Left Eugene this morning at about 9.30am ready for a long drive! We followed I5N north as far as Portland passing some beautiful farming country, lots of hay production and also fruits and nuts. There were also many light industrial areas, one of which was Marathon Coaches which produces motor home and fifth wheelers! There were literally acres of new trailers and motor homes waiting for distribution!
Jasmine and Mumsie had blonde moments when they remarked about the huge size of the square bales of hay!!! Which were actually 12 or so big squares stacked ready for transport, causing much mirth from Greg and I.
We followed the freeway right through the large city of Portland, which is built either side of the the huge Colombia River, and then turned westwards and began to follow the river through the Colombia River Gorge! The river originates in Canada and is nearly 2,000 kilometres long and for a long way forms the border between Washington and Idaho States. In some places we saw today it was a massive water course, over half a kilometre wide and there were several huge dams across it producing vast reserves of hydro-electric power. It is navigable by barges and small ships for hundreds of kilometres and carries all sorts of produce. There are roads and railways on either side, tracking the river through the steep sided gorge, making it a major transport route.
The terrain went from dense rainforest with rainfall of over 100 inches to dry, rocky mountains with less than 10 inches! All this in less than 140 kilometres!
Once again it was an amazing drive and then once we stopped for fuel at Boardman, we turned south-east and left the river and heading into magnificent cropping country with huge open fields as far as the eye could see!
This continued for ages until we crossed over the Cascade Range where we returned to natural forest, and encountered the first rain of our trip. The rain followed us all the way to Baker City where after driving about 770 kilometres we had all had enough! So we found a motel in the little town - only $75 tonight for the same facilities and had a relax!