I declare this my favorite hike in the Oregon Coastal Mountains. We went pretty wild last weekend and headed west to the Oregon Coastal Mountains. Sometimes I forget that we live between two mountain ranges, since we spend a lot of time in the Cascades and the Columbia River Gorge (both of which are east…
dry creek falls.
I think we might be experiencing the mildest, sunniest, happiest winter in the history of Portland. While I’d love some snow and real winter weather, I’m not going to complain about 65 degree days in the sun. (Naturally, as I am actually writing about this wonderful weather, it’s been raining for three days straight.) The…
opal creek.
Big surprise: It’s been raining in Oregon. We went hiking on Saturday and got really wet. I, a woman who never leaves the house without checking the weather, checked the forecast for Opal Creek Wilderness and saw that it should be snowing during our hike. Apparently we weren’t hiking at quite the altitude of the…
kentucky falls.
We finally got a much needed break from the winter gloom on Saturday, so we took a trip to the Coastal Mountain Range to hike Kentucky Falls. This was one of the first hikes we took when we moved to Eugene back in 2012, but it looked completely different this time around. We first visited…
trail of ten falls.
Let’s all give a big “Hooray!” for sunshine. We got a big ‘ol dose of it in the Willamette Valley today, so we ventured out for a hike. We drove about 1 1/2 hours to Silver Falls State Park. We’ve lived in Eugene for a year and a half, and somehow, we’d never heard of…
four-in-one cone.
This weekend’s Ally Day killed it. Now that grad school is back in full swing, we’re back to celebrating Ally Days on the weekends (if Eric is in town, which is becoming increasingly rare). This means we go do something really exciting for a day, with no homework allowed. It’s the best. For this adventure,…
hiking at crater lake.
Our last post left off right before we started our day of hiking at Crater Lake National Park. We headed up to the lodge to take a look around, and hopefully warm ourselves up a bit after a very, very cold night camping in below freezing temperatures. You can spend the night in the lodge,…
hiking horse rock.
Let’s just start by stating the obvious: Oregon is gorgeous. Seriously, it’s a blessing to live in such an amazing place with so many things to do. There are so many beautiful hikes around here that I don’t think we’ll ever conquer them all, but we’re knocking out what we can. In planning last weekend’s…
it’s spring break, y’all.
It’s spring break for all of the Oregon kids (but not for me, unfortunately), so we’re living it up here in Eugene. And by “living it up,” I mean we’re watching a lot of basketball, eating a lot of food (hot dogs! cookies!), and spending some time with friends. Good stuff. Today we (along with…
hiking mount pisgah.
School is back in session, so Ally-days are back in full force. Ally-days are the wonderful Saturdays during the school quarters when Eric leaves his homework at home and we spend the day doing something exciting together. For our first Saturday of the winter term, we decided to hike. I should mention that it was…
a mini-vacation (day 2).
The great thing about staying at a B&B is the real breakfast. Jerry, our breakfast chef extraordinaire, whipped up an enormous meal of chicken apple sausage, croissant french toast, scrambled eggs, fresh fruit, orange juice, and coffee. And since we were the only guests, Jerry served as our breakfast entertainment as well. A few fun…
touring oregon with the family (day 1).
Eric’s parents and sister came to visit over the weekend, acting as our first guests in this new state. Of course, this gave us a great excuse to get out and explore. We started our Friday morning with breakfast at Glenwood Restaurant, where Eric and I ate on our University of Oregon visit a little…
a wrap up of this week’s best.
Here are a few great things that happened this past week: 1. “Safety Not Guaranteed.” We really wanted to see this movie when it came out in theaters a few months ago, but since it’s an indie film, it wasn’t showing in Kentucky at the time. But now it’s in Redbox (woo!) and we finally…
hiking spencer butte.
It’s Saturday, which means that it’s an Ally-day. Ally-days are the best because I get Eric all to myself for a full day of exploring and fun (although I will admit that I shared today with an Oregon football game). We started our morning with a walk down the street to the Humble Bagel Company…
waterfalls and ocean waves.
In our attempt to fit in everything awesome while the weather is nice, we checked two things off our “Oregon to-do” list on Saturday. A hiking trip to Kentucky Falls and a visit to the Oregon coastline. We were also celebrating our 6-year dating anniversary, which seemed to require an adventure of this magnitude. We…