Moving on.......

The last couple photo's before leaving the Portland area and going east in the Columbia River Gorge.

Granny and Riley prepare one last pancake breakfast.

Our last night we went out for Mexican food with Jason, Lisa and Riley and unbenounced to me, Jason had told the waiter we were celebrating Opa's 65th birthday. I was embarrassingly serenaded with Happy Birthday in spanish and english.

Willamette Falls upstream as water flows past mostly abandoned or long closed dilapidated factories.

It took a while but we finally found (or at least saw) and photographed the Willamette Locks from the Oregon City bridge in the rain.

Okay, we are really leaving the Portland area today. We had showers while driving east on highway #84 towards Arlington.

Little known is the RV park at the Port of Arlington. While small, it does provide full hook-ups on in cooler river environment for only $21 per night.

Least anyone think we only park in the nicest parks, here is one of the 20 plus trains traveling in or out of Portland up the gorge.

Time will tell whether we get used to the trains but when you live on a "fixed income" you'd better learn to roll with the punches.

As you can see we are sandwiched between the river, wheat granary, dock, highway and trains...if we can sleep through this, we can sleep through anything!

Took a short drive as soon as we got set up at the RV park (it's what we do) and found that Arlington is ground zero for wind generators. Man, these blades are big and three of them go onto each tower.

Las Vegas in the 1990's and 2000's was the crane capital with all the buildings going up, well Arlington is now the 'wind generaor' capital of Oregon

How would you like to be the guy that bolts these 100+ nuts onto each of three blades per tower?

It's beautiful country once you can get off the major roads. 

The old Rock Creek School house was moved to this intersection and is now used as  community center. There was nothing at this intersection, or for a few miles, in either way.

I was slightly perplexed because of the way in which the routes were mapped.

This large wheat farm and the ones nearby were hurting because of the lack of adequate winter rain.

Field on the left has yet to be cut but the field across the road is ready for plowing.