Our house is just below the Squak, Tiger, and Cougar mountains. A couple of hours to the south of us is one of the largest volcanos in North America - Mount Ranier. We also live east of Lake Washington, which separates the cities of Seattle to the West and Bellevue which is closer to us. Lake Washington is quite large, and on the west bank there is a fairly large peninsula that sticks out into the lake. This area is Seward Park.

 

Seaward park has miles of trails, a paved trail around its perimeter and several beaches and boat launch points. The weather was a bit overcast when we arrived for our hike, but we stayed dry, if not a bit cool. Fall is coming!

 

Seward also has a fish hatchery, a swimming area, an activity center and a wildlife center. We hiked all day and still didn't get to it all. We'll definitely have to come back, this time with a canoe so we can feed the geese and ducks out in the water. 

With our last weekend before Christina starts school for the year, we piled into the Marjorie-Mobile and headed south a few hours to Portland, Oregon. The weather was supposed to be very bad this weekend, according to the weatherman, but we've found two axioms for weather forcasting here in the Pacific Northwest:

 

1.  If you wake up and it's cloudy, it will probably rain that day. If it is sunny when you wake up, it will probably rain that day as well.

2.  If the weatherman says it will rain/snow/be sunny, it won't. At least not where you're at.

 

So we took the chance and it was absoultely gorgeous all weekend. First we took the "scenic trail" to Mount Hood, which is the largest mountain there in Oregon. There are some fantastic vistas from the twists and turns on the mountain roads, most of them due to a few visionary engineers who built little stops along the way. In many parts of the road an Italian wall separates you from the face of the mountain. 

 

If Minnesota is the "land of a thousand lakes" then Oregon must be the "land of a thousand waterfalls". There are so many hikes that lead you to stunning waterfalls and the streams and rivers they fall into. We had a great time hiking those smaller falls, and then we came to the Multnomah falls. Wow. There's a two-mile hike that you can follow up a thousand feet or so, and when you're up there you can see all the way back to Portland. It's a strenuous hike, but the view is worth it.

 

Portland has to be one of the cleanest cities I've ever been in, anywhere. Where we stayed near the university the streets, buildings, and just everything was spotless. It's got so much architectural interest, with old buildings everywhere. Of course, they don't have as many earthquakes as we do so things last a little longer! We saw a ton of things in Portland, but we'll have to go back to see everything. We kind of got sidetracked at Powell's Bookstore, which is billed as a "city of books". It is. Christina went off one way, I went another, and Marjorie explored another area. We had to keep in touch via cellphone it was so big. And that's only the first building - there are four others in the city that are part of it.

 

It's definitely a do-over.