NORTHWEST TRAVEL BETTER THAN ???

(Any place you’ve seen before.)

Start in Portland and drive any direction and I see elevation changes, more shades of green than a box of crayons, and snow capped mountains most of the year.

Start in LA and drive any direction and never leave the freeway.

Start in Kansas. No one wants to start in Kansas if they’ve been anywhere else.

But Texas, you say?

I asked my Texas grandmother why she stayed in Oregon and didn’t move back to Texas when she had the chance after WWII.

“Grandson, I know you’ve been to Texas, therefore you know my answer. My only question is why you bothered asking,” she said.

She always did like showing off her special powers of observation, something I like to think I inherited from her.

I asked her questions so we had something to talk about in my role of considerate grandson. (I was the one who spent time with the grandparents on both sides of the family. I like to think they asked for me when my parents needed a break from three boys and dumped one of us on the grands.)

Northwest Travel Score

I recently planned a trip to Mt. St. Helen, the volcano that blew in 1980. It’s a run up I-5 to Castle Rock, Washington and turn right. But before leaving the Portland/Vancouver urban area my group stopped at Fort Vancouver.

The group was my wife and a French chaperone for foreign exchange students, so we started with a good foundation of local history.

While we walked the garden and took a look inside the gates, I asked the ranger what she’d heard about St. Helens.

“Cloudy,” she said.

“But clearing later?” I asked.

We smiled. I talked some more, asked about the Fort, basically stalled to give my two fellow travelers more time to take it all in. I was locked and loaded for ten minutes of Oregon Trail talk when I noticed we were all ready to go in about thirty seconds.

Heading out for a mountain drive also includes the incredibly recent history of the area from the Hudson Bay Company to Kaiser to Intel, and stops in between.

Once clear of the big town the road curves along the Columbia River on one side and the green hills of Washington on the other; I was in between water and the sort of forest that grows in a high water region.

Long story short, we got to the mountain museum fifty two miles away from the crater, found a camera showing more clouds up there than the low ceiling outside, and made new plans.

Northwest Travel always makes new plans, even if the old plans don’t change.

Instead of Mt. St. Helens we crossed the Columbia at Longview, drove on the St. Helens Highway through the town of St. Helens, and over the hill on Cornell after cruising NW Portland.

Northwest Travel Recap

In the space of a few hours I went from a heavy duty urban environment under the Fremont Bridge on Interstate, swung by Swan Island to show off some badass Portland business, and crossed the river on a bridge that’s said to have problems.

From there we went back in time to 1830, then further back to the sort of creation event volcanoes generate. My French friend was a student of geology, which was a good match for my expertise after a rocks for jocks science class in college.

We clashed on a few things earlier, like the three points on the Mercedes emblem. He straightened me out with the correct answer, which wasn’t what I guessed, a propellor.

I said Hawaii was an example of the ‘spreading center’ along the Pacific Ocean crust. He said it was a ‘convergent plate boundary’ to my claim. And it’s neither. It’s a ‘hot spot’ which is closer to my answer.

The thrill of Northwest travel is finding so much more than expected.