Champoeg State Park and Fun in Portland

A few months ago, I made a reservation for four days at Champoeg (pronounced shampoo-ey) State Park because of its proximity to my friend Alice.

On Google maps, it looked about 3-4 miles from Alice's condo in Wilsonville, but in actuality, it was 10 miles. But my sweet friend drove over every day to pick my up so we could do fun things together, and I could meet all of her friends.

On rainy Monday, we went downtown to stroll around the shops, and most importantly, to get some famous Voodoo doughnuts. Their reputation precedes them, and they definitely live up to the hype. The line is always out the door and down the street. I got six, and ate every one of them!
(Settle down, it was over the course of three days.)

We also stopped into Powell's Book Store, which is about a square city block of new and used books. I found a good quality used copy of something I had been looking for.

On Tuesday, the clouds began to clear, and we drove to Silverton and then on to Silver Falls State Park, and took the trail down to the falls. Beautiful falls, and the trail circles around behind them. Yes, we saw the backside of water!

We made an online reservation that evening to do a Segway tour on Wednesday. It was a beautiful, warm, sunny day... perfect for rolling around on two wheels. Within the first 20 minutes, we crossed two bridges and took a spiral ramp down off one of them! It was quite the adventure!  But the tour was great; we learned a lot about the city, and had a really fun time on the Segways.

On Thursday, my last day, we drove up to Multnomah Falls. I have seen many pictures of them, but have never been there. They were spectacular, but with hundreds of people jockeying for space on the trails and view points, it was very difficult to truly enjoy them. We visited two others that were close, and though the waterfalls are not quite as magnificent, I think we enjoyed them more because there were very few people around. We stopped by her daughter Alicia's on our way home to say hi to her family.

That evening, we enjoyed happy hour at the golf course country club where Alice lives (and plays golf) and had our final chat before saying our goodbyes for now.

We had hoped Glenda would be able to join us, but a family member needed her at home, so our GAD About was just an AD About this year. Hopefully next summer, we can get our "G" back with us.

I left Portland on Friday morning with Mossyrock, WA on my GPS. I was looking forward to spending the weekend with long-time friends, the Bowes

Camping by the Deschutes River

I studied my AllStays app, looking for a campground near Burns, Oregon. My main objective was altitude... I wanted to be at least 4000-4500 ft, because I was far enough inland, I knew it could be warm.

I remembered RVSue had traveled through Oregon last year, and decided to take a look at her blog. Sure enough, I found a post about a lovely campground just north of Burns in the Mulheur Forest called Idlewild, so I headed there. There were plenty of empty spaces, but no cell phone signal. I picked a spot and set up for one night.

The next day I moved on toward Bend and made my way southwest into the Willamette Forest, to Big River Campground. I had been keeping an eye on my cell phone all the way and was excited to see a good signal in the campground. I knew I could settle in for three days and enjoy some walks along the Deschutes River, Kindle reads and lots of Netflix. And that's just what I did.

The first couple of evenings, I had some noisy neighbors, but fortunately they quieted down before 10:00 campground curfew.

On Sunday morning, I headed north to Champoeg (pronounced shampoo-ey) State Park, where I had a reservation for five days. I had plans to spend the week visiting and sight seeing with Alice.