Blogs

SciencePub tongiht
  All the way across downtown
    Be early. Sold out!

Winter in Portland
  Cold, rain, day after day, but
    Not today. Sunshine

On hold phone music
  Waiting for Ikea help
    I am sorry sir

Last weekend Adriane and I drove over to Astoria to spend the weekend in a yurt at Ft. Stevens State Park. Saturday morning we woke bright and early, loaded up Betsy with the camping gear and headed, well, we headed north. We decided to take the I-5 route into Washington and then to cut over to the coast along the Columbia River gorge. It was a typical Pacific Northwest winter's day; rainy and cool. The Columbia gorge is quite beautiful, but definitely bears the signs of clear cutting. After a little more than an hour of driving we stopped for a little lunch at the Berry Patch restaurant, a little east of Westport, Oregon. There we got quite the lesson on the history of everyone's favorite berry, the Marionberry, as well as a decent patty melt and fries.

A little update from the Left Coast. Okay, sure, people walk a lot here. And why wouldn't they? The neighborhoods are beautiful and lush with roses aplenty to stop and smell if you are into that sort of thing. However, there are a few things that you should know about Portland before venturing out into the streets.

So, we left Paonia at around 11 am on Tuesday. We were eager to get on the road, but driving across the Utah desert in the middle of the day in the middle of August was, well, just plain dumb. Betsy, my '93 GMC pickup with 220,000+ miles on her, doesn't have a/c and isn't a crew cab, so the kitties had to ride in the back. Betsy was fully loaded with just enough room for the kitty carriers in the back of the bad. There is a topper, so it wasn't as if they were hanging out in the wind, but they were cooking back there.