The Great American Road Trip - Exploring Hood River

Continued from Driving to Hood River, Oregon.

I stepped out of our motel in Hood River, which was settled cozily between Interstate 84 and the Columbia River Gorge. If you have never been to the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area, I highly recommend it. There are mossy forests, stunning scenic views of the gorge, waterfalls, and some amazing hiking. So anyway, I stepped out of the motel room to take Poppy for a jog. The sun was warming up and there was a cool breeze. Wow, it was really breezy. Actually, I think it is downright windy. But I have heard the kitesurfing is the king of sports here, so I guess its to be expected.

The Columbia River Gorge, view from near our motel.

After the jog, Paul and I head downtown to the Dog River Cafe where I heard they served Stumptown Coffee, another recommendation of mine, if you find yourself in the greater Portland area.

Dog River Cafe

The highlights of our morning include: watching the windsurfers at the waterfront park and trying to get Poppy to fetch a stick in the river, hiking six blocks of stairs built into the hillsides above downtown in the residential neighborhoods, eating bland and overly-stuffed-with-lettuce tacos downtown, ordering freshly made juice from the Juice Brothers cart while talking to a local about Hood River as well as the guy Matt, the juice guy, and watching Tibetan monks create a sand mandala at the library.

Downtown

View of Downtown with the Columbia River in the distance.

The Waterfront Park

Another View of Downtown and the neighborhoods above.

A view of Downtown as we climb the hill above town.

Matt, the Juice Guy, from Juice Brothers.

Tibetan Monks

After all that excitement, we decide to drive around the surrounding rural area. The Hood River Valley is rolling green with orchards and vineyards. The back roads are winding, hilly and fun to drive. After meandering to the end of the paved road near the top of a mountain, we made our way along the fruit loop and wine loop and stop at Apple Valley Country Store along the Hood River where I sample and purchase some Huckleberry and Marionberry jam.

Hood River Valley with a faint view of Mount Hood.

Poppy, enjoying the countryside from the car window.

A fun, hilly country road.

The Hood River Valley

A view of Mount Adams in Washington.

Another hilly road in the rural Hood River Valley.

After a Paul and Poppy nap back at the motel, Paul and I head out for an early dinner. We go to the Trillium Cafe, which I hear is a low-key sort of local place with simple food. We order beer and food and a large, bald, middle aged man sits down next to me. We start to talk to him and learn he is from Sacramento and is in Hood River for a month to learn to teach yoga. Interesting. He continues to talk and I politely listen until I start to overhear the women in her early thirties sitting next to Paul telling him about having all kinds of exciting sexual encounters with multiple men at the Cannes Film Festival in France this past spring. Okay, what the hell is going on? Meet Vita.

Vita

Vita is from Vancouver, Washington. She mentored a group of film students at the Cannes Film Festival and decided to take advantage of every single opportunity that came her way in Cannes. It sounded like an adventure in celebrities, exquisite and lavish parties, lots and lots of booze, debauchery, and basically having sex or at least making out with many, many people. She continued to tell us the sad tales of her broken heart love stories, which included a poet from Milwaukee who had enough of her three dogs. She lamented about the only available bachelors in the small town where she is living with her parents are the 18-year old high school quarterback and the mid-fifties former child molester. Hence, she is Hood River.

Chris

In the midst of these thrilling tales, we meet Matt, the juice guy, again and he joins our conversation, reiterating that Hood River is a really cool place. Then comes in Chris, who says he is from Seattle but also owns a condo in Huntington Beach, is a chiropractor, has a better voice than Layne Staley, plays in a band (who he probably thinks is better than Alice in Chains) is recently divorced and is hanging out in Hood River with some friends. Naturally, Vita and Chris end up hooking up outside, where I will save you the description of what I saw when we stopped to say goodbye. I did manage to talk to both bartenders, both from Portland, who both said that Hood River is really the greatest place on earth. Well, we'll see.

People in Puerto Vallarta

Its Leap Day, I just had to say that. When I was a little girl I asked for a globe of the world, which I received for Christmas or my birthday, I can't remember which. I loved looking at the globe, wondering about all the different places and what they were like. To this day, I still love looking at maps, with more knowledge of the people, countries, cultures and my mouth waters at the thought of traveling somewhere new.

When I travel and take pictures, most of my images are of landscapes and buildings, but rarely of people. I have discovered that some of my favorite images are of people and I have become kind of bored with one landscape after another. I am tired of being frustrated with people "getting in my picture". So, I decided to make a point of photographing people, as a way of capturing a sense of a place, in Puerto Vallarta.

Yes, sometimes I feel like it is a bit of an intrusion on people's private lives, but I remind myself it is not spying, it is out of appreciation and an attempt at understanding more than just buildings and scenery. It was a rewarding experience. I liked seeing people going about their daily lives and how it is different or the same as my own. I posted a collection of more than 90 photographs of people doing normal things in Puerto Vallarta on Flickr. If you would like to see all of them, including their captions explaining a little more about the image please visit my People in Puerto Vallarta set on Flickr. In these photographs I feel like it tells the tale of adventure of ordinary life - in Puerto Vallarta.

Here is a sample of some of those photos:

In addition to the many candid photographs, I also took some portraits as part of my 100 Strangers Project on Flickr. Here are some of my favorite portraits that I took in Mexico as part of that project. Please click on the link for each stranger to read the write up for each encounter.

Stranger #46

Stranger #51

Stranger #50

I'll leave you with one of my favorite photograph's from Mexico:

Stranger #52

The Battle of Relxation in Mexico

So it came to be that I am in Mexico. I will spare you the details as to why, other than we are here to meet up with my husband's birth mother (whom he reunited with five months ago), her husband, her various cousins and their spouses. We are were assured that it would be a relaxed vacation with no strings attached to how much or how little time we wished to spend with them, since most of the group come here every year to get away, relax, read and nap.

Most of my life I imagined Mexico as a vacation place for college kids on spring break and unadventurous adults who wished to travel to all-inclusive resorts where they could over-indulge in food, drink, sun and laziness. That was until I heard of Oaxaca, a place of culture and beauty, which calls to me strongly and tempts my curiosity, like an adventure. But we are not in Oaxaca, we are in Puerto Vallarta, and I am sitting on a bugenvilia fringed balcony overlooking palm trees and sand along the Banderias Bay with the mountains spilling out buildings of central Puerto Vallarta all the way down to the water. 

This is my first time to Mexico, unless you count the couple of hours I spent in Juarez (after walking across the border from El Paso), which is not a place I recommend, especially considering all the kidnappings and murders you hear about on the news that occur in this hotbed of Mexican crime. Which brings me to another thought, I was a little nervous about traveling to Mexico right now, especially since the U.S. State Department issued a new warning to halt all non-essential travel to Mexico a few days before our departure, it turns out Puerto Vallarta is still okay.

The plane ride seemed really long and I finished the first book I brought with me, The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. I decided that it is an extremely awkward choice of a book to start a vacation, if you are like me. If you don't know what the book is about, here is a short synopsis - an American born Chinese woman is determined to bring up her daughters in America the Chinese way, which means they are required to be the top student in school, study Mandarin, do manual labor, show utmost respect and loyalty to their mother even when she is a tyrant, refrain from having friends, always do exactly what is expected of you even if that means relinquishing any hope for your own happiness, forget about having fun and study classical music five or six hours a day, even on vacation and when they are sick. She claims it backfires, sort of, but not really.

If you are like me and feel your own part-Asian guilt strings pulling at you then you might understand why a vacation that promises ten days of leisure, with no more expectations other than to drink, eat, sleep, read, nap and relax, might push you into the uncomfortable zone. In very few ways did I grow up like the Tiger Mother's kids, but I did grow up with a half-Asian mom with a work ethic that makes you exhausted just hearing about it. She was my role model and now I have had a very hard time determining for myself just how much I should push myself and what is a balanced life for me.

There is a battle going on. Sitting around to "relax" is torture but I have also come to realize that I push through the agonizing pain of the weight of too many expectations on my shoulders, most of which were placed there by me. What is haunting me is the addictive promise of what hard work, dedication, discipline and focus can bring you, like it did for the Tiger Mother's kids, sort of. Yet, there is an iconoclast that lives within me trying desperately to tear down these beliefs and whisper the truth. Now I am stuck in the middle, with nowhere to go, except maybe Mexico.

We are here in the open air reception area of our hotel, greeted by my husband's birth mother and her husband. The skies open up and rain comes down like a waterfall. It is a beautiful downpour. Welcome to Mexico.

The skies clear quickly and we go to a cousin's multi-floor rental overlooking the water. We meet some family for the first time, drink and eat into the night.

Our balcony doors are open through the night and the sound of the hotel staff setting up for breakfast in the outdoor dining area six floors below our room wakes me at 6 a.m. After some time I fall back asleep and sleep until 10 a.m.

We catch a Mexican bus, for six pesos each, and go into central Puerto Vallarta. We walk along the water and through the streets and down on the beach. We stop at a beachside restaurant for an early dinner. After some more walking around town, we watch some live music in the square in front of the cathedral, then we notice the amazing sunset. We manage to catch the Mexican bus back to our hotel.

I'm not sure how this vacation is going to shape up, its been very nice so far and I can't complain about the view.

Its good to be here.