Welcome to my weekly update for October 4, 2020! Friday is our sixteenth wedding anniversary. I’m not quite sure where the time has gone! We normally take our big vacation for the year in October but that’s obviously out of the question this year. Oh well. When you’re traveling with work because you actually enjoy […]

Welcome to my weekly update for September 27, 2020! The rain has continued this week here in Portland, Oregon so that means the smoke has stayed away. Yay! According to the fire map I check, the Riverside fire, which is the one closest to where we are, is at 138,000 acres burned and 34% contained. […]

Welcome to my weekly update for September 20, 2020! We finally got rain in Portland on Friday! Woohoo! Air quality has improved a lot. We’ve still got an air quality warning in place as I write this but our numbers on the Weather Channel app have dropped from 535 on Tuesday (I think that was the day I took the screenshot) to 32 […]

Welcome to my weekly update for September 13, 2020! I don’t have any hiking pictures to share this week. We stayed in and away from potential crowds the whole Labor Day weekend. A freak windstorm blew through Oregon on Tuesday, keeping us in again. My husband worked the rest of the week. Huge wildfires ignited […]

Welcome to my weekly update for September 6, 2020! It’s a holiday weekend here in the States and my husband is actually off work. We’re choosing to stay home and away from the crowds though. We enjoy getting out when he’s off mid-week and trails and other attractions are less likely to be crowded. On Wednesday, we hiked Mt. […]

Welcome to my weekly update for August 30, 2020! For our mid-week hike, my husband and I drove up to Timberline Lodge on Mt. Hood for a short-ish leg stretcher. He was willing to go further but I just wasn’t feeling it that day. Being East Coasters, we were surprised to see so many people at the lodge skiing and snowboarding in […]

Welcome to my weekly update for August 23, 2020! My husband and I like to explore on weekdays when he’s off and most people are at work, making trails less crowded. So on Tuesday, we drove up to Mount St. Helens for the day for some hiking. It wasn’t as classically beautiful as Mt. Rainier […]

Welcome to my weekly update for August 16, 2020! Two of the biggest natural tourist attractions in Oregon are the Columbia River Gorge Scenic Highway and Multnomah Falls. State officials closed them before we arrived here in April because of COVID-19. They finally re-opened on Thursday! We set out to explore on Friday. The air […]

Welcome to my weekly update for August 9, 2020! After all our hiking last week, we took it relatively easy this week. My husband and I are usually in one place for three months before moving to a new place with his job. His three months in Portland, Oregon were complete on July 25 but […]

Welcome to my weekly update for August 2, 2020! My husband’s 50th birthday was on July 25 so he took a week off work and we spent time hiking and exploring. Mt. Rainier National Park is within driving distance so we decided to head that way. Oh my goodness! It’s gorgeous! We tried to visit […]