Disclaimer: This post is one of those that ended up being written years after the experience was had. Sadly, there were no notes taken so whatever is shared here must be extracted from the images and what memories they may have lent us. Fortunately, there was an itinerary still in my directory of travel plans, so that will help with some details. As to why this wasn’t noted or blogged about, I was in the throes of writing/editing my book Stay In The Magic and felt that any other deep writing would derail that fragile effort.

My 17,704th day on earth, and while I can calculate the number of days between my birth and this particular day, I cannot offer any idea whatsoever about the number of sunrises I’ve seen. I do know I’ve not seen enough of them as each subsequent sunrise strikes me in such a way that I long for more, never satisfied that I’ve had my fair share. We were out of Portland before dawn as during the majority of our travels, we note prior to our departure when sunrise is so we have a good chance of seeing it. Here in late September, we have 12 hours of light from 6:00 a.m. until 6:00 p.m., and with such a short day, you can be assured we’ll try to grab every moment of it.

Our first stop today is in Sublimity at the Silver Falls State Park.

This is the largest state park in Oregon, and with 24 miles of trails, we’ll barely see the tiniest fraction of this place today.

What we will see is enchanting enough to satisfy our quotient of required natural beauty for the first part of a vacation day, but it will leave us longing for a return visit someday.

Years after taking this photo, I’m curious how the lighting turned out so well; sure, I had to pump the shadows up to brighten the darkest areas, but I don’t typically capture these dense areas so well.

Broken is beautiful, too. Just because the tree is gone doesn’t mean it’s not serving an important role in the forest.

Habitats are not only homes to the myriad plants and animals; they are fertile grounds for our imaginations.

I’d like to tell you that our next stop is the big reason for coming to Oregon, but there were multiple reasons, and all of them are equally important, including this random stop along the road. While it’s difficult to see in this low-res image, the view we were driving by elicited us to pull over due to the beauty of the landscape in the distance. This seems as good a reason as any for coming to Oregon.

This is the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum in McMinnville, Oregon. While we were in Southern California, in the Long Beach area specifically, we had many opportunities to see the purpose-built hangar that once housed the Spruce Goose, but by the time we reached the United States, the plane had already been dismantled as it never proved to be much of draw for travelers.

Well, it’s an interesting enough piece of history that Caroline and I were willing to make the detour to see this engineering marvel with our own eyes. While we waited for our tour of the Spruce Goose, we explored the rest of the museum. There are plenty of other aircraft here in the museum, including an old SR-71 Blackbird, but like so many other seriously large things in small spaces, it’s really difficult to photograph. We also stuck our heads into a B-17 Flying Fortress and were lucky enough to encounter a WWII Air Force Vet volunteering as a guide.

Then, it was time for the main attraction. So many times, I tried to focus on capturing some small part of the thing that may share a detail that could easily be overlooked. When I was allowed to briefly occupy the very seat Howard Hughes once sat in to fly this plane on its only journey, taking off and landing on water, I thought that the foot pedals likely go unseen and the lighting down there was so interesting that I had to take and share this image.

The scale of this airplane is incredible, but only a tiny fraction of the craft may be explored by us tourists.

Howard Hughes once sat here.

Go west is the popular refrain, and so we did, heading to Pacific City on the coast.

As you can see in the previous photo, we were driving into the fog, and by the time we reached the coast, we were in the thick of it.

Early fall, fog, cold water? That will never stop Caroline from feeling the Pacific Ocean’s water rushing over her feet.

We checked into the Anchorage Motel for the nice low price of only $55 for the night. Checking on the motel ten years later, I see that the cheapest room is now $119.

Caroline’s crazy accurate memory is at work again as she happens to remember that our dinner at the Riverhouse restaurant was the place where I first tried steamers and fell in love with them. Sadly enough, my upbringing was such that things like clams, mussels, and sardines were unliked without even ever having tried them. I was afraid of something I’d never seriously considered eating. Trying and enjoying them only let me know what a fool I was for not confronting my fear.