Portland to Yellowstone
July 31 – August 9, 2016
It was another night of not-great sleep, but we were better off for it. And I’m pretty glad we did. We got to drive through the Umpqua National Forest in the day time. And it was pretty.
JA taking more pictures through the windshield. That large rock ahead has a lot of graffiti on it. People suck.
I swear he did this just to mess with me.
There aren’t a lot of pictures for the next week. We arrived in Portland in time to meet up with some of JA’s friends, who we will be spending the next week with, and headed off almost immediately to a beer festival. Apparently these happen very frequently in Portland. I spent $20 on beer tokens and…it was worth every penny. And it was a lot of beer. One token got you a 4oz pour/taste and 4 tokens got you a full 16oz pour. There were so many beers here I never got a full pour. Just tried all the ones that I could and we probably got in about 60% of what was available there between the four of us.
The next few days were spent exploring Portland and Beaverton, helping JA’s friends around the place, hanging out with their awesome one-year-old, visiting a friend of my at Oregon State University (they have a farmer’s market right on campus!) and taking a break from the roadtrip. We visited a couple breweries (Cascade with their sour beers…favorite brewery, I think) and the Rose Garden, as well as numerous coffee shops and whatever other errands we had to do. We also spent some time making sure we had a place for Yellowstone NP – normally we’d be too late to make reservations for the year, but we lucked out. Someone cancelled at a central campground five minutes before my call connected and we got their spot.
Only minutes in Portland and we’re at a Beer Festival! Yay!
OSU’s Farmer’s Market. Right on campus.
The gondola ride down from OSU to downtown.
Possibly my favorite brewery ever. Sours. A whole menu of sours. It was beautiful. And tasty.
Here’s some photos of the rose garden – I took far too many, but am only sharing a few. I love roses. Any size, any type – one of my Grandmas had so many rose bushes around her house when I was growing up. I used to help her weed and loved being surrounded by those. This was a wonderful place to visit; I never knew there were so many types of roses.
Ft. Hood in the background.
These aren’t roses. I think they’re called fuschia plants, but I can’t remember.
JA’s hand is smaller than this ridiculous leaf.
So many gorgeous roses! I want them all!
Around this time, JA got sick for a couple days and spent a lot of time sleeping. I spent some time getting me-time in because I didn’t have a lot of that on this trip. Not to mention I didn’t want to get sick either.
We took time to restock our coolers and whatever other supplies we needed for the trip before having one last night with our wonderful hosts. I’ll never be able to thank them enough for giving us a place to crash and being so awesome about us being there a week. Never underestimate how luxurious just having a bed and a shower for the night can be.
Time to hit the road again though. We’ve got some travel time through Montana. I need to spend more time there too.
Getting close to Yellowstone. I love that some rancher has property here (or maybe leases it, I’m not sure how it works here). It’d be a gorgeous place to ride a horse and push cows on. We entered through West Yellowstone – a city that looks like it specifically grew around tourism for the park.
Again. It’s funny and sad that people have to be warned.
Night’s coming on fast and we’re entering while everyone’s leaving. Glad I’m not in that line.
I’m super happy to be here. Yellowstone has always been high on the list. We had to pull over for JA to fix some eye irritation so I snapped a picture of the river. We arrived somewhat late to our campground, but they had everything ready for us. The night was pretty damn cold – dropped down to about 30 or less. We weren’t exactly prepared for that – we didn’t think it’d get that cold at all, but it makes sense given how far north and how high in elevation we were (around 9000ft). Thankfully I had insisted on bringing four sleeping bags total and we both used two to keep warm at night.