By James F. Sweeney, Special to The Plain Dealer
Planning a vacation often requires difficult choices: the beach or mountains, city or country, culture or outdoors. Finding a destination that allows it all without a lot of time in the car is tough.
We found one: Oregon. Specifically, the northwest quadrant of Oregon, encompassing Portland, the northern half of the Pacific Coast and Bend. Over the course of 10 days in late May, and with a moderate amount of driving, we experienced three distinct vacations.
A passion for brewing
A note on beer: I love craft beer and wherever I travel I try to drink local.
Local
requires a whole new definition in Oregon. Even the smallest towns seem to have at least two microbreweries and three brewpubs and an
import
could be an ale brought in from 30 miles away. I quickly realized I wouldn
t be able to sample them all, but I did my best.
One of the best-known breweries is
, headquartered in Newport. We wound our way past fermentation tanks to have lunch in an upstairs restaurant. I can
t remember what I ate, but I do recall what I drank, a Dad
s Little Helper Black IPA and a Rogue Farms Chipotle Ale. Just the names of the brews made me want to steal a menu: New Crustacean Barleywinish Imperial IPA Sorta and Beard Beer, claimed to be brewed with yeast from the whiskers of the brewmaster.
Oregonians are equally passionate about coffee. Drive-up coffee shops dot the roadsides and every town has at least one coffee shop where baristas will gladly explain the virtues of pour-over brewing.
THE COAST
After flying to Portland, we picked up a rental car and drove an hour and a half west to Seaside, a beach town just stirring itself for the summer season. The temperature was in the upper 50s and low 60s with a constant threat of rain. The shops selling T-shirts, seashell souvenirs and plastic beach gear were open, but not yet crowded with the tourists who'd be there later in the summer.
The next morning, we drove up the coast to the old salmon canning town of Astoria. Before visiting, I had never seen, and was only dimly aware of, the 1985 movie, "The Goonies." Well, Astoria is a place to become very, very aware of "The Goonies." The hidden-treasure adventure starring Corey Feldman and Sean Astin was set and filmed here and in other spots along the Oregon coast, and the town will not let you forget it. (Any perceived similarity between this and Cleveland's fixation on "A Christmas Story" is accurate.)
There is a tour of sites where the movie was filmed, an Oregon Film Museum and "Goonies" Days, an annual festival that draws fans from around the world. We were early for the party to mark the 30th anniversary of the movie's release, but I'm going to watch the film anyway, just to see what the fuss is about and to say, "Hey, I was there."
But Astoria has draws for people indifferent to mid-80s comedies. The Columbia River Maritime Museum offers a fascinating look at the river that defined the entire region. The fourth-largest river by volume in North America, the Columbia doesn't so much flow into the Pacific Ocean as hurl itself at it.
The Columbia Bar is a treacherous system of shifting sandbars and shoals at the mouth of the river that has earned the nickname Graveyard of the Pacific. More than 2,000 ships, including oceangoing freighters, have wrecked here. Ships traversing the Bar must be captained by local pilots expert in its ways, and the museum has video of pilots making dangerous mid-ocean transfers onto the ships as well as exhibits about how the Coast Guard rescues ships that don't make it.
The museum explains the Native American cultures that thrived along the Columbia River and the salmon fisheries around which Astoria was built. (The trash containers downtown look like cans of salmon.) It even has a Japanese fishing skiff that floated ashore in Oregon after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in that country.
The museum made us anxious to see the Bar in person, but first we stopped at Fort Stevens State Park to tour the remains of a military installation that guarded the mouth of the Columbia from the Civil War through World War II. On June 21, 1942, a Japanese submarine surfaced offshore and lobbed several shells at the coast (to no effect), giving Fort Stevens the distinction of being the only U.S military installation shelled by an enemy since the War of 1812. We ducked into the concrete gun bunkers concealed behind mounds and wondered what it was like to have been here when people feared a Japanese invasion.
It was a short drive from there to Jetty Rock, where a wooden lookout tower offered a view of the Pacific. The massive stone breakwalls are 20 feet high, but storms still toss driftwood tree trunks over them and onto the beach. It was a calm day, but the long rollers moving up the mouth of the Columbia hinted at the tangle of powerful forces below the surface.
A note on Oregon beaches: They're great for walking, jogging and sunset watching, but not so good for swimming. The Pacific is rough, treacherous and cold (it doesn't get much above 50, even in August). So leave the swimsuits at home and bring some comfortable walking shoes.
After two nights in Seaside, we drove down the coast, stopping at Cannon Beach, a beautiful town that had us checking prices at real estate offices. It's home to Haystack Rock, a 235-foot sea stack 'Goonies' fans will recognize from the movie. The towering monolith hosts a wide variety of seabirds. When we visited, a pair of bald eagles flew in from the forest to hunt, sending hundreds of gulls and auklets wheeling skyward. After a few minutes, the eagles left empty-taloned. Volunteers on the beach answered questions about the rock and keep visitors from harming the sea life in the tidal pools at its base.
A little farther down the coast is Tillamook, where the eponymous cheese is made. Here, we hiked the North Coast Trail at Cape Lookout, climbing high amidst towering firs and looking down at the crashing waves. After another hour on winding U.S. 101, we arrived at Newport, a city of about 10,000.
Our beachside hotel in the Nye Beach neighborhood had binoculars in the room, the better to spot migrating gray whales from the balcony. It was hard to distinguish through the fog and mist, but we did spot some spumes. Like Seaside, Newport has a beach made for long walks followed by mugs of hot coffee.
"That's what I look like getting out of the pool," sighed a woman watching a blubbery sea lion heave itself onto the deck at the Oregon Coast Aquarium.
Even those whose interest in marine life is limited to what is served with tartar sauce will be impressed by this attraction on Yaquina Bay. The aquarium features otters, seabirds and giant octopi and a clear walk-through tunnel that lets the fish swim over and around visitors. (Bonus for Clevelanders: Look for the docent named Lou Boudreau, who says he was named for the Indians Hall of Fame player-manager.)
Nearby is the Hatfield Marine Science Center, operated by Oregon State University. Ever since we'd arrived on the coast, we'd seen signs warning that we were in a tsunami zone and directing us to the nearest high ground, just in case. After building a Lego house and sending a three-inch tidal wave crashing through it, I resolved to pay a little more attention to the signs.
After lunch, we walked Bay Boulevard, which rims the northern shore of the bay. One side of the street is devoted to kitschy tourist attractions, while the other is working fisheries. Yellow-slickered workers mingle with gawking tourists on the sidewalks. Behind one restaurant, sea lions sprawl on docks, barking and shoving for space and emitting a deep marine funk. (A few weeks after our trip, someone tried to scare them away by towing a plastic orca nearby, but it flipped upside down and the sea lions were unfazed.)
BEND AND SISTERS
We headed east out of Newport the next morning and left the rain behind as we crossed the Cascade Mountains. We had intended to stay in Bend, but waited too long to make reservations on Memorial Day weekend and wound up 30 minutes away in Sisters, a town of 2,500 surrounded by Deschutes National Forest.
Campers, RVs and SUVs fill the streets of Sisters, which is named for a trio of nearby peaks, and the Main Street businesses cater to campers and hikers. Our motel even had a herd of llama that guests could feed.
Bend looks like the kind of place where a triathlon could break out spontaneously. In contrast to the coast, it boasts of 300 days of sunshine a year. Everyone looks fit and healthy, which they must be in order to burn off all the beer.
Bend and nearby Redmond boast 23 craft breweries and host a staggering 11 beer festivals a year. We watched the Cavs beat the Hawks at Bend Brewing Co., while sipping deeply sour Belgian plum lambics that tasted like victory.
The next morning, we hiked Black Butte, an extinct volcano in the national forest. The 3.5-hour round-trip is just strenuous enough to require stops to admire the magnificent views of neighboring mountains. The peak is crowned with two fire lookout towers, one abandoned, and a cabin that would be occupied by a lookout during high fire season.
PORTLAND
The next morning, we said goodbye to the llamas and headed for Portland, the third part of the trip. I'm a fan of the IFC comedy series "Portlandia," which gently spoofs the city as a hipster haven "where young people go to retire," and the real thing did not disappoint.
For the full experience, we drove straight to the Pearl District, a former industrial area downtown now gentrified. We ate fortified kale salads for lunch at Whole Foods, sorted our trash into five different recycling bins, and walked over to Powell's Books, the largest independent new and used bookstore in the world.
Powell's has a number of locations, but the City of Books mothership is a bibliophile's dream. Covering an entire block, its nine color-coded rooms house more than 3,500 sections with over 1 million titles. You could browse for an eternity here, but we limited ourselves to a few hours and a few titles.
A note for booklovers: Every city we visited in Oregon, from Astoria to Sisters, had at least one independent bookstore. I don't know if there's a correlation between rainy weather and reading, but it was heartening to see. A former financial consultant who owns bookstores in Newport and Bend told us the fantasy of retiring and running a bookstore is so common in Oregon that he is able to staff his store with volunteers every summer.
We were there during the Rose Festival, a weeks-long celebration of everything the city has to offer. We wandered closed-off streets, ate from booths, listened to bands and people-watched.
A few notes from the West Coast Brooklyn: hipster beards appear to be over and the food truck movement is so entrenched that operators have semi-permanently parked their trailers in parking lots, which, I guess, makes them ... carryout restaurants?
We stayed at a B&B owned by a yoga instructor because ... Portland. Like many homes in the residential neighborhood, it featured a large garden. To make it even more Portland, one guest was in town to finalize the purchase of a tiny house to be delivered to her property in Indianapolis.
On Memorial Day Monday we joined the crowds at Washington Park, a 410-acre urban park near downtown. We skipped the zoo, children's museum, children's garden and other attractions to visit the International Rose Test Garden. Gertrude Stein might have revised her "a rose is a rose is a rose" statement if she'd seen the 550 varieties grown here. The garden -- actually, many plots spread over 4.5 acres -- combines horticultural science with eye-popping beauty.
New rose cultivars from around the world are sent to the garden to be tested for fragrance, color, resistance to disease and other attributes. The Gold Medal Garden features award-winning roses with the names and winning years noted on small signs. Roses here come in a rainbow of colors: lavender, apricot, the palest pink, violet and, of course, every shade of red.
If the rose garden is an optic assault, the Portland Japanese Garden nearby is a balm for the senses. The 5.5-acre garden is a composition of stone, water and plants. On top of a steep hill, it invites visitors to slow down, breathe deeply and, for an hour at least, find serenity.
Serenity was harder to find downtown where we wandered Chinatown and Old Town. Despite the holiday, everything was open. We stopped at Pioneer Square, a red brick plaza at the heart of downtown that offered great people watching. Unlike most of the rest of Oregon, Portland is diverse, with sizable populations of black, Asian and Latino residents. That gives the city a cultural richness that was lacking elsewhere in the state.
We felt the call of Nature again on our last day so we drove east into the Columbia River Gorge. There's no need to go chasing waterfalls here; there are 77 on the Oregon side of the Gorge. The best known is Multnomah Falls, which cascades 620 feet, the fourth-highest in the country. The 1.2-mile hike to the top is a slog of switchbacks, but the view is worth it. Others not to miss are Bridal Veil Falls, Latourell Falls and Shepperd's Dell.
Back in the city for our last night, we watched the Cavs again at a seafood restaurant that proudly served organic, locally sourced ketchup. Because Portland.
In all, we drove about 950 miles and never spent more than 3.5 hours in the car, easily manageable over 10 days. We missed several of Oregon's most popular tourist destinations, including Crater Lake and Mount Hood, but came home knowing that we had experienced more than can be fit into most vacations.
Sweeney is a freelance writer in Fairview Park. To reach him via email: travel@plaind.com.