RV Adventure – Portland, OR – NNs On the Wind

May 20, 2019May 23, 2019 Kathleen Ennen

MAY 17, 2019

Thom’s cousin in Portland OR offered not only to host us for our stay here, but also to provide “guided” tours of various places in the region.

On Friday May 17 we dropped the RV off for its repairs and took the transit light rail into the city. Patrick met us at the plaza and we wandered around for a little bit of sightseeing and found lunch at an area of various food trucks. In the evening I joined Cheri during her paddle practice on a dragon boat in the Willamette River. It, again, was drizzly so photos are not so good. But it was great to get out on the water. I did paddle some of the time!!!

MAY 18, 2019

Saturday May 18 started with a 2 hour bike ride!!! We rode for some time out to the southeast, returning along the river. After the last long uphill slog we were rewarded with a stop at Starbucks!!! We passed some great areas of wetlands restoration along a well maintained bike path.

MAY 19, 2019

On Sunday we were treated to a ride to the east, to Mt Hood. We toured the Timberline Lodge, built during the 1930s. There is still a great deal of snow and we saw some skiers even though it was well above freezing and foggy and wet. The snow must have been very heavy. We drove down from 6000’ and went to the Town of Hood River. We had lunch at a nice brew pub set back but with some views of the river and the many kite surfers there. I was excited to see the menu had an Impossible Burger listed. It was as good as is now being reported by the media as a plant based meat substitute. It was really good!!!

On the way back to Portland we stopped and toured the Bonneville Dam. What a complex!! It is on the Columbia and is managed by the Army Corps of Engineers. We viewed one of the power houses with the generators and stopped by the windows along one of the several fish ladders and spotted what could have been salmon swimming upstream. Evidently the sea lions are a real problem and are shot with rubber pellets to encourage them to head back downstream. They capture a great number of the fish and rarely eat the whole fish. Maybe just a bite is taken but it’s enough to kill the fish. They are impacting the fish populations in a major way. On the Willamette River it’s such a problem that licenses have been granted to kill the sea lions due to their deleterious impact.

We also stopped to see the Multnomah Falls, the tallest in Oregon. It was rushing and wet!!! Some of the nearby trail that used to go up to the top of the falls is closed due to damage from erosion that closed it after the fire 2 years ago. It’s amazing to learn how much Oregon and California have to deal with frequent forest fires.

MAY 20, 2019

Patrick led us on another tour of the city on Monday. We took several modes of the transit system and wandered around Northwest, Pearl and downtown, again visiting the food trucks for lunch. We did, however, have a midmorning snack at Salt and Straw Ice Cream! Strange and yummy flavors – Arbequina Olive Oil, India Pale Ale (very hoppy!), and I had Sea Salt with Caramel Ribbons. We also stopped at Powell’s Bookstore and the Keen store, as it’s the headquarters store for Keen. I found a comfy pair of slip-ons that will make it easy to enter/exit the RV and not have shoes on while inside. We wandered into the Deschutes Brew Pub to see the detailed wood carvings and admire all the Deschutes brews on tap!

On Thursday we will leave via train to go to Bellinham WA. It’s a 6hr trip and hopefully will have some great scenery along the way. We’ll actually get off the train in Fairhaven where we’ll spend one night in a Airbnb that’s close to the train and ferry terminal. We’ll catch the 4pm ferry to Juneau AK Friday afternoon. We will be on the flagship, Columbia, at 418 feet, and a capacity of 499 passengers. Yikes!! It will take until 4:30AM Monday morning to get to Juneau and should give us great views of wildlife. It’s a big ferry and a lot of hikers/campers pitch their tent on the deck to save on the costs of the trip. We’ve opted for a cabin with shower/wc and linens and towels are provided. Should be fun!!!!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Columbia

We have traveled over the years and retired in 2017, when we started on a nine month long adventure departing in December 2017. In the past we’ve traveled to Sri Lanka, Africa (several times), Turkey, and made a number of trips to Europe, and St Lucia. Our 2015 trip to Turkey, took nearly 3 weeks to explore Istanbul, Cappadocia and the areas in proximity to Izmir.

This is a chronicle of our travels, past and present. We love to travel by trains, planes, ships, and cars – and love sailing whenever and wherever we can.

We retired from the US General Services Administration, the Federal Government’s landlord! Thom worked at planning and large scale program management of numerous projects and Kathleen, a registered professional civil engineer, was a project manager for many infrastructure and building renovation projects, including both design and construction aspects, in New England, Florida and the metro DC area. We lived in Washington DC for 12 years and upon retirement sold the house, putting a few things in a 5’x5’ storage unit and started traveling.

On return to the US in September 2018, after traveling to 21 countries, we bought a Class C RV – 2019 Thor Freedom Elite 24FE. We enjoyed our week long camping trip in New Zealand in a small converted van with few amenities, so this seemed liked a good way to tour the US. We hope to visit family along the way and as many US National Parks as possible.

UPDATE – the Covid pandemic made travel more difficult for us. We were abroad for several months when the pandemic started and returned to the US in July 2020. After several months in the RV to visit Utah and Albuquerque NM, we moved east, bought a house on the Northern Neck of Virginia, and sold the RV. For 2021 and 2022 we tended to our new house and cottage, gardens and various boats including a 18’ 1977 Marshall Sanderling catboat and a 25’ Steiger Craft Chesapeake fishing boat, and kayaks and a canoe. Hopefully travel will start again one day!!

May 2022