Weekend 5 revisited

Here I sit at 7am Saturday morning on our 6th weekend in Oregon. After a good nite's sleep in this fancy place where the turn down service included heavy terry cloth robes, a dolop of really rich chocolate and a bottle of Voss water for each of us. The restuarant hasn't opened yet for breakfast, but I have had a really great stroll around the grounds of the Columbia Gorge Hotel (http://columbiagorgehotel.com/) which is listed as an historic place because it was built in 1921 and I am surely sitting in a chair that either Clara Bow or Rudolph Valentino sat in on their stays in this really elegant "country inn". Because this post is not about this weekend, I will save the pictures of the onsite waterfall and the millions of daffodils as well as the view of the Columbia river (below) from the rock and flower gardens that surround this place. I wanted to catch you up on last weekend. If you read Georgia's post, you knowthat we went to the Japanese Garden and Powell's Books in Portland last Sunday and got our first look at Mount Hood. (Today, we are going there. It's about an hour from here.) What you don't know is that Saturday, Georgia wasn't feeling well, so about noon, said, "Honey, why don't you go ahead".. After some discussion, I decided to go. so I went to Silver Falls State Park.... YES.... finally got there. I saw several falls, but there were about 7 more that would have required several miles of walking and I didn't want to take the time, since I believe I saw the best. Then, I went to West Linn, a Portland suburb to visit with the familiy of Jen (Podolski) Tepavich who finished our radiology residency program a few years ago and came to "Portland" to work at VDIC, a specialty imaging group. http://www.vdic.com/default.asp. Got to visit with Jen and her really nice husband and super cute daughters. I was even offered a Nemo blanket to make me feel at home while I was there. It was great to see Jen again as well as "that guy" who used to show up with flowers and lunch and all that stuff that made the rest of us guys look like oafs. From my short observation, I think she got a good one. A really neet family.

Here is a video from behind the south falls at Silver Falls State Park. I went ahead and put all the pictures at the top because it's easier to manage that way. There are some more waterfall pictures, some from a rest stop on the way up Sunday where the flowering crab was in all it's glory and I captured a flower between 3 tall trees. A couple of the Japanese garden, one of the most serene places we've been, etc. Now on to Hood Mountain (after the best meal of the day.... breakfast)..