This is an adjunct to the chronicle of my family's bicycle tour through the northwest and Paula's continuation beyond Montana. If you came here via a Web search, you might want to back up to the index page to start with the overview.
This page has various gems that deserve display, but just don't fit in with the theme of a bike tour or perhaps do but would be a distraction to the flow of the prose and photos.
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This marvel of mixed architectural "design" outside of Portland caught my eye. It makes wonder about its history and glad I don't know it! |
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All the photos here were taken with an Olympus C540(?) camera. I
think that's the model, Paula is still on the road and she has the camera.
Before my old trip I bought an Olympus OM-1 which had just been introduced.
That was - is - a wonderful camera, especially for photographers who don't
want their cameras to do any thinking for them. Paula bought the C540
just before the trip and it's a remarkably good camera. It does get
itself in the photographers way, e.g. manual focus is nearly unusable.
However, the good stuff far outweighs such nits. The diopter adjustment
on the LCD viewfinder means I don't need the LCD on the back of the
camera for much of anything.
This was an experiment one evening with the camera's 10X optical zoom combined with the 3X digital zoom. Not bad! |
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Gee, we don't have signs like these in New England. We do have signs that say "Brake for Moose." At least you may have more warning for a tsunami. The pacific northwest has seen several massive tsunamis going back to prehistoric times. Some can be triggered from as far away as Japan. |
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Hannah thought this would be a good place to pitch a tent. This is at an Oregon State Campground. |
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Our tour was in the mid latitudes. This was the first of several crossing of the most middle latitude. |
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This did make it on to one of the other pages, but it certainly belongs here too. People have used this in Bend's Pole, Pedal, & Paddle race, an event that attracts both serious and frivolous entrants. |
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While I knew that Olympic athletes train in Bend and while I expected my brother to know some of them, I didn't expect to meet a Canadian Olympic Medalist for dinner. This is Beckie Scott's bronze medal for the the 2002 women's Nordic pursuit. She has since returned the medal because the two Russians who finished ahead of her subsequently failed drug tests. Not only is this the first nordic medal won by a North American woman, Beckie may be the first person to win the bronze, silver, and gold medals in the same event because the Russians were disqualified at different times. |
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My brother Doug spent more childhood hours in trees than I did. There are few better places to visit than a treetop. Doug took up rock climbing in Colorado, a skill that can often be directly applied to tree climbing. |
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And then there's this shoe tree we passed just outside of an Oregon town. I don't know why there are shoes in it, but I imagine if you hang a pair of shoes in a tree near your local high school you'll be responsible for raising another shoe tree! |
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If you read Hannah's page you'll see she really didn't want to spend the entire summer on the road. This is from a diorama at the Oregon Trail Interpretive center outside of Baker City Oregon. I don't think this girl wanted to spend the entire summer on the trail.... |
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Have you ever looked at a high tension line and wondered where its
endpoints are? No? Oh well, here's one terminus at a power dam in
Idaho. Yeah, it's not that exciting. Let me tell you about the
Sunday morning I was driving to work and came across a work crew
bringing in the DC-AC convertor for the Westford Massachusetts
terminus of the Hydro Quebec line.
Hey - no need to run away, it's a short story! |
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Hannah wasn't even trying to do an Alfred E. Neuman impression. I'll have to ask the orthodontist to spread those front teeth apart a bit. |
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Some towns let people camp in a town park, some are quite accomodating. Roadside rest stops generally frown on campers, this one seems pretty serious about it. |
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I like mechanical things, especially clocks. This is in the Old Faithful Inn. Unfortunately, it's not running. |
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Yeah, like Yellowstone planned the 1988 fires or something! While Smoky the Bear doesn't like forest fires, a lot of good does come from them. I hear the wildflowers were remarkable in the years immediately after the fire. While some news accounts made it sound as though the entire park burned, that wasn't the case. For the most part, new growth is doing much better than this hillside. |
The balance of the pictures here are from Paula's solo trip. Ric's not responsible for the editing any more.
| I insisted Ric take a picture of this billboard outside of Great Falls. It's a fun sign of the times. |  |
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I saw flags waving all across the US. Someone went to a lot of effort to have a lovely background for this one. I think it was in N. Dakota, but I can't really remember. |
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There were boatloads of these odd rock formations along the road to Fort Peck. I thought they looked like dinosaur eggs. Ric's brother Doug told me what they were, but I forgot. Dinosaur eggs should be the name of the geologic formation anyway. |
| Hannah's hand tan was interesting at the end of the trip. |  |
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