Wednesday, June 15, 2005

oregon - props

I have several things I liked and several things I really disliked about the great state of Oregon, which I discovered during my recent trip. I will begin with the things I liked, just not to seem grumpy and ungracious.

Scenery - Oregon has some of the most interesting scenery that I have seen, and I have seen a good bit of what this world has to offer. I have hiked in the smokies, skied in the Rockies, slept in the outback, scuba-ed on the great reef, sea kayaked in Fiji. The best I can describe the coast of Oregon is a "cold rainforest". The trees lining the "short" scenic route (It was not that far distance wise, but took almost an entire day to drive) were covered with moss and they were the type of trees that you see in colder climates (conifers mainly is what I recognized with my limited knowledge). In some places the unused edge of the road had a thin dusting of moss covering it.

Corvallis - I spent nearly two days in the Corvallis area. That city is set in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains, in Oregon's Willamette Valley. Most of the town has a scenic view of a hill over looking the town. The town population is around 50,000, but it feels more like 20,000.

One of the things that I really liked about Corvallis was that nearly every road had room for bikes, a parallel bike path, or a bike lane. I feel that you do not have to raise gas taxes to encourage people to drive less. All that is really necessary is to provide for bike or walker safety and to allow businesses to build where the people are. It is basically a build it, and they will come approach. If there were room for people to ride their bikes without being in the way of cars consistently through out the city, then you would see many people choose to ride their bike to do certain things.

Silver Lake Bed and Blanket - I know that this place is not in Oregon, but it was on my trip. This was easily the best place that stewardess and I stayed at during the trip. It had a great view and an extremely comfortable bed. In fact, the bed I slept in is on the website (it is captioned with "Queen Sized Bed" or third from top). That is a super-soft fluffy bed and I would suggest it to anyone. It was soft, but not too soft. I loved it. You can also see the view I had as I woke up of the dock and the lake. Which the view is better if you head is on the bed.

See other trip info here

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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for all the positive comments about the trip. I'll be linking to this.