City of Portland

We've been staying with some wonderful folks in Beaverton, a suburb of Portland for about 4 days now. We're camping in thier driveway. They are brother and sister to dear friends Fred & Patty Meyer. Dave is an avid road cyclist and so he has kept us busy on our bicycle. On the first day here, he sent us on a 20 mile ride from their home. Bike lanes like crazy but BUSY roads, wow!! We got out into the country from where they live and around little mom and pop fruit stands but the roads were still quite busy. Very lovely ride! The next day he sent us out of town a half hour to a linear trailway. We road 43 miles round trip and it was a slight grade almost all the way out. Really fun on the way back, beautiful tour, very wooded. Yesterday we road 26 miles along the Columbia River Gorge. Touch ride but well worth it. It was essentially a long grind up hill with extremely high winds on the gorge. Beautiful view at the top and too tired to continue on further down hair pin curves into the next town. So we returned down that grade back into Hood River into the wind. Great fun as we still got up some speed in spite of the head wind. We pretended to be competing with a barge that was on the river and we won the race. We decided based on our uphill climbing next to the barge that it was only moving about 8 mph.



Pictures today are of our trip into downtown Portland several days ago now. We happened upon the rose festival parade while we were there. Really awesome parade, floats and participants were beautiful, so were the bands. The picture of the bike rack with bikes is in front of Powell Bookstore, supposed to be the largest bookstore in the country for sure. Really fun place to visit. You'll see a picture of a US coast guard ship. We toured 2 ships on the river, one Canadian and the US ship. Because brother Bob was with us he coerced them into taking us down into the galleys and living quarters. Pretty cool! We talked a lot with the shipmates, I was asking all kinds of navigating questions and how much math they used.



You'll see pictures in the square and people sitting on the steps enjoying coffee looking over on that floral view. Gracie, Randy, and Caileigh at the Starbucks overlooking the floral gardens. Gracie was really into watching the guys playing chess there on the veranda. Then a picture of Mt. Hood from the highway as we're driving back to camp and finally if I haven't given you enough pictures of the gorge, another one.



I just made reservations today for Sequim, Washington on the northeast side of Olympic Naztional Park. We're heading there on Sunday and have a site reserved right on the ocean. From there we're going to take the Rig and all on the Port Townsend ferry and go camp in a state park to the east of the San Juan islands where we hope to bike, hike, watch whales, and maybe try kayaking. Hmmm......