Columbia River Gorge

On Tuesday, we travelled through the wheatfields on the plains of Idaho and east Washington until we hit the orchards and vineyards of south, central Washington near the Columbia River Gorge. The east side of the gorge has been marred by dams and railroad yards but the area we are in now near Hood River is lovely.
There are waterfalls everywhere you look and Mt. Hood is in the background!

We took a loop tour around Mt. Hood yesterday (Wednesday.)  Stopped and hiked along Cold Spring Creek to Tamanawas Falls - a beautiful way to start our day. We ate lunch at Timberline Lodge - a ski lodge at Mt. Hood. It is a National Historic Landmark - built in the 1930's as a WPA project. Believe it or not, they are still skiing on some areas of the mountain - in August! Gorgeous old building of rock and logs. We stopped and saw other falls on our way home - most of them close to the road - our legs were tired from our morning 4 mile hike!




We hiked the Eagle Creek Trail today - thinking it was only about 3 miles total - but we ended up with a longer hike than yesterday - about 6 miles! Our legs are soar tonight! But it was so nice - two falls on this one - Metlako Falls and Punch Bowl Falls. Today we had lunch at a cafe on the River and then toured the Bonneville Dam. We joined a ranger led tour that was really interesting and even got to see some salmon coming up the fish ladders!





There is an osprey nest, high in a dead tree, across the road from our campsite and we have enjoyed watching them. It was such a nice temperature that we decided to eat outside tonight. Roger took a bite of meat and a bee stung his lower lip! I had to pull the stinger out with tweezers! I gave him some Benadryl and ice but it is puffed up big! How freaky!

We got up at 3:30am so we could SKYPE with the girls before they went to bed. Samantha wanted to tell us all about school and her new teacher - then she took the computer to her room to show us how they redecorated it. It's real cute and she loves her new "art station" with all her arts and crafts supplies. Emily was crying in the background because she couldn't talk until she ate all her dinner! Samantha said "she's being Miss Cranky Pants!" They are excited to go to Bali on "holiday" next week. Emily says they are going to "ride on an elephant!"

Megan and Carlos just got back from a fun week-end in LasVegas with David and Monica. Good shows and good food but not especially lucky at gambling!