We flew out of Jacksonville, with a plane change in Houston, and arrived at the Portland airport on Saturday night. We secured our rental car (more on that in a bit!) and checked in to the old standby Hampton Inn, conveniently located on the airport grounds. Hampton Inn's are great to travel with kids, as they are always, always the exact same experience, and the breakfast in the morning is complimentary.... Free Coffee equals good!
Photo of Mount Hood, just east of Portland, taken from the 737 we flew on from Houston. In the background that's Mount Jefferson, and just to the left of Jefferson, waaaaaaay off in the distance and barely visible, the Three Sisters. Not every day you can snag a shot like this from a plane! Especially now-a-days, where airlines have 12 year old pre-pubescents with little flight experience controlling the stick.
Day one spent in the air, and day two spent on the ground, driving from Portland to the house we'd rented as a group. The Goal for the trip...meet my bicycling buddies and pack as much riding time around the priority of a good comfortable vacation with the family. We'll be staying between the Willamette and Deschutes National Forests, about 60 miles east of Eugene, 25 miles away from Oakridge, a wee bit north of Crater Lake National Park, in the heart of the Cascade Mountains.
The light was right on the 'leaving' side.
Our house for the week. Lots of space, very clean, and with a big fat kitchen and a hot tub. It will be a great home base for the trip, and that hot tub will come in handy after this unsuspecting east-coaster rides his bike in thousands years old lava fields.
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And that's the rental car. Yeah. Call us Florida Rednecks, because that silver-sucker is the new Camaro. It was a very, very nice car. Well built and extremely smooth and fast. Chevrolet did a masterful job.
From the front, the house that is...er, and the car?!
That afternoon, Kristen, Jane and I hung out and relaxed while the others struggled to finish their morning rides by 5 pm. Time estimation would prove to be the only real glitch in the trip, as east-coast ride times need to be doubled to be accurate. Plus, while the plan to stay east of Oakridge was based on being convenient to riding, somehow we still would wind up spending hours driving to trailheads across central Oregon.