Mount Hood - Columbia River Gorge Loop

This post is about tours in US. I don't know how you guys experience all the beautifully advertised tours, but I DESPISE them. As you can see, my little family despises them too 😴.

Long story short, we took a train through Mt. Hood in Oregon. This place is magical - gorgeous valleys full of fruit trees, grapevines and rivers. When you travel in a car and see train tracks everywhere, a train ride sounds like the best idea ever for a day trip.

But again and again I realize that what a brochure would call exciting and marvelous is far away from my imagination of what a good time is 😅.

Summarizing and generalizing all the touring experiences I had in the US, I can say that the tour route is usually subpar, the food along the way is dry (your choice of a sandwich or a burger) paired with the cheapest wine. You also get to hear plenty of silly jokes by the tour guide and take lots of pictures at the end. That's it.

We ended up sleeping on the way back and felt like the day was wasted. In the end, we have lots of photos and -$80 from our budget.

But wait!!! WHAT ABOUT PORTLAND? Hmmm.

1. The RV parks here are huge! There were 450+ spots in the park we stayed at.

2. Powell's book store - AMAZING. It was our second time here and after an hour or more we left with "Logic of Games" and "The road to Jonestown". What a huge gap in tastes, right?

3. Place to eat? We have not found anything special to recommend, but we still managed to make a great purchase - a drinking water flask from a cozy urban boutique corner.

To sum up the whole Oregon state, we can recommend two random places to eat: Terra & Sintra. Between the bigger cities, there is absolutely nothing to eat. No stores with anything but frozen prepared meals and alcohol, no restaurants. It was shocking to find half empty shelves in grocery stores. The view was similar to the pictures old Soviet Union stores.