Planes, Trains and Automobiles
Day 1 - Wednesday - Let us start with a little background on this trip. Originally, plan “A” was to drive around Lake Superior, head to the Canadian Rockies and back. We would have visited 3 US National Parks and visited nearly every large city in Canada that we haven’t already visited (other than Vancouver). BUT, with the wildfires in Canada in July, we decided to create a new plan “B”. Fly to Portland, Oregon, visit 7 National Parks in the Northwest and then take Amtrak home. As soon as we made the decision and booked our flights and train, all of the NW started burning. UGH! We watched the smoke maps for the past month and kept our fingers crossed. When we arrived today, the big question was, “will our visibility be hampered by wildfire smoke?” The answer? I can honestly say that we had ZERO issues with smoke. Of course, that is because it was raining so hard!
We woke up at 4:00 am so we could be at the airport by 5:00 (THANKS, Steve for picking us up and dropping us off). The 1.5 hr. flight to Minneapolis went well and the 3.5 hr. flight to Portland went even better as we had First Class! It was the first time we have flown since Feb. 2020 (COVID) and the changes we noticed all seemed to be improvements to the flying process.
Today we drove for about 3.5 hours from the airport to Newport OR (town on the central coast). The first hour was mostly city driving with LOTS of rain. Along our path, we saw the North American Aerospace Museum. While we didn’t have time to go in, we did have time to view some of the outdoor exhibits including a 747 on top of a building with a water slide coming out of it!
As we approached the coast, we drove through an area identified by Oregon as a “Forest Corridor”. It was fantastic. HUGE tress (though not Red Woods) and different types of moss covering all parts of the forest and surprising to us, lots of “fog” in the hills much like we see in the Smoky Mountains. As we arrived at the coast, the rain more or less stopped but the Gale warning on the ocean provided incredible waves and surges.
We saw the claimed World’s Shortest River (440 feet) and had many great views of the coastline. In one spot, a Bald Eagle flew about 15 feet directly over our heads! Sadly, missed the picture.
We visited the Devil’s Punch Bowl around high tide so we could see it fill up. At low tide, people walk around inside the bowl on the sand like a beach. It reminded us of the Hopewell Rocks we saw last year in New Brunswick.
We finished the drive with a stop at Yaquina Head Lighthouse. Again, just an incredible view up and down the coast.
Well, we have been up for about 19 hours so signing off.