Not many foreigners, especially not many Italians, make it to Oregon. I am not quite sure why very few people are aware of its beauty and incredible wilderness, but possibly this adds to the experience of the ones who are lucky enough to visit this chunk of the west coast. We drove up to Oregon from SF, ready to get into the wild after our great "urban" time. It was interesting to follow changes in the landscape while driving, going from agricultural planes to hills and mountains, going through forests dotted beautiful with lakes,and spotting some snowed peaks from the distance.
Even if we didn't have a long time we had a great taste of Oregon, starting from the Crater Lake, a volcanic lake whose intense blu normally leave people speachless for a while. We drove around the whole crater and hiked up a 2700 m peak on its side on one of the sunniest days the northwest has ever seen. Check out the pictures to get a feeling of the landscape!
We then drove from the Cascadea (oregon mountain chain) to the coast where we played with the literally "saharian" dunes of the pacific beaches. We found a bit confusing seeing evergreen forests mixing with shiny sand dunes, but this is how nature turned out here and the result is worth a trip by itself.
My emotional side was all excited as we then drove to Eugene, the town where my parents lived in the 70's and where I spent several months during an exchange program as an undergraduate at the university of Oregon.
In Eugene people are happy, this is pretty evident as soon as you chat to somebody there and really give a positive touch to the city. We stayed with Jim and Joan, family friends whose amazing house is surrounded by woods and looks over a green valley. We shared a couple of days of berry eating, stimulating conversations and exciting sailing on a lake nearby. Oregon is so dense of beautiful lakes, trails, mountains that basically any moment can turn into an outdoor adventure. This is probably why I love this place, and obviously also because of the people I met here. In our last 24 h of road trip we drove up to Portland for a hardcore session of shopping at an outlet mall and some walks about utterly hypster neighbourhood, but especially to meet a bunch of friends I hand' t seen in years. What a great time!Our minds are defo thinking that life on the West Coast is pretty damn good...