there's a blessing in every moment every mile

I mean, why not talk about my trip to Oregon some more? It was a fun trip.
Among many other adventures,
I enjoyed hiking to the top of Multnomah Falls:

View from near the bottom of the Falls

A hole in the rock

The top of the falls!

Hitting up the Portland Temple:


Our Beach Day:

You can't tell, but I was recovering from a failed jump. That's what you do on beaches, right? Jump?

Tide pools

dat sky tho!

Beautiful, beautiful day

Cape Meade (amazing):

The day started cold and cloudy, very atmospheric

Do I recall correctly that it's the shortest lighthouse around? It was pretty diminutive.

A giant pine tree. This is like one of its branches?

Sunny and warm

Breathtaking

Hiking University Falls:

it might've been nice to have warning we would need to drive a few miles on an unpaved road to get to the trail.

Also the trail was not marked. But it was beautiful.

Finally like halfway through the trail we discovered we WERE going the right way.

Beautiful!

And I enjoyed it with Cynthia, who was very patient with my being a delicate flower and also with me taking pictures of her in her natural habitat:

Multnomah

Temple

Rose Garden! You can be sure she got way better pictures of the flowers than I did.

Oregon Coast!

yeah the coast!

University Falls trail

Not a lot of pictures of our city day because my phone was clinging to death most of the day, but Portland was fun and nice too. And so was the Lewis and Clark state park and Tillamook. (major shout-out to Great-Aunt Becky who let us stay at her house! It was wonderful.) It was just all in all a great trip. Sorry for those of you that saw it all on my insta stories at the time and are getting a repeat. Sorry for those of you that missed my insta stories at the time and will never get a full picture of the trip.

Like, Sorry. But Not Sorry?

the light in me will guide you home

Wow did Cape Disappointment live up to its name!!

I really liked our little excursion out that way but it actually was disappointing in a lot of ways:

• As we drove into Washington it started storming. Since most of the day had been hot and sunny, this sudden change was a little disappointing.
• We followed Google Maps' directions toward Cape Disappointment and it sent us to a military facility where we were for sure not allowed. A little disappointing.
• There was another lighthouse in the same state park or whatever, so we went over that way. We had to pay to park there, even though it was the end of the day and raining so we wouldn't be using the pass any more. Disappointing because we'd really lucked out with not having to pay much thus far, and it felt expensive.
• As we walked over to the North Head lighthouse (or whatever it was), in the visibility-reducing fog (disappointing!), we discovered that this lighthouse was under construction and largely obscured by scaffolding. How disappointing!

Here are some pictures of the event.

Trail

Cape

disappointed

disappointed

disappointed

Deer!

Rose it makes my heart smile

I love roses. I think they're amazing. I don't have any reason for thinking that, they just are. Beautiful and fragrant and wonderful. When I was a young girl, my mom would sometimes get a rose catalog in the mail. I would hoard it for months, just poring over the different varieties and picking my favorites. Sometimes I would ask my mom if we could plant some, but they were pretty picky about the types of soil that each variety would thrive in, and it didn't always work.

Some do, though. We definitely have some roses in our garden that I remember from the catalog.

Me as a 13-year-old by our rose bushes.

My obsession with roses was such that when we had to come up with a presentation about something in my Plant Breeding class, I remembered the catalog (which I believe came from the International Rose Test Garden, because it showcased the winners and stuff) and presented about breeding roses. It was a terrible assignment, but at least I talked about something that interested me more than corn.

I still love roses even though I don't think about them as often as I used to. On my recent trip to Portland we decided to hit up the International Rose Test Garden (where they test new rose breeds to see how they'll do in real life) and it wasn't until we were on our way there that I remembered that going to this garden was probably a childhood dream of mine. To actually see the place whence the catalog pictures came? How could I not want that?

(PS I paid a dollar to get in to the garden but it was actually free/voluntary donation. An unexpected boon!)

And it was really nice. I took some slightly blurry pictures (I'm an indifferent photographer but my camera is also the worst) that don't quite capture it, but maybe a little.

It was probably my goal to take a picture of the plaque adjacent to a picture of a rose, but then I realized I didn't want to do that so many times. But I did once!

Like, I'm pretty sure this is a Peace rose. It looks like what I recall from my childhood.

This is the guy that started the garden.

Speckles!

Blurry, but nice vivid colors

Lovely

I loooooooved these.

Cynthia modeling some beautiful deep crimson roses

Here we are, blissful in our surroundings

A nice little poem as we neared the exit.