It started with a notion that Portland, Oregon would be a nice city to visit. With the house search happening, the notion was not receiving much commitment nor planning. But, since the house dealings were all in order and there wasn’t really anything for me to do but wait, Janet and I took a week vacation and did an extreme last minute trip. Last minute flights – literally booked 60 hours before departure – were cheap enough to go. So, we headed out from GRR to PDX for a week nearer the Pacific.
We knew that July was a good month to visit since it’s the driest, which in Portland is a good thing. The day of our arrival (Saturday, July 25th) was the exception and it was a bit drippy, but that’s OK because a good chunk of the day was taken up with travel and getting supplies in Portland. We did drive out to a portion of the Columbia River Gorge and hiked up to Multnomah Falls during a lull in the rain and then headed South to Salem where we had booked a hotel for the first night with the intention of continuing on to Crater Lake the next day. In hindsight, we could have made it further toward Crater Lake that evening, but things weren’t really planned much beyond the next 36 hours.
Multnomah Falls is, I think, the largest falls in the Cascade River Gorge at 620 feet drop. It was a pretty tame path up to the top where I got to make the first actual use of the WiFi video remote feature of the a6000 to hang the camera over the edge of the falls while taking pictures with the phone.
Two side-notes for the day: We had some delicious Vietnamese food at some hole-in-the-wall restaurant in Portland, the likes of which seemed very abundant. The hotel was a Motel 6, which really only had one redeeming quality in that there was a very large blackberry patch on the other side of the property’s fence. Yes… the Motel’s most redeeming quality (beyond the base requirements of having a roof, bed and shower) was held by the neighbor.
I don’t have too many pictures form the first day without getting painfully redundant and posting 50 copies of Multnomah Falls.
