From Portland, Maine a little over two months ago, we're now in Portland, Oregon on the opposite side of the country! First up we jumped in this tram and headed up the hill for some views over the city.

Portland is plonked along the Willamette and Columbia Rivers immediately south of the Washington state border, and is the largest city in Oregon with a population of about 600,000. Known as the "City of Roses", Portland is noted for its scenic beauty, abundant outdoor activities, and an apparent enthusiasm for beer - it's home to the most total breweries and independent microbreweries of any city in the world. Lovely!

From the hills we headed downtown for a wander. Nice blend of historic and modern architecture, tree-lined streets, and cyclists and cycle lanes everywhere - I like it :)

As well as beer, Portland also has an apparent enthusiasm for mobile food carts - they're everywhere, and offer a huge variety of food goodies.

This is Pioneer Courthouse Square - the central courtyard of downtown Portland occupying a whole city block, and affectionately known as Portland's living room.

In the corner of the square was a little set up claiming the September 11 attacks, 14 years ago today, were an inside job, and the World Trade Center was deliberately destroyed not by the planes, but by explosives rigged throughout the buildings as part of a conspiracy by the US government. What a crock of shit. Needless to say, these people don't really have jobs, or a life.

We all know the Statue of Liberty in New York City - the largest copper statue in the United States. Well here's the second-largest: Portlandia, based on the city seal of Portland. Marvelous.

We eventually wandered up to the Pearl District area, of which one of the most famous things to see is Powell's Books - actually a chain of stores but this particular one here is Powell's headquarters and claims to be the largest independent new and used bookstore in the world. With about 1.6 acres of retail floor space, Powell's inventory for its retail and online sales is over four million new, used, rare, and out-of-print books, and they buy around 3,000 used books a day. A book nerd's paradise.

Just down the road is Voodoo Doughnut, an independent doughnut shop known for its unusual doughnuts and eclectic decor. The menu includes such doughnut goodies as Cock-n-Balls, Tex-Ass, and Old Dirty Bastard hehe. We opted simply for a couple of glazed doughnuts - tried and true :)

We finished up with dinner and drinkies on the 30th floor of the 42-storey U.S. Bancorp Tower - the second-tallest skyscraper in Portland. September 11 might be a good day to avoid tall buildings, in hindsight.

This is the Columbia River, the largest river in the Pacific Northwest region of North America. It also forms most of the border between Washington and Oregon states.

And this is the (very) scenic route running along the Columbia River Gorge, a canyon stretching over 80 miles (130km) as the Columbia winds westwards through the Cascade Range, and our play area for the day.

The gorge features several tall waterfalls and hiking trails of which we picked out a couple to go see, starting with Multnomah Falls here. The two sections of the falls total 620 feet (189m) in height, making this the tallest waterfall in Oregon. The footbridge up there passes 105 feet (32m) above the lower cascade, and being a Saturday it was absolutely packed with tourists; I Photoshopped 'em all out.

Bottom of the upper falls from, as seen from the footbridge.

Further along the gorge is the stunning Oneonta Gorge. There are four waterfalls in there somewhere along the Oneonta Creek, all viewable from a trail. The lowest waterfall is accessible by walking along the floor of the gorge itself, which sounded much more interesting.

A garter snake, commonly found in these parts and harmless to humans. This one was as dead as a rubber snake however, so he was particularly harmless.

The entrance of the gorge is all but completely blocked by this mess. During the 1990s, three massive boulders tumbled into the creek and a log jam subsequently formed behind them. This makes for a perilous and slippery scramble to get into the gorge, which led to a fatality in 2011 when a 22-year-old slipped and drowned in the creek after banging his head on the way down and being knocked unconscious.

With the log jam succesfully conquered we started heading into the gorge, very reminiscent of the very awesome Zion Narrows hike we did last month!

Again, being a Saturday and the back end of summer, this place was packed with people! It's stunning in here nonetheless.

At the end of this section of the gorge is the Lower Oneonta Falls, and again a lot of Photoshopping was required to remove the throng of tourists.

This here is Bridge of the Gods, connecting Washington and Oregon across the Columbia River. This bridge featured in the 2014 movie Wild where Reese Witherspoon's character ended a 94-day hike along part of the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) - a whopping 2,663-mile (4,286km) trail from the Mexican border at bottom of California to the Canadian border at the top of Washington. Incidentally, there is also a road-based 2,500-mile (4,000km) Pacific Crest Bicycle Trail that closely parallels the PCT - I'll keep that in mind.

We spent the first half of today driving south along the Oregon coastline, and laid our eyes on the Pacific Ocean for the first time on the trip. Somewhere out there is New Zealand :)

The latter half of the day is what I was excited about however. I mentioned on the index page for this trip that Stand By Me, at least in part, inspired me at all of six years old to explore the world. And today, that exploration took me to where some of Stand By Me was filmed, in Brownsville, Oregon. Needless to say, this was quite a thing for me :)

The four kids in the movie lived "in a small town in Oregon called Castle Rock". The small town of Brownsville here (population 1,700) was the filming location for that town. In the second scene of the movie, Gordie walks out of the red building above, which looks rather different these days to what it did back in 1986.

After crossing the main street, Gordie then walks down this street here, and eventually to this tree.

This was the kids' tree house, not actually located down that street above but up a hill round the corner. The tree house, which was where I'm standing, has since been removed and the tree itself is now on private property. I got talking to one of the neighbours who told me no one really cares about people 'trespassing' to see the tree; in fact they embrace it. Stand By Me continues to bring in a few tourist dollars, and the town is happy to take them hehe.

Other scenes from the movie... The back of the diner where Gordie accidentally fired the gun Chris had 'borrowed' from his father.

The saloon where Kiefer Sutherland's character (Ace) and fellow gang member discuss the body of the kid around which the whole movie is centred.

The bridge at the end of town that the boys walked under near the end of the movie, and the pedestrian crossing where Vern found the penny hehe.

Teddy walking home as the boys went their separate ways.

A panorama of that same scene. Vern walked off to the right after finding the penny, Teddy walked off to the left, and Gordie and Chris continued walking through the town.

The final scene with Gordie and Chris looking over the town by the tree house. Every July 23rd, Brownsville celebrates Stand By Me Day, complete with a full schedule of events based around the movie. Next year is the 30th anniversary of the movie's release, so that ought to be a good day! There's one more scene (probably the most famous) that wasn't shot around here but in northern California. We'll be checking that one out in a few days :)

Last night we stayed right here - the real Springfield after which the fictional town of Springfield in The Simpsons is named: Springfield, Oregon! There are about 40 Springfields spread across the USA, and there was always speculation around which of them was the real namesake for the show. In 2011, more than 20 years after show first aired, creator Matt Groening finally confirmed it was this one, which shouldn't be a surprise given Groening grew up just down the road in Portland.

Springfield contains several murals, including this one that went up just over a year ago in collaboration with Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. Directly below the mural are the handprints of 'Lisa Simpson', really Yeardley Smith who voices Lisa in the show. Very cool :)

After leaving Springfield we starting heading through the stunning Willamette National Forest. The forest covers 1.7 million acres, stretching for over 100 miles (160km) along the western slopes of the Cascade Range. There are more of the usual waterfalls and hiking trails throughout, but just even just driving through the forest is awesome!

We did do one hike however, through very rocky terrain.

Hidden in the trees there is Lower Proxy Falls.

Two separate waterfalls constitue Proxy Falls, of which the 226-foot (69m) lower fall here is the most photogenic and probably one of the most famous, regularly appearing on calendars and in photo books and the like. Given we're now getting into autumn, the water flow is pretty low at the moment. During spring the falls extend all the way across to the right and the creek is roaring.

The mossy backdrop and cascading veil make the these falls particularly beautiful, and Kristina and I had the whole place almost completely to ourselves (hooray for Mondays ;)

This is Sparks Lake, looking absolutely nothing like the photos I saw of it when researching our route hehe. The lake in fact is a natural rock dam that captures snowmelt and rain water. However, although it has no visible surface outlet to a river or whatever, the water actually leaks out through fractures and cracks in the lava rock of the lake floor. So, like a giant bathtub, the water slowly drains out over time. Given there's no melting snow and very little rain at the moment to maintain the water level, it's a pretty unimpressive sight. Oh well.

Until next year.

Other lakes in the area are still looking good, but the most impressive of them all is probably...

...this guy!

This is Crater Lake, the deepest in the US at 1,943 feet (592m) and famous for its deep blue colour and water clarity. That colour and clarity is due to the water being some of the purest in the world, and certainly the cleanest large body of water in the world. The lake has no inlets or tributaries, and is nothing more than snowmelt and rainwater (which sufficiently compensates for evaporation). The lake sits inside a 7,700-year-old caldera, formed when a volcano collapsed after a major eruption (perhaps the largest eruption in North America in the last 640,000 years).

A subsequent eruption is responsible for forming the cinder cone Wizard Island here, peaking at about 755 feet (230m) above the lake surface.

In the sunshine the lake's deep blue colour is really emphasised; Wizard Island could almost be a Caribbean Island :) That was our final stop in Oregon - tomorrow we start the first of three weeks in California!