Post Camping Fun

(better late than never…which applies to a lot of posts right now!)
After we left the campsite on Saturday (on our way back to the traffic jam that was Portland) we did some more fun things. First we crossed the "Bridge of the Gods" (I didn't see much about it that was God-like...)


and then went to the Bonneville Dam.


We were excited to see several salmon swim up the fish ladders,
but the highlight of that tour was definitely seeing the lamprey fish.  Seriously, I have never seen anything as bizarre as their perfectly round mouths   attached to the fish ladder viewing windows while they held on to rest for their upstream swim.  They were so strange that we thought at first that they were something that was attached to the windows to show how fast the water was moving.

Here’s a little video I took so that you can see them in action.  Normally I mute the videos but if you listen you can hear Russ reading the info about the Pacific Lamprey.

We had a nice picnic lunch near the dam and enjoyed watching the water and the wildflowers.

We left the dam (we did not get to drive on the "dam access road,") and then drove to a scenic part of the highway that was just littered with waterfalls. Seriously, Hawaii doesn't have anything on Oregon for waterfalls. We saw quite a few that were right by the road, and then hiked to another that was in a scenic grotto that couldn't have been prettier if it was designed by Hollywood. After that hike I decided that I was probably never going to be able to walk again, and that's when we headed on to Portland.



If you’re wondering why we only have one child with us in the waterfall pictures, Jared & Josh decided to skip out on the post-campout fun and went straight back to Hillsboro.  And Rachel was so tired and cranky that she didn’t want to get out of the van to see any waterfalls.  We left her in the van to take the short hike and she took a nap and was much more cheerful when we got back.

The only bad part of the trip was the traffic. It was supposed to only take us an hour and a half to get there, but Russ & I both managed to hit terrible Portland traffic on our way to Beacon Rock. I figured we'd have no problem driving back on Saturday but no, they were doing road construction in downtown Portland and had an entire section of interstate shut down. The upside of the construction was that we ended up driving through a different section of Portland with some really amazing houses and some other neat views.