Oregon Travel Blogs | Travelogues | Travel Journals

We ended the day in Medford, Oregon.  Dinner at Hometown Buffet, which was only about a half mile from our motel.  Then time to write some blog and upload a few pictures.  Hopefully we will be able to do it again everyday.    And tonight’s room is way at the back and the street in front is not a busy one, so it will be much quieter.   Waterfalls = 2, bridges = 2, tunnels = 2  

Our first day was basically car travel.  Visalia is pretty near the center of the state here in California, near the same distance from Los Angeles and San Francisco.  And only five miles away is old standby Highway 99 which is the old north-south highway through the San Joaquin valley.  Interstate 5 is about an hour west at this point so it’s much easier and a shorter router for us to just take 99 north through this portion of the valley.  We’ll pick up Interstate 5 u...

Boring, Oregon, I have heard of it many times, I have even been through it  twice and didn’t even know it!  Supposedly Boring has a population of 12,800, but after hanging out there, I may have to doubt those figures a little…okay…a lot!  I didn’t see many houses or apartments and we went down the back roads to get a true feel, we left nothing unturned.  But I am getting ahead of myself.   My friend Angie and I were talking about how Oregon is a strange plac...

Traveling west between Redmond and Sisters I took a couple of shots of some of the mountains of the Cascade range.

We decided to drive back to Portland on the Oregon side of the Columbia River, crossing at Astoria.  The causeway and bridge over the Columbia is is a engineering marvel -- very long and dramatic.  It's a four mile long crossing that was completed in 1966.  We were told that the seagulls like to cruise along beside your car and try to get something to eat.  I had taken a piece of an English muffin from my breakfast to try my luck, but alas, no gulls took the bait.  th...

These pictures are actually taken across the highway looking at Sparks Lake. Sparks Lake is about 25 miles west of Bend. We played around and hiked a bit. Got freaked out by some growling noises in the woods and the giant bees and had to evacuate!! Sparks Lake is an awesome place though to play in the water and/or camp. Last time I camped out there our camp groung was about a 45 minute canoe ride from the loading dock. Every view there is simply breathtaking.

 Early in the morning  I hit the road in my  Toyota Prius and headed  for the southwestern Oregon town of  Grants Pass, where I spent that first afternoon and night.    The first thing you notice about the downtown area of  Grants Pass are the bizarrely painted bears on almost every street corner. After walking around a bit and taking some photos I had a  buffet style meal at one of the many Chinese restaurants there.  Spent the night at a Mot...

I never realized how sparsely populated Eastern Oregon is.  I stopped at a wayside for a map and saw this Oregon Trail monument.  There was an old computer game I used to play as a kid and I loved it.  You pretend you're a pioneer on the Oregon Trail (wagon train).  So that brought back old memories.  I was headed to Newberry Volcanic Monument, and as I drove I passed another butte - Malheur Butte.  This is an old volcanic plug sticking up in the middle of n...

 (the title of this journal review comes from one of my favourite songs - Reba Mcentire - Fancy, me and Marty always play it really loud and sing along when im in Portland and we played it on the way to the airport to San Diego) I arrived in Portland back from Puerto Vallarta the evening before around midnight, i managed to get a good sleep and my friend's mum dropped me off back at PDX around 2ish, we'd stopped for lunch at a Chinese restaurant before we got to the airport, my stomach w...

This summer for Independence Day, I decided to leave the crappy sauna that is NYC and head out west to visit my family and friends in Portland, Oregon to escape the torture that is known as an East Coast summer.  I usually go back a few times a year and summer is a very good time.   West Coast summers are so different than its East Coast counterpart.  The West Coast has a dry heat during the day and during the night it cools off leaving you with a wisp of light crisp breeze.&...

Visiting Portland is always relaxing in comparison to NYC, but I was in need of even more nature than Portland was offering me.  My best friend Angie suggested a visit to Seaside, Oregon.  Ah, yes!  Seaside!   We decided my father also needed to escape the confines of Portland and Court TV and asked if he wanted to come along.  Sure, he did.  He has the pioneering spirit as well!  So we grabbed our jackets and my iPod with the road trip mix and headed towa...

Marty, George and Emmy decided to take me to Mount Hood for the day.  Mount Hood is a stratovolcano in the Cascade Volcanic Arc in Northern Oregon. It is located 50miles southeast of Portland. We set out from Vancouver about 10 in the morning, reaching Mount Hood around 11.30 as we took a scenic route driving down desolate Oregon roads. One of my happiest memories of the day was listening to the funniest radio station. Blue Swede - Hooked on a Feeling was playing and we turned it up real...

To celebrate much good news, we spent last weekend in Oregon. We started by catching the train Friday night from Seattle to Portland, with a long delay due to a fallen tree on the tracks. We pulled into the city at Union Station, which was opened on Valetine's Day 1896, and is the oldest continually operating train station in the US, still with the original hand-wound clocks. Portland was incorporated in 1851, after being founded by Lovejoy and Pettygrove. They actually flipped a ...

I always hate leaving my sister it's strange because when we live close to each other we rarely see on another and when we live together we want to kill each other but when she moves away I hate it. Strange how that works.

I drove to Oregon from the east coast of the USA almost five years ago to take a look around, and I’ve been here ever since. I make frequent trips to the little city of Bend, Oregon, on the banks of the Deschutes River. Bend is about 35 miles away from the little Central Oregon town where I’m currently living. After finally getting a break in the rainy weather I was able to give my digital camera a good workout in Drake Park. The pictures of Mt. Hood and other mountains of the Cascade...