Friday, April 16, 2010

Portland Day Two

Today we took to a tour through the Pacific Northwest forest to Mt. Hood. It was beautiful, just beautiful. BUT our tour guide bored us to tears all day. He talked.all.the.time. Someone would ask a question, he would briefly answer it, then go right back to his speech. Highlights of our tour were:

Three AWESOME waterfalls! The area has about 75, and I would love to see them all! Here's a link to one of them.

Visiting a fish hatchery and a dam, and watching the salmon trying to swim--couldn't tell you if they were swimming upstream or downstream, but they were HUGE. We learned all about them--I've never heard someone talk about salmon more in my life.

Visited this adorable little town, Hood River, for lunch. I had a fantastic toasted roast beef sandwich on a bagel, if you must know. I know you were wondering.

Finally, we ended up at Mount Hood. We visited Timberline Lodge, which is halfway up Mt. Hood, and is where The Shining was filmed. (Red rum Red rum Red rum) The clouds parted, and we got beautiful views of the peak of Mt. Hood.

I was proud of the kids--they were soooooooooo bored by our tour guide, but they tolerated him so well. Want to know how bad it was? At one point he played folk music by Woody Guthrie, about building dams in the 30's and 40's. Then at the end, he played a recording of himself reading from the Lewis and Clark journals from 1805 when they were exploring the area. Don't get me wrong--he was very nice and very knowledgeable, but we weren't as interested as he was!

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