Our vacation continued in Portland (because it’s important to vacation in your own town) with a visit to Hopscotch, an immersive art experience.
I loved this mural, and would love to have the artist paint a mural on the side of our house. Someday, maybe.
This installation was made of plastic garbage bags, and the lights changed colors making things seem otherworldly.
Here’s a close-up with slightly different colors.
This was my favorite installation. Because a ball pit is a very fun thing, especially when not in a Chuck E Cheese and with fun lighting.
Matt really liked this room, but I did not. You put on a headset that showed you, but from a different perspective. Then you got to walk around and shoot a basket and other fun things while dealing with that perspective.
This installation was a maze of neon.
From there, we went to Clarklewis and had a delicious dinner and many, many people wished us a happy anniversary (and also engaged us in conversation about our wedding.)
In Sisters, the air quality was terrible. Smoke from two forest fires was funneled right into the town. Because of that, we didn’t do any walking back and forth to the downtown area as I did on my last visit. But our very large room was a perfect place to hole up.
On Monday night we saw Blue Beetle at the Sisters Movie House and concluded that while Blue Beetle didn’t want to hurt anyone, he didn’t mind if his family did.
We also did another Exit escape room game, getting out of the labyrinth in just under an hour and a half.
On Tuesday, we stayed inside and played another escape room game, this one called the Deserted Lighthouse. It included four puzzles that you had to assemble in order to solve it, plus other things. I didn’t love it. Putting puzzles together while a timer is ticking isn’t my favorite thing. And we didn’t do very well, I think maybe getting 2 stars out of ten.
From there we drove to downtown Sisters to find food and stopped in at the Open Door to see if they happened to have a table. They had us wait a few minutes because someone was a no-show for their reservation and they wanted to see if they would appear. They did not, and we had a delicious dinner. Thanks, Open Door.
On Wednesday, after eating breakfast and lounging around, we took our timer photo and headed home.
On the way there, we stopped at On Any Sundae, and had a frozen treat. I tried the frozen “lasagna,” which was many layers of delicious fun. Matt got an overstuffed waffle cone. Both were quite good.
On the previous day, we left the Walker Trail Trailhead and headed to Lakeview for some lunch. We heard a squeal. It was intermittent, so at first we ignored it. Eventually we pulled over and had a look. But we know little about cars, so that wasn’t helpful. On we continued to Lakeview where we ate at a Chinese restaurant and headed back to our lodgings. Unfortunately, as we drove through town the squealing was super loud, so much so that people’s heads were turning. We pulled over and again looked at where we thought the source was, our front tire.
A man in a truck pulled over, immediately diagnosed the problem as a rock stuck in the wheel. He first crawled under the car to see if he could work the rock out that way. That didn’t work, so he asked us to pull the car up onto the curb and did another check. No rock. From there, he got a jack out of his truck and asked for our tire iron. That’s the level of car knowledge I have, so we could supply that. He took off the tire, but no dice. Back to the truck he went for more tools and he disassembled the breaks. It was at this point I did feel a prickle of worry that he might not be able to put things back together, but it was late afternoon on Sunday in a small town, so he was probably our best bet.
It turned out the rock was buried as deep as it could be in the workings of the tire. Our good Samaritan found it, reassembled everything, and was on his way. We compensated him for his time because when someone helps two city folk with no car knowledge in a small town, that is a very lucky thing.
We took the rock with us, and here Matt is modeling it for the camera.
So tiny, yet so loud! The rock then joined the other rocks in the driveway of our cabin.
On this day, it had rained all night and into the morning which wasn’t great for stargazing, but made for a cozy night playing board games in the cabin.
From there, we took the very long way to Bend taking Highway 395 past Lake Albert over to Highway 20. On Highway 20, driving became normal again, with much traffic. We stopped at Hampton Station for lunch and found it was overwhelmed with customers and almost out of food. Our sandwich choices were limited, but they were good.
In Bend, we did a Riddle Route and had fun exploring the city that way. I grabbed this picture of a very stripy couple walking while we were on our route.
The air quality in downtown Bend was hazy, but not terrible. But once we got to the north part of the city it was very smoky and then increasingly smoky on our drive to Sisters, where we checked into 5 Pine Lodge and shut ourselves in for the night.
We took a drive to see if we could find the place where hang gliders launched. The dirt roads challenged our Honda Civic, and we ended up pulling over and Matt exploring the last bit by foot. We then looped back to a scenic lookout for a picture.
We then did a short hike on the Walker Trail, going nowhere near the 30 mile length of the trail, but appreciating the scenery.
I liked these dollops of bright red-orange against the greens and browns on the trail.
From there, we went to Lakeview for lunch. On the way, an intermittent screeching began. More on that tomorrow. In the meantime, here is another pretty view of our cabin. While the cabin is darling, we discovered that the screens weren’t tightly fit into the windows and it got a little buggy inside once the sun went down. I’ve set my sights on the Sunrise or Sunset cabins for our next visit.
Some time ago, Matt brought home two escape room games. Exit has created at-home escape rooms, which are brilliant. For less than the cost of one person attending an escape room, one to four players can “escape” from the scenario. There’s also no having to work in teams with people you’ve never met before, a thing I don’t love about real escape rooms.
We worked through the various rooms and escaped from the museum.
At the end, you can fill out your certificate.
If you use the app, it keeps time for you, and then you can enter your information and get a star rating. We got 8 out of 10.
While card game “rooms” don’t provide some of the surprises we’ve found in physical escape rooms, this was a fun experience I would like to repeat.
As with many things, we dropped the ball on making reservations for Matt’s birthday celebration (the just-us dinner) and so the celebration happened almost a month after his birthday.
But Arden was worth the wait. We had the four-course prix fixe menu and I would swear that there were about seven courses in that four-course dinner.
The dinner ended with a Basque-style cheesecake and for Matt a little scoop of sorbet and a birthday candle to blow out.
Somewhat recently, Emperor Georgiou’s Tea Room, set up (tea) shop in Kenton. Matt decided to celebrate his birthday there so we could experience the tea.
Some pretty cups.
One of our platters of food. While no service job is easy, being a wait staff at a tea shop does have its advantages: a very limited menu; a set timeframe; the inability for people to become inebriated by consuming the product.
I grabbed a picture of Matt and his mom, Linda. I neglected to catch the rest of the table.
When we redid the side yard to feature native plants, I planted two bushes, one to the left of the door and one in the front bed. This is the first year they have really popped.
To the right of the door is Oceanspray (Holodiscus discolor) which has done a great job of growing in the shade of the flowering plum tree. It has also behaved by growing up more than out, giving us a bit of a screen in front of the porch. I have done a bit of pruning to keep it from shooting out to the sidewalk, but not very much. It’s a very vertical plant.
I was excited to plant Syringa or Lewis’s Mock Orange (Philadelphus lewisii) because it’s the Idaho state flower, and I’ve always like to say the word “Syringa.” It has also done a great job growing mostly upward, though it needs a little more pruning than the Oceanspray. And it tends to fall over, if not anchored to a stake. But it’s very pretty in general and I love the white flowers. The USDA fact sheet says Native Americans used it for arrow shafts, combs, bowls, cradles, and other things.
Here’s to success in landscaping, especially landscaping carried out by a person with few landscaping skills.
