hundreds of food trucks. The area's main downside is the traffic. We felt like we were back home in DC during rush hour!

We started off with a great free walking tour of Portland, led by a professional comedian who clearly loves his city. One of the things we saw on the tour was the world's smallest public park (per the Guinness Book of Records), officially maintained by the city and reportedly the home of a leprechaun.

We visited Portland's wonderful Japanese Garden, perched up in the hills, with a beautiful view of Mount Hood with downtown in the foreground.

Portland lies along the Columbia River, and we traveled east form Portland to see the Columbia Gorge, some of its cascading waterfalls, the Bonneville Dam, and beautiful Mount Hood.

Finally, we had a chance to catch up with a couple of friends based in the Portland area, including our wonderful travel agent Casey Cavasher who we've been working with for a decade but had never met in person.

We'd wanted to explore the northern coast of Oregon to contrast it with our time on the southern coast. We headed first to the town of Cannon Beach and its famous Haystack Rock.

We also visited the town of Astoria which lies at the mouth of the Columbia River. Astoria is where Lewis and Clark wintered during their exploration of the Louisiana Territory, and we visited the site of their quarters Fort Clatsop. We also climbed to the top of the Astoria Column for a great view of the area all the way out to the sea.

We spent the afternoon at Astoria's Maritime Museum where we learned about the hazards mariners faced trying to enter the Columbia River from the Pacific Ocean. There are good reasons this area is known as the "graveyard of the Pacific." There were exhibits of different fishing craft, a retired lighthouse ship, and also a rowboat that had washed onshore nearby after being swept out to sea from Japan during the 2011 tsunami.

Portland has its food trucks, and Astoria has its food boats.

Leaving Oregon, we headed up into Washington and the Olympic Peninsula in the northwest part of the state. More about that in our next blog post.