Anyway, after our coffee hit we headed into downtown Portland for a bit of exploring. We'd read that Portland was 'well ahead of its time' and full of bridges..the latter kind of had us excited!!
There were concrete bridges, steel bridges, a double story bridge, and multiple draw bridges, one which we were lucky enough to watch in action!! We found our way to the weekend market down by the water, which was busy with people eating, playing in the fountains and enjoying the beautiful weather! We make the most of the sun and chilled out for a while before hitting the road again and heading down to hood river, which we had heard was the adventure capital and famous for its kite surfing!
On the way out to hood river we past a sign for a dam and of course, after our day full of bridges we needed another hit of big structures so we went to check out the dam! It was a hydro electric dam which had been specially designed to allow the salmon through without getting injured in the dams turbines! We even saw a few seals hanging out catching salmon! We took a family shot with the kids, Charlie (of course he's still around, much to Rhys's dismay) Jimmy, Pertuna (the platypus) and Rowland (the panda) if you look closely in the photo below you can see the two little ones on the review mirror!! Anyway, after capturing the moment we were bak on the road to hood river.
We soon found out why it was so famous for kite surfing, it was SO windy! The afternoon we arrived wasn't so bad and we sat down on the pier watching all the guys kite surfing but the next morning was crazy! The lady at the information centre told us they were just about to put out a wind warning so everyone was on their way to enjoy the wind and get their kite surfers out! To be honest I don't think the wind was really our cup of tea and the water looked way too cold to be out there! We did a few of the touristy things on the way out going to all the lookouts and kind of avoided getting out of the car in fear of getting blown away! We did get out once and managed to loose half the papers out of the car and then had to chase them down the street! The clouds had settled in though so after our brief scenic drive we headed west toward the Multnomah falls. We could've spent a few hours hiking around the falls and visiting other sites in this area, but the clouds seemed to be following us and we weren't keen to get wet so we raced up the trail, took a few snaps, had a picnic lunch in the back of the car and were back on the road!
We headed straight for the west coast, hitting highway 101 and making our way to sunny California!
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