Portland, day 8

We're really getting to the end here! Today was another non-retail day (there were a few stores that I maybe should have visited, but I was feeling burned out on retail after visiting around 20 stores and 2 malls over the last week), so instead I decided to drive out along the Columbia River Gorge east of Portland. Unfortunately, apparently everyone else had the same idea today, so I had to skip most of the popular spots, but I still had a good time! Now on to the pictures...

I made a conscious effort to take a bunch of panoramas today (using the built-in function on my ipod, which I haven't really used before -- works OK, but I think taking a bunch of pictures and stitching them together later is actually easier). Most of these will be views from random viewpoints I stopped at. Here, the famous Vista House (which I did not get to stop at -- it was way too busy) is visible towards the left edge. I really wish I had Flickr's photo annotation feature here!

All of the famous waterfalls were overrun with tourists as well, but there were some more obscure spots to get out of the car and look around. This is probably my favorite spot of today, just a random waterfall with a little pullout off the side of the road but which is just as pretty as the famous spots. Even better, I had this spot all to myself, though a few other people pulled in just as I was leaving.

This is an attempt at a panorama of the back side of the Bonneville Dam from another random roadside viewpoint. I'm sure this was a very nice view when the viewpoint was built, but the trees really get in the way now!

Regular pictures turned out a bit better. The first one shows the south portion of the dam, while the second shows the central and north portions. I was planning to go to the dam from the Oregon side, but, again, apparently everyone wanted to do that, so I decided to just go from the other side instead at the end of the day.

Here are a couple more random views from the Oregon side. It's pretty clear that we've crossed east of the Cascades from the vegetation here!

My last stop before crossing over into Washington and heading back west was at the The Dalles Dam, in The Dalles, OR, before crossing over the The Dalles Bridge, on the left of the picture. (They really like the definite article here!)

This is a view looking the other way from the Washington side of the river, from another extremely scenic rest area.

My last stop was at the Washington side of the Bonneville Dam. This is the newer part of the dam, built in the 70s, and was built with some serious provisions for tourist access, most of which are sadly now closed, due to a mix of security concerns (how I remember it from the one time we took the guided tour) and budget cuts and low visitation (how my parents remember it). Either way, it's sad to see how forgotten this place seems to be these days (though the extremely 70s interior, featuring orange carpet in the visitor center and rainbow carpet in the fish ladder viewing space, is kind of cool to see these days). Perhaps if they had built this place with access from the much busier Oregon side, things would have worked out differently. And for anyone weirded out by that last picture, those are lampreys, a type of fish (not eel) that apparently really likes attaching itself to the sides of the fish ladder!

Anyways, that's it for today. Tomorrow, I'll be driving back home, so I'm not sure whether I'll be back to regular content or have a short vacation post -- that will depend on whether I get any pictures worth posting tomorrow, I suppose!