Road Trip to Wedding Part VII: Redwoods, White Smoke, and Columbia Blue

On Day 8 of our road trip we left Hermiston and headed west for a quick visit to Portland.

The drive to Portland was about three hours. Most of it was along the Columbia River which divides Washington and Oregon.

We saw a lot of windmills.

You could see Mt. Hood in the distance.

Back at the Buffalo Bill Dam our golf cart driver said they were news reports of wild fires in Oregon. We didn't think we would see any but here they were.

We arrived in downtown Portland after a failed attempt to visit Multnomah Falls. It was crowded with no parking so we skipped it. We found a pho place by the Saturday Market area for lunch.

I read on a blog that Voodoo Doughnuts were the bomb so we checked it out. There was a line to get in.

It's open 24 hours. 

Everything looked delightful.

We got a Voodoo Dozen (13).

From Portland we hit a little bit of late Friday afternoon traffic as we headed south on Route 5. We passed Salem (the capital), Eugene and after about four and a half hours of driving we stopped in Grants Pass for dinner. We ate at the Kobe Sushi Buffet and it was pretty good. They had little boats floating around a bar with small plates of food and you can take anything you want. Our home for the night was going to be in Klamath, CA just inside the Redwood Forest area (a six hour drive from Portland).

We reached the Pacific just before sunset. 

We made it! It felt weird being on the west coast without having flown there. It didn't seem real.

There was a vista point so we stopped. We were by the Del Norte Coast Redwoods.

We had a little bit more to drive and with the remaining daylight left we got our first glimpses of the Redwoods. The next day we'd get to see some more and get up close and personal with them.