We made a trip to Oregon for a wedding over Labor Day 2011.
Crater Lake from the air
As soon as we landed in Portland we rented a car and drove northeast to the southwest corner of the state of Washington to visit
Cape Disappointment State Park. I love to visit lighthouses so we were able to see two of them in this state park.
North Head Lighthouse (built in 1896):
Very interesting tile inside the lighthouse
Just a few miles south, where the Columbia River meets the Pacific Ocean, is
Cape Disappointment Lighthouse (built in 1856). This is an area notorious for shipwrecks because of high winds and the
Columbia River Bar which is a 3 mile wide/9 mile long sandbar in the ocean that ships must cross to enter the river. There are 234 identified ships that stranded, sunk, or burned between 1725 and 1961 here.
Just across the river back in Oregon we ate lunch in Astoria.
Just west of Astoria in
Fort Stevens State Park lies the ruins of the shipwreck
Peter Iredale.
The Peter Iredale ran aground in 1906 when trying to enter the Columbia River from the Pacific Ocean. I am totally fascinated with shipwrecks so this was very exciting sight!
The next day we visited the
Evergreen Aviation Museum in McMinville, Oregon. The main attraction of the museum is the Spruce Goose, built by Howard Hughes in the 1940's. The Spruce Goose is the largest airplane ever to be built and flew only one time, for one mile at an altitude of 70 feet.
The plane is so large there was no way to get a great photo showing its size.
Inside the Spruce Goose
Portland seems to have a concentration of antique hardware stores which are useful if you are remodeling an old house but want to stay true to the time period (like us).
Rejuvenation was one of our great finds of this trip and we have bought several things for our house from this store. Some other great antique and reproduction hardware stores are
House of Antique Hardware and
School House Electric.
The highlight of our trip was visiting the largest independent new and used bookstore in America,
Powell's Books. I have never seen such a collection of new and used books. The store in downtown Portland (there are 5 locations in the city) covers an entire city block! We spent several hours in the store. What I loved most was that the used books were mixed in with the new books so when I went to the travel section I found books that I never would have known to look for otherwise. We even found an obscure book (written in Italian) about an abbey that we visited and loved in Italy! We haven't bought a book from another bookstore in the year since we've discovered Powell's!
After spending a few days in Portland we drove to the center of the state to visit the town of Bend, taking the long way through the Columbia River Gorge
The next day we drove to
Newberry National Volcanic Monument located just south of Bend so that I could get another stamp on my
National Parks Passport!
Here is a close up photo of a piece of obsidian (volcanic glass) from an eruption 1300 years ago
The obsidian flows from afar
There are two lakes inside the crater, Paulina Lake and East Lake
Finally, here we are with the bride and groom!
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