Back from Oregon

We've gotten a little rusty about road trips over the past year. Since our oldest son left on his mission, we've only ventured out of state to attend one family wedding, then we hurried quickly home again.

But last week we took off to attend my best friend's daughter's wedding in Seattle. On the way home, we made a loop along the northern coast of Oregon and through Portland, an area I had not visited since I was five and barely remembered at all.

And we tried to let ourselves have fun without our chief navigator in the backseat. For the most part, we succeeded. It was a great trip. (We did send Taylor a total of six postcards -- he was never far from our thoughts.)

Now that I've been home for almost two days, I find that I am reflecting back on the unfamiliar areas we traveled through. Here are some of my impressions of the Oregon part of our trip:

* I had expected coastal Oregon to be as modern and sophisticated as coastal California. It wasn't. It's an area unspoiled by chain stores, which gives it an almost primitive feel -- 1974ish -- like it hadn't really changed all that much since my previous visit in 1969. There were no storefronts putting on airs along the coast, no malls, no fancy boardwalks or elegant restaurants or ritzy hotels. It was all woods and ocean. The buildings along Highway 1 were coated in perpetually pealing paint. The boats we saw were weathered, too, and the people were regular people, susrprisingly friendly (given Oregon's reputation) and unpretentious.

So I liked the coast of northern Oregon. It was charming and natural and stunningly beautiful, but I wasn't quite at home there. (When we travel, aren't we subconsciously looking for new places to call home?)

* The buzz on Portland is how progressive it is (i.e., how environmentally sensitive it is.) It still has a bit of a hippie feel. (By the end of our visit, we had abbreviated the local bumper sticker to three initials: KPW for "Keep Portland Weird.") It was green and beautiful and very modern. We enjoyed three things in Portland: the rose garden (where most of the hundreds of visitors had their noses in flowers, prompting my husband to remark that we were behaving like bees); Powell's Book Store (the largest independently owned book store in the world; the sheer size of the place gave me renewed courage that maybe I could publish a book -- apparently millions of people already have!), and the incomparable Japanese Garden (the finest in the world outside of Japan.)

We passed several waterfalls and the Columbia River Gorge driving home, and it was all beautiful and awe-inspiring.

But deep inside I am still a girl from Kansas, and like Dorothy, the most famous girl from Kansas, I have to agree: There's no place like home! There's no place like home!

And that's true no matter where home is or what it looks like. (No matter how long the grass has grown or how high the laundry pile is or how dry and barren the landscape....)

It's good to be home!