In a previous post, I talked about the first half of our visit to Portland. We also celebrated a milestone while visiting Portland, which was Rick’s 40th birthday. His choice was to spend his birthday at the beach. From our rental home in Portland, it took us close to 2 hours to drive west until we hit Cannon Beach on the Oregon coast. This is where Haystack Rock is located, the infamous location where Goonies was filmed. We had photographed the beach from a distance about a year earlier, so this was our first time actually walking the beach and getting up close to the massive rocks!
Although it was a bit foggy at times, we can never get enough of the beach.
The boys and I also spend a day touring OMSI – the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. This museum was really right up there with Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry. It was excellent and the boys stayed busy for hours!
The boys and I also took a field trip to nearby Fort Vancouver, Washington to visit the Fort Vancouver National Historic Site. This site was a British fur trading post built in the 1800’s. We enjoyed strolling around the site and especially climbing the tower and pretending to defend the fort.
They had a beautiful garden on the grounds as well, and I think we saw the biggest sunflower ever!
And finally, before returning to Chicago, we decided to spend a couple more weeks in Boise, Idaho, and do some serious house hunting to determine if this was truly a place we wanted to relocate to in the future. We connected with a Fulltime Family that had just moved to Boise after one year of RVing, and they invited us over for dinner and to share travel stories.
We also happened to be in town over Labor Day Weekend, which hosts an annual Hot Air Balloon Festival. We got out of bed at about 6am to make it downtown in time to see one of the launches.
The boys and I ventured out to pretty much every large neighborhood park that we could find, and they are in abundance in the surrounding areas of Boise. This one pictured below was my favorite:
We also took a weekend drive up into the foothills and mountains of Boise. It only takes about 20 minutes to get “up” into those mountains, and the views were breathtaking. We definitely love Boise!
