Portland's Rose Garden and Arboretum

Driving up from Port Orford toward Portland, Oregon on Monday, we stopped at a rest stop south of Portland. It had all the amenities, of course, but it also had hundreds of tall pine trees, a veritable forest, with picnic tables and grassy areas for resting and eating. I'd never been at a highway rest stop with so many tall trees.

Rest stop in northern Oregon (above)

On Tuesday we went to Portland's Washington Park to see the International Test Rose Gardens and also the Hoyt Arboretum. It was already hot in the morning. The Rose Gardens are spectacular...acres of roses, one of my favorite flowers, We wandered among the roses enjoying their beauty.

These are some of my favorites...

Aww...Jerry and me under an arbor. We hiked around lots of trails, one of which led us to a Holocaust memorial. There was an 8 foot by 30 foot black marble wall with a narrative of the events leading up to and through the Holocaust, as well as a long walkway going up to the wall with bronze sculptures along the way, things like a child's scattered shoes, a broken suitcase, a teddy bear, a doll, broken eyeglasses. a partly torn book, a menorah. It made me teary-eyed....man's inhumanity to man.

Topiaries shaped like deer just outside of the Rose Gardens.

Then we went over to the Hoyt Arboretum, a 187 acre refuge with more than 1000 tree species and 21 trails covering 112 miles. We hiked for miles through the beautiful forests, up and down hills. It was very hot in the sun, but nice and cool in the shade.

Hiking (well, resting here) on the Wildwood Trail in the arboretum

An upward look from the Wildwood Trail

After 4 miles of hiking in the Arboretum, we drove out, got a bit lost, but found a Taco Bell, and since we were very hungry by then, and also very hot and sweaty, we stopped there for lunch. My Fiesta Chicken Salad was great, as always, but I liked it better when it came with salsa rather than ranch dressing. Since we didn't know exactly where we were, but wanted to drive to Beaverton, a suburb of Portland, we asked the manager for directions. So, with his initial directions on how to get to the right freeway, along with my GPS, we managed to get to Beaverton and then to the Visitor's Information Center. The very helpful woman there suggested that we visit the brand new Cooper Mountain Nature Area and she even gave us detailed maps and brochures. I thanked her profusely and told her she should get a raise.

The Cooper Mountain Nature Area in Beaverton is so new that they just had their Grand Opening a couple of weeks ago. It didn't have much shade, but there were new plantings of trees and shrubs all over, but they were still just small plants. By this time of the day, it was very hot--in the 90s, but we gamely began the trail called the Cooper Mountain Loop, a 1.5 to 2-mile trail. The first part was all downhill and we were already sweating. The only other souls we saw were a woman with 4 little girls collecting insects with nets. We'd already hike 4 miles before lunch, so coming back up the loop in the full sun, 90 dgrees, was a killer. We had to keep stopping and resting in the few spots of shade we could find.

But, at last we made it back to the parking lot and visitors' center (which was closed), where we had long drinks of water from their drinking fountains. The visitors' center had solar panels on the roof, very state of the art.

It was so state-of-the-art that it had special toilets that used less water for liquid waste than solid waste. You pull the handle up for the former and push it down for the latter. Oregon is totally environmentally correct, but sometimes it makes you laugh!

View from Cooper Mountain Nature Area of the distant hills

I'm catching my breath on the Cooper Mountain Nature Area trail in the hot sun going uphill.

Jerry on the Cooper Mountain Nature Area trail

We stopped at a nearby vineyard (Cooper Mountain Vineyard) after the torturous hike to taste some of their wines, and then made it back to the hotel, via a very long and circuitous route due to horrendous freeway traffic and trying to take a shortcut on surface roads during which time we got a bit lost. I thought LA traffic was bad, but freeway traffic through the center of Portland is so congested you move only 25 to 35 miles per hour just about any time of the day! But all's well that ends well. We slept well last night!