Day # 17 - Portland, OR

Missy and I didn’t really have a plan for today. Anyone who reads this and knows my wife, will realize how unusual that is. So yesterday we asked the girls what they would like to do today. We gave them the choice of going to the Bonneville Dam and fish ladder, going to the Rose Test Garden in Portland, or driving up Mount Hood. They chose the Rose Test garden.

So after a quick breakfast in the camper, we headed the 50 miles into Portland. Both Missy and I have been to the Rose Test Garden several times before. It is probably Portland’s best free attraction. It is a public park that overlooks the city from a hill. There are several terraces all filled with different kinds of rose bushes. Since I am not a gardener or a flower aficionado, I will not try to go into more detail about the place other than to say that they do a lot of cross-pollination to come up with new kinds of roses. So most of them are very beautiful but some are just weird looking. Mostly it is a very fragrant and beautiful garden. Both of the girls really seemed to like looking at the roses for the first 30 minutes. The remaining hour and a half they took a “seen one rose you seen them all” attitude. Frankly I don’t blame them. The place is huge and there are thousands of rose bushes. After a while they all begin to look the same. AJ enjoyed running up and down the rows of roses. And there is an interesting water sculpture that had 2 bridges that kids can walk across, that he liked.

As a side note if anyone wants to hear a funny story, be sure to ask Missy about the Saturday morning several years ago on our last trip to Portland when we were at the Rose Test Garden and noticed everyone setting up for a festival that started that afternoon. There were signs advertising the Purple Peacock festival and parade. As the festival participants began arriving, it was obvious that this festival had nothing to do with birds. That was also part of the year that we now refer to as the “queer year” because we ended up in New York and Key West during similar festivals (completely by coincidence I might add).

We thought about packing in a lunch and eating at one of the benches at the Garden (several families were doing that while we were there), but we had read about a cheap Mexican place in downtown Portland that had an enclosed play area for kids so we went there instead. The food was okay but the kids loved playing in the “kid area” and Missy and I had a pretty quiet lunch as a result.

We headed back down the Columbia Gorge for our campground after lunch and I decided that I wanted to try to find the mountain overlook that Missy and I went up 10-years ago when we were last in Oregon. We didn’t remember exactly what it was called, but we were pretty sure it was a picnic spot at the top of Larch Mountain.

Larch Mountain is small compared to Mt. Hood or Mt. St. Helens, but it is still 4300’ and it took a while to drive up to the picnic area. As soon as we got in the parking lot we knew that we were in the right place. It is a ½ mile hike from the parking lot to the overlook, but it is a very steep hike with the last tenth of a mile being about 120 steps straight to the top. And it is COLD at that elevation. We had been in jeans and t-shirts, (standard Oregon attire for June) but even wearing our jackets it was cold up there.

The neat part is that from the overlook you can see Mt Hood, Mt. St Helens, Mt. Jefferson, Mt Rainer and Mt. Adams. Cloud cover kept us from seeing Adams or Rainer, but we could see the other 3 well. It is neat to stand up there and look around.


The drive back down the mountain is a windy one. And it had gotten late and I was trying to hurry. Sarah can get a little car sick from time to time and I was not thinking about her being in the back of the truck. Well…you guessed it, just as we got off the mountain and with no warning; she puked all over herself and her booster seat. We stopped and Missy cleaned her up while I cleaned Sarah's seat (yuck!).

So once we got back to the camper, everyone got a bath. Since we had blown off naps and Missy and I needed to pack-up for the move the next day over to the coast, we had pizza (we buy the “ready to bake” crusts and top them with sauce, cheese and pepperoni ourselves. A frozen pizza would never fit in the camper’s freezer) for dinner and then the kids went to bed early