7:00 am
We finally get in touch with my side of the family to find out what their plans are before they leave town on their trip. They’ve scheduled breakfast at 8:00. Gotta hurry to get showered and ready to go!
8:00 am
Arrive at the restaurant just in time. They’re still arranging the table for 12 that we are going to need to seat all of us. I’ve just had a couple of sleepless nights – taking decongestants for my cold keeps me awake at night, and they haven’t made it out of my system yet. Karen offers me a dose of her Airborne – 1500% of my daily recommended Vitamin C in a single dose. The directions indicate that one should take this every 3 hours until the symptoms of an impending cold disappear. This first dose helps a lot – I’m suddenly actually hungry for my scrambled eggs.
9:30 am
Breakfast over, we’ve picked up a remaining few items at Mom and Dad’s house before they leave. Head home and pack for the trip.
12:00 pm
Finally on the way. We see a pair of deer – looks like possible mother and a nearly grown child – bounding away from the freeway just on the north side of town. I’m asleep (finally!) by the time we get past Coburg.
Sometime in the afternoon I drift awake, conscious of the music playing on the stereo from the iPod (Guns N Roses). We’re approaching Corvallis. I drift off again by the Weyerhauser paper mill.
Sometime later in the afternoon I drift awake again – we’re at Wilsonville, where we’d decided to stop for a late lunch. We discuss Sushi – I’m not wild about the idea of sushi due to my cold, so we settle for fast food at Arby’s and I suck down another dose of Airborne. After leaving, I have to prop my eyes open to help navigate – our first stop today is someplace neither of us have been to before.
3:00 pm
The Grotto. Properly, The National Sanctuary of Our Sorrowful Mother. A Catholic sanctuary dedicated to the
Madonna. It was recommended by some colleagues of mine, neither of whom are Catholic either, but they say it’s a beautiful place to stop on the way through Portland. And they’re quite right. The gardens are beautiful, the artwork is impressive – even Kyrie was impressed with the work that went into some of the statues and declared that there is something sacred about the devotion of that much effort to art. The view from the top of the cliff is lovely – we arrived on a clear day and could see Portland spread out below us, bits of the river, and Mt. St. Helens in the distance. There were a few other visitors, and it was difficult at any given time to tell who was there for the art and who was honestly there for prayer, so I came away with few photos for fear of disturbing anyone.
4:20 pm
We come away from the Grotto impressed with the art, but no more inclined to convert to Catholicism. It’s time to head back to the freeway and drive the hour remaining to our stop for the evening: Hood River.
5:30 pm
We check into our hotel – the Vagabond Lodge – just off of the freeway in Hood River. We look briefly at the provided “What to do during your stay in Hood River” flyer in the room and walked to the Mongolian Grill (and defunct sushi bar) next door for dinner.
Monday, September 11 – Hood River and the Gorge
6:00 am
I’m still something of a morning person, so am awake with the sun for the first day of our vacation. We roll out, already showered and ready for the day, and head for a local viewpoint to catch early morning light on 
Mt. Hood. We get a fair number of pictures each and leave when the breeze gets too chilly for two people who haven’t eaten yet. On the way back to the hotel, we stop at a bagel shop and pick up some sandwiches and hot drinks for breakfast.
We’ve got a lovely view of the Columbia from our room, but we don’t take much time Monday morning to appreciate it. Instead, after finishing our bagels, we drive down to the Visitor Center to check a map and get our bearings. With both of us taking doses of Airborne every three hours as instructed, we’re running a little bit low. The place we’re headed is across the river and about 30 miles west. We hit the bridge and pick up Route 14 on the other side of the river. Kyrie starts getting a bit sleepy after a while, and I kick myself for forgetting that the cold medicine I’d offered him earlier contains an anti-histamine. We swap off for about 5 miles into Stevenson, where we stop for more vitamins and cold drinks. From there, it’s only about 15 miles to our destination: Franz Lake Wildlife Refuge.
It’s a roadside pull-out off of the highway, no hiking trail. Swans and geese frequent this wetland area, and since it shares a name with my new husband, we have to visit. We discuss the possibility that the lake was named after the same anthropologist as we think he was, take some pictures, and leave.
Back on the Oregon side of the river, I find an entry in one of the visitors’ guides about places where eagles are sometimes seen during the fall. We try one out, but find it to be hot, dry, and nearly empty. About the only sign of life we find is a praying mantis clinging to a stub of grass.
At this point, it’s getting close to lunchtime. We drive back to Hood River, thinking about hitting the yummy sounding sushi bar listed in the directory. When we get there, though, the sushi bar is locked up tighter than a clam – the sign announces that they close on Mondays. We drive around town for a few minutes longer before settling at the brewpub that Lisa recommended, a place called Horsefeathers. The food is excellent, although the music is a bit loud for the few diners present. After lunch, we check a couple of shops in town, and head back to the hotel to rest a bit and decide what to do next.
Resting a bit turns into napping for most of the afternoon, and it’s pushing sunset by the time we leave. We frantically drive back to the viewpoint we visited earlier, having decided previously that sunset would be fantastic from there, and in fact, the colors were beautiful. We try to make it down to the waterfront, as well, but the light doesn’t hold out and it’s hard to see anything well enough to photograph it. On our way back to
the hotel, we searched for a place to eat, finally getting a table at Brian’s Pourhouse, in downtown Hood River, where the soup of the day was (I kid not) Chantarelle and Grilled Pear. After dinner, we stopped at the store on the edge of town to pick up some extra books and call it a night.
Tuesday, September 12 – Travelling to the Coast
10:00 am
We get a late start on Tuesday as we both slept in a bit, and then took some time getting ready to go. By 10 am we were out of the hotel and looking for breakfast. We found it at Egg Harbor, on the west side of Hood River.
We both ordered yummy egg dishes and finally got back
on the highway headed west.
We hit Portland around lunch hour, but avoided any serious traffic problems. Managed to locate Highway 30 with little problem, and headed off towards the coast. A sign along the highway in Scappoose or Warren gave us a good chuckle. It said: “God wants spiritual fruit, not religious nuts.” Yeah, the rest of us would appreciate fewer religious nuts, too.
Along the way, we stopped for a short side trip to Twilight Eagle Sanctuary, where we looked for the bald eagles that live in that area. We finally saw an eagle-like shape high in the sky above us, but unfortunately, that was the extent of our eagle viewing.
Just past Astoria, we stopped at Fort Clatsop as Kyrie had never seen the old fort. Fort Clatsop is the fort originally built by the Lewis and Clark expedition as they wintered on the Oregon Coast before turning around and heading home with their notes and maps. The fort replica burned down last year – a stray spark escaped from one of the exhibitions they were giving and lit off the sawdust floor of one of the rooms. They are still in the process of rebuilding the replica, and do not have all of the rooms completed yet. Still, we got to see the outside, and get a feel for how small the fort was – 33 people in roughly 8 rooms and no real dining area to speak of. Kyrie’s comment was “It’s puny.”
It was probably 5 pm by the time we pulled into our hotel in Rockaway Beach. I asked the lady at the desk 
where good places in the area for photos would be, and it turned out that she’s a digital photographer, too, so we traded some information, and we left with a couple of good places to head. Got everything into what turned out to be the nicest room we stayed in during the whole trip, and drove down to Washington Street to walk down to the beach from there. We stayed on the beach until sunset, waiting for the sun to go down behind some nice sea stacks. After the sun went down, we walked back to the car – it now being 7:40 pm – and attempted to find a place for dinner.
Unfortunately for us, Rockaway Beach, while a coastal resort town like any that I’m used to, is evidently used to a different standard than I employ for distance. From home, I might drive to Coburg (5 minutes north) or Cottage Grove (10 minutes south) for special occasions or to find something otherwise not available. In Rockaway Beach, however, it appears to be normal to travel the 20 miles north or the 15 miles south to the nearest city if one wishes to eat after 6 pm. Even the grocery store closed up as we were driving to it after giving up on finding an open restaurant within 15 miles. The only eatery in town which remained open was the smoke-filled bar on one end of the highway. In all fairness, the food was tolerable – we ordered our dinner to go and ate at the nice little table in our room. And after dinner, we stood on the deck for some time just watching the stars. We had been considering canceling our reservation for the next night and staying here another day, but after the difficulty finding food, decided to go forward with our trip south.
8:00 am
After getting such a late start on Tuesday, we were up early on Wednesday and checked out of the hotel at 8:00 am. Neither of us were looking forward to the long drive – the only reason we had opted to visit Coos Bay
on this trip was because we had been there once before as a day trip, and agreed that we needed to go again when we could stay there over night to see everything. The road signs indicated that Newport was still 70 miles away, and I knew that Coos Bay was probably at least 70 miles past that. Just before we reached Tillamook, we stopped along the bay to enjoy the view, and found a group of pelicans to watch for a few minutes.
Sadly, we determined that stopping in Tillamook for “squeaky cheese” would take too much time, so we stopped at a diner downtown long enough for breakfast, and moved on from there. We made it south through Newport without any further delays. Just past Yachats, we traded seats, and our next stop was at the viewpoint for Heceta Head Lighthouse, where I added a few pictures to the many I already have of the lighthouse. We stopped in Florence at a Subway for a quick lunch, and from there, we headed down into Coos Bay. In Coos Bay, we checked into the Red Lion on the highway.
I checked with the in-hotel restaurant to make sure they’d be open past sunset, just in case. Then, we drove through Charleston, spotting a place for dinner on the way, and drove out to Cape Arago and Shore Acres.
The last time we visited Shore Acres, we spotted a small bunny perched in one of the flower beds. Although we searched, called out, and even offered free portraits to any small animals who wanted to show themselves, we did not see any other than the few small brown birds scurrying from flower bed to flower bed. At times, the birds appeared to be sneaking – they seemed almost to be making sure that no-one was watching before they ran to the next bush.
For a flower garden in September, the gardens were remarkably lush.
It was a windy Wednesday, and getting late in the day, and had been a while since lunch. We admired the sea stacks and the cliffs of Cape Arago, but opted to leave before sunset to get some dinner. When we came out of The High Tide (“Award-winning Chowder”), the sky was streaked with a brilliant gold. Just lovely. We headed back into town, managing to get only slightly lost in a wrong turn that landed us right where we needed to be. And managed to catch The Fantastic Four on the TV in our room.
7:00 am
We happened to be awake early Thursday morning and stumbled down to Charleston harbor, which is open to
the public from 5 am until 8 pm. The sun had just come up, and the reflections off of the water were beautiful. We also saw a very attentive seagull, whom we 
dubbed “The Watchbird”, and a small group of jellyfish darting back and forth in the shadow of one of the boats.

We ate breakfast back at our hotel, and checked out. Given the amount of time we had already spent driving, neither of us wanted to drive the 20 miles south to Bandon, so instead, we headed north to the bridge into Coos Bay.
After getting some shots of the bridge, we turned back north into Reedsport, which we entered just about the time the high school kids were leaving campus for lunch. Seeing the Reedsport High School brings back memories for me – not of Reedsport, but of high school, as it always confused me a bit that Reedsport and Eugene were part of the same sports league.
The highway east from Reedsport was a new experience for both of us. I had never traveled Highway 38
before, and was a little worried about the road. However, right along the highway, a little ways out of Reedsport, is a viewing area for a herd of elk who live along the river. We stopped at the parking for the viewing area, but did not see any elk, so we moved on. And stopped short a few miles later, when we found the elk resting under a shady tree. Other travelers stopped with us as we all got out to take pictures of the alpha male’s 4-point rack.
The rest of the trip home was uneventful. The highway I was nervous about turned out to be smooth and little traveled – and was therefore mostly empty as we were driving. The next major point on the highway after leaving Reedsport is Drain, though, which probably explains a lot. Shortly after leaving Drain, the highway dumps back onto I-5, which was exactly where we wanted to be. We arrived home in mid-afternoon, unloaded the car, called everyone to let them know we had arrived, and left again to eat and buy groceries for dinner. Back to normal, daily life – except this time, it’s normal, daily life as a married couple instead of as almost-marrieds.
