An aerial view of Portland

A month ago, I found out during a work trip to San Diego that a co-worker of mine has been flying planes as a hobby for the last 15 years. Sweet! I offered up my services as a good traveling companion if he ever wanted someone to fly with. Well...he took me up on my offer a few weeks later, and we rented a Cessna 182 after work one day. It was a 4-seater plane, so we took up another co-worker with us.

Below are some pics/videos from the flight. Much cooler than seeing the Portland area from a commercial airliner because we were able to fly really close (5,000 - 10,000 ft) to everything. In the last video of this blog, we capture zero gravity...David (our pilot) essentially took the plane straight up and then straight down causing things (such as my co-worker Brian's phone) to be weightless.
This pic is actually of me post-flight by the plane (to give you an idea of what we rode in)...let's just say with all of David's cowboy maneuvers that I'm surprised I didn't throw up during the flight...but I was mighty close :) It was cool watching David do all the pre-flight safety check, and he was great at explaining everything to us as he was doing it.
We first flew East of Portland through the Gorge. As you can see, this area is probably some of the prettiest landscape you'll find in America: rocky hills full of green trees, snow-capped mountains, waterfalls, rivers, etc. I captured some of the flight through the Gorge in the other video at the end of this post. The pic above is of Multnomah Falls.
Below us in this pic is Bonneville Lock and Dam. It's amazing how you can see a whole other side of Portland from being up in the air.
It was a fairly clear day so we actually got some good views of Mt. Rainier, Mt. Hood, the Three Sisters, and finally Mt. St. Helens as seen in this picture. Here is a pic of us coming up to the mountain.
As we flew around Mt. St. Helens, we got a great shot of the clouds surrounding the crater.
An inside view of the crater in Mt. St. Helens. It's still an active volcano, so we could actually see some steam coming from the little nub you see inside the crater.
Around Mt. St. Helens is gorgeous with the Cascade Mountains. These pics were taken just 2 weeks ago...yes, there's still snow in May here!
Just North of Mt. St. Helens is Spirit Lake. It used to be a popular place to visit, but then Mt. St. Helens erupted in 1980 causing the lake water to be toxic and uninhabitable. Also, as you can see in this picture, a good portion of the trees that the eruption took out were pushed into this lake and now covers a large portion of the lake. In the picture, the logs are all off to one side of the lake, most likely due to where the wind has been pushing them lately :)
So David gave me the opportunity to fly the plane for 10 min.. Hrmm...are you sure you want to trust your life to me?? ;) It's interesting how as soon as I was in control of the plane that I no longer felt like I needed to throw up; actually, the tides turned and our pilot was starting to get a little airsick from my shifting us up and down in elevation :)
Here we are approaching Portland from the North.
A closer shot of downtown.

Below are the 2 videos I mentioned earlier. I grabbed a quick video of what the flight felt like and our view of the Gorge in the first video. Also, you'll see that we fly by a vista point, which is a popular place to stop to get a great camera shot of the Gorge (when you're on land that is...). At the end of the video, David is playing around by tilting the plane to the side, hence the bad video shot.

Iceland, Day 1

OK, we are again slow to get pics up....the next few installments of the blog will cover our trip to Iceland in March. Some think we are crazy to go to Iceland during the winter, but it is really not that cold (40 degrees most of the time we were there). The landscape ranged from the beautiful to bizarre, with all of it being quite surreal. There were many times when you almost felt like you could be on another planet. The small island has many natural wonders; we highly recommend a visit if you like to see nature at its best. Sure, you can see waterfalls, volcanoes, hot springs, black sand beaches, mountains, and glaciers in several other places in the world.....but this place packs them all into a small island that is easy to conquer in a few days and only a few hours of driving. The only thing it lacks is trees....now that we have become treehuggers in Portland, we kinda missed our arbors. :)

We started our trip in Seattle....because that's where the cheap flights are. Em was in Chicago for a Northwestern Alumni meeting on Friday and Saturday, so she flew from Chi-town to Seattle. I got in a great day of solo snowboarding on Saturday (they had new powder so I couldn't resist), went home to do a Clark Kent, then hit the road to Seattle. The 70 mph speed limits ensure a quick jaunt between the two cities. We met up late Saturday night with Jo and Clayton and crashed at their pad for the night.

We woke up the next morning to have brunch in Ballard with Jo and Clayton, check out the farmer's market, then scoot to the airport to almost miss our flight. Daylight Savings Time almost killed our trip; we had accounted for the time change, but our tickets didn't. The tickets said 4:30 so we thought we had plenty of time when we leisurely walked up to the gate at 3PM.....well, the tickets should have said 3:30 PM. Somehow they screwed up the time adjustment. Oh well, it is a good thing we were early. We basically walked right onto the plane. It's all good, I hate wasting my time in the terminal anyways.....let's get this show on the road.

7 hr direct flight Seattle to Iceland. Can't beat that!! Wake up the next morning, BAM!, you're in Reykjavik eating marinated cod and caviar for breakfast. This is how we roll.

Iceland sits on the mid-Atlantic ridge and has an ever-changing landscape due to the constant shifting of the tectonic plates. Couple this with melting glaciers in the spring, and you have a recipe for picture-perfect waterfalls. Our first day involved a trek along the south side of the island. Here are the major waterfalls:

Seljalandsfoss

Em hiking up a treacherous path to get a better view of Seljalandsfoss

Along the way, we saw some of the famous Icelandic horses....they were very beautiful, and I wish we could have gotten close enough to pet them because their fur looks very thick and soft.

There were a few farms scattered about the countryside....definitely few and far between. The entire country only has 300,000 inhabitants, and 200,000 of them live in the capital city of Reykjavik.

As the horizon stretched upwards, it seemed to be split between the land and the glacier above. At times it was hard to decipher whether you were looking at clouds in the sky or a glacier upon high.

As we approached Skogafoss, the mist coming off the falls created a perfect canvas for the sun to paint a rainbow. We couldn't have planned better conditions for this Kodak moment. Em wouldn't let me go diving in the ice-cold water for a chance at the pot o gold. Oh well.

Once again, we let our adventurous side get the better of us, so we decided to climb up for a better view. The trail dead-ended on a precipice with a thousand foot dropoff in each direction. I gotta admit, my knees got a little weak when I looked over each edge....the strong winds that day did not help the situation either.

I risked falling to certain death just to get this shot, so I hope you enjoy it! ;) Look at the people below for perspective of how high we climbed!!

We saw some sod houses along the countryside.....remember how I told you there are not a lot of trees?

We walked on the black sand at Reynisfjara Beach, which also had some amazing rock formations created from the volcanic activity.

columns of rock at Dyrholaey

The last stop of the day was Solheimajokull to visit the glacier. I only wish we had brought some crampons to further explore its vast beauty. We did find a few ice caves to crawl into and explore some natural ice sculptures.

inside an ice cave - the ice really is that blue!!

We got back to the hotel at dusk and decided to head downtown to grab some dinner and stroll around the capital city of Reykjavik. We were supposed to go see the Northern Lights at night, but our tour was canceled due to the overcast conditions. I didn't really notice it was overcast....guess I have been living in Portland too long.

Em downtown at dusk

There is a really serene lake in the middle of downtown with cottages perched all around and plenty of waterfowl; kind of like a Bob Ross painting, but without all the happy little trees.

....and that was just Day 1!!

(to be continued...)