Blogs from Portland, Oregon, United States, North America - page 32

Ruth and Judy drove this morning from Olympia, where we had stayed since Sunday night with Ruth's warm and generous cousin Margie Taylor and family, to Aurora airport to link up with the other pilots. We dropped off Geoff Hornseth at the airport shuttle for Seattle -- he had been traveling with the group since May 4th -- has to get home and can't wait for the uncertain arrival of C2C. Irregular low ragged rolls of maritime scud slurp up the hilltops on the left as we drive south. Bright yellow broom -- flowers -- pop out low along the road edge amidst the lush green forest and ground cover. For a while the air smelled of evergreen Sap, incredibly fresh in the cool humidity. Now we're smelling downwind aromas of pulp and paper. Scud is ... read more

Sunday, we breakfasted at the hotel and began our trip's two-week anniversary with the news that Alex had decided to return home commercial from Seattle, and Gashaw had decided not to come west after all. Extensive route planning followed, as whatever plans we THOUGHT we'd laid for our final northbound leg had been totally scrapped by this point. After much peering at the sectional charts, we plotted a northbound route to Portland through some significant mountain passes in the Trinity Mountains of northern California. The weather, fortunately, wasn't a factor this far inland --unlike the coast, which remained socked in. ... read more

Ginger looked around nervously. She didn't like this darkness constantly, so she continued chirping in protest. It would nothing for his plight quite yet, as he and his 4 sisters sharing the little depressing cardboard box in the basement. These last two weeks had been trying, with their box being moved to new parts of the house on an almost daily basis. Such changes are quite hard to deal with when all you want to is food and water and a bright place..... Being a chicken, that is a chick, Ginger spent her day running around her box doing various things to bide time. Nibbling on the feed left by their curious owner was one of her favorite pastimes, though sometimes things got out of hand and Kibi, the largest sister, began pecking at her she ... read more

Though Newport and Charleston (previous blog) are two nearby ports on Oregon's central coast, they are quite different. Charleston is an earthy fishing town, but there was great fear that the salmon fishery was to be closed this year. We got the impression that quite a few people were unemployed. One of our neighbors was a veteran of the Kuwait and the Iraq wars and was living full time in his trailer (an older Airstream). He sounded like it wasn’t the post-service experience that he had planned for. In both towns, we were camping at RV facilities adjacent to the town marinas. Newport was very upscale in comparison to Charleston. But Newport's fishing fleet was large, and we were aware of quite a few worried fishermen there as well. In Newport Bay there is a large ... read more

Wow, so this weekend I moved all of my stuff from storage in Seattle to storage in Portland. I'm getting good at loading my stuff from one box, into another box/trailer moving it and then putting it back in a 3rd box. I have to say that loading the trailer this time was a lot less work than the last time. I guess that is the practice of the jigsaw puzzle. Of course fitting it all into storage was another good game of tetris. It seems that the dimensions are always just a few inches shorter than I need. My 5x5 unit, isn't quite 5' in the one dimension that would be most useful. I'm sure there are lots of ways to skin a cat and I'm finding lots of them as I try and repack ... read more