Twisp of Fate

After we left Ashland & Medford, we drove up to Portland, OR.  No trip to Portland is complete (for me) without a visit to the Pendleton Mill Outlet Store in Milwaukee (SE of Portland, on the other side of the Willamette River).  This is where I forage for materials for rug weaving.  We barely got there on Thursday before their closing time, and I picked up some blanket selvage material, but also found out their weekly shipment from the mill comes in on Thursday night, and the pickings would be even better on Friday morning.

We did go back the next morning, and I took quite a few pictures in their new tapestry gallery, which I will save for the next post.

We stayed the night with our good friends who own The Real Mother Goose Gallery in downtown Portland (with a second store at the Portland Airport).  Rick had built new cabinets for their living room last summer, and since I had been there last they had finished the fireplace installation, and furnished it with books and lots of beautiful pieces of art and crafts from their collection:

On Friday we returned to the mill store, and also did some other shopping, at which point the car was so stuffed full of things we could barely move!  By early afternoon we headed north to Lake Quinalt on the west side of the Olympic Peninsula, between Aberdeen and Forks.  This is where our friends own and operate Lochaerie Resort on the North Shore of the lake, actually inside Olympic National Park.

Lochaerie Resort is a real gem – 5 housekeeping cabins that were mostly built in the 1920’s and 1930’s, with one that was built in the 1960’s.  The main house was originally used as a boarding house, and to say the whole place had fallen into a state of disrepair when our friends bought it a couple of decades ago, is an understatement.  They have done what they could over the years, with marked improvements since they bought out their partners.  But they have always had an onsite manager, as they were still living and working in the Seattle area.  This year, they are rebuilding the main house to be their home, and will be living there and managing it themselves from now on.

Once a year, around the end of June, they invite a group of friends to come out, stay in the cabins, and participate in the Quinalt Rain Forest Bike Ride to benefit the Lake Quinalt Cancer Fund.  It’s a 31-mile ride which takes you along the north shore, up the Quinalt River valley to a bridge, back down the south shore and then a couple of miles along the highway in the vicinity of Amanda Park.

We actually had gorgeous weather, sunny with temperatures in the 60’s and low 70’s.  This seemed like blessing given how wet the spring and early summer has been (and, they call it the rain forest for a reason….)  Rick and I made it from Lochaerie around to the Rain Forest Resort on the south shore, just north of the Lake Quinalt Lodge.  That was 20 of the 31 miles.  This was better than we expected to do, since it is the first time we have attempted this ride on our little folding Dahon bikes instead of mountain bikes.  At least half of the ride was on dirt/gravel road so our little tires and our legs did quite well.  Our behinds, not so much.

Here we are about halfway around, at the bridge over the Quinalt River:

Sunday we drove home to the Methow, about 7 hours of driving from Lake Quinalt.  As always, glad to be home!