…we could totally live in Portland, Oregon.

It’s gorgeous, outdoorsy, full of great culture and live music and even has fantastic coffee which we enjoy at Stumptown Coffee Roasters adjacent to the lobby of the ultra-hip (in a good way) Ace Hotel (thanks for the tip, Miss J).

The place also has the best farmer’s market we’ve ever seen—it’s like having a meal just walking through it. The bounty almost makes us sorry we’re staying in the Hotel Deluxe, a Golden Age of Hollywood (think Kate Hepburn, not Kate Hudson) inspired luxury boutique hotel, instead of in our Airstream where we could go nuts and (over) stock the kitchen.

We can’t resist the peaches (juice down to your elbow) and a great crusty loaf of fresh baked bread and we turn those purchases into a light breakfast for the next few days—and we require a light breakfast with all the great food we’re indulging in the rest of the day.

So many compelling new restaurants have opened in Portland this summer (on top of all the great ones that already flourish in this foodie town) and we can now personally vouch for newcomers DOC (24 seats of inventive Italian bliss), belly (pleasingly heavy on the pig) and a place called 50 Plates that offers up regional favorites from across the country (Cincinnati Style Chili, Buffalo Tamale Pie, Hot Brown from Louisville to name a few). 50 Plates even has an absolutely delicious cocktail called The Road Trip and we may have had more than one of them…

Portland's Classical Chinese Gardens is a suprising oasis right in downtown.

We’re also lucky to be in town during a visit by our friend Justin who’s from Portland and we meet up with him one night to go see the Robert Walter Trio featuring Johnny Vidacovich, one of our favorite drummers, for a show at Doug Fir. In addition to a very comfortable little music venue, the Doug Fir runs an adjacent motel with a retro look but thoroughly modern attitude including a tremendously forward-thinking policy of discounted rates for check-ins after midnight.

While in town, we also get hooked up with access to the Columbia Sportswear employee store where we stock up smartly, exercising Herculean self-control in the face of shockingly good prices on gear from one of our favorite brands (thanks Leslie and Janis).

Not even an unusual heat wave, which makes Portland feel every bit as sticky and sweltering as August in Manhattan (our home town, if we must have one), can cool our enthusiasm for the place.

But none of our Portland fun would have been possible without Mike Rogers, Oregon Unit President of the Wally Byam Club 5452 who responded to our anxious post on Air Forums asking if anyone had any suggestions about a safe place to leave our Safari for a few nights while we ventured into Portland. Within minutes of posting, Mike had offered us the covered concrete Airstream pad at his home just a few miles outside the city. He’d be taking his Airstream (a 25’ Safari with a gorgeous wooden table the wood shop teacher made himself), out for a week of family fun leaving the pad available to us. We honestly can’t thank him enough.

On top of everything else, Mike teaches us an Airstream Secret: you can add a switch to your Fantastic Fans that lets one suck air into your Airstream while the other blows air out, creating more powerful cooling and venting. Genius. (Please don’t keep any secrets like that to yourselves! Hit the comments button and share what you know!)

Entering Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument with the volcanic mountain itself in the background.

When we (reluctantly) leave Portland, we head for Mount St. Helens Volcanic Memorial. We’ve seen pictures of the place, both before and after the catastrophic eruption of May 1980, but nothing prepares us for the reality. A dramatic, sound effects-filled film shown in the Johnston Ridge Observatory Visitor Center (just 6 miles from the crater) informs us that smoke and gas from the eruption shot 80,000 feet into the air within 15 minutes and debris, including huge rocks, that spewed out of the crater created a massive landslide that traveled at 70-150 miles an hour and had enough force to twist and snap giant trees for more than 10 miles in its path.

View of Mount St. Helens from nearby Johnston Ridge with trees that were snapped liked matchsticks from when the mountain exploded in 1980.

Yeah, it feels like not-the-smartest-thing-we’ve-ever-done to be standing there gawking at the still-active volcano’s base

Apparently Washington’s Cascade Mountains, and particularly the Mount St. Helens area, have a long history of Bigfoot sightings –but we’re pretty sure this one, right outside Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument, doesn't count.

We’re not sure how or why it’s taken us this long to spend a night in a KOA, but it has. However, that’s about to change. After a night in the Tumalo State Park just outside Bend, Oregon—where we add to our swiftly expanding Brewpub Coaster Collection with some new additions from the local Deschutes Brewery Brew Pub—we head to the Sisters/Bend KOA .

The place is in the final stages of what looks like some pretty big renovations and most improvements, except final landscaping (the grass isn’t in yet, as they tell us when we make our reservation, but there are plenty of nice big trees), seem to be done. It also has a small and basic putt-putt golf course ($2) and a pool, though the hot tub was closed. Its best assets are a little lake with some sites around it and one of cheapest ($1 per washer) and fastest (super hot dryers) laundry rooms we’ve ever used—a good thing since we’d really let the dirty clothes pile up. We also love that we can see the Three Sisters Mountains in the not-so-distant distance right from our campsite.

The Three Sisters behind someone’s creative meadow art.

Lee at the front desk is very helpful and full of recommendations of hikes and waterfalls and hot springs to check out. She also tipped us off to the fact that the road we’d planned to take over the McKenzie Pass was closed as forestry crews tried to get a beetle infestation under control.

Koosah Falls.

The nearby town of Sisters, while all-in-all a bit too cute for us, is home to the Sno-Cap, an Oregon homemade ice cream institution and the place we stop at 10 am on our way out of town for a cup of blackberry ice cream goodness. Hey, it’s got fruit and milk just like breakfast, right?

A highlight of the Newberry National Volcanic Monument, near Bend, is The Big Obsidian Flow trail which passes through enormous and beautiful chunks of jet black obsidian.

Paulina Lake in the Newberry National Volcanic Monument.

The Columbia River Gorge.

Waterfalls, rainforests, rivers and world class water sport winds. Well, three out of four anyway. We arrive in the Columbia River Gorge on a perfectly still day—not even a breeze—and it stays that way for our entire visit (it’s so calm that we go ahead and put our awning up), much to the frustration of people who’ve flocked to the area in order to get out on the water in the area’s famous winds.

642 foot high Multnomah Falls is just one of many dramatic waterfalls in the Columbia River Gorge.

One of those people is Timo who’s in the only other Airstream in the Memaloose State Park campground so, naturally, we get to talking. We are delighted to learn that, like us, Timo gave up his apartment and is living and working full time in his new Airstream which allows him to be in a lovely state part conducting business while waiting for the wind to pick up so he can go kite boarding.

Bridal Veil Falls.

The closest we get to the water is on trails past some of the area’s many waterfalls, which works up a thirst which we successfully quench at the Full Sail Brewery in charming, outdoorsy Hood River (the northwest really knows how to create livable interesting cities).

It is here, over a couple of cold ones, that we decide to start a coaster collection (i.e., we steal a few and put them in our pocket). We figure brewpub coasters are small, light, portable, useful and evocative. Plus we’re in American microbrew central so it ought to be easy to really get the collection going.

Tell us what you collect along the way.

The trail to Horsetail Falls takes you behind the falls itself.

Just inland from the Gorge is 11,240 foot Mt. Hood, where plenty of people were skiing on the mountain’s perma-glaciers even on this hot August day. We made lunch and opened the Airstream door for lunch with a view.

We’ve mentioned our love of music before and we make it a priority to get to as many music festivals as we can (everything from the High Sierra Music Festival to Christmas Jam to Mountain Jam to Jazz Fest for five years straight). So, we were intrigued (to say the least) when we heard of an annual music festival in Oregon that’s totally private and by invitation only.

With a cap of 650 guests, the Black Sheep Family Reunion, as it’s called, is the only entirely word-of-mouth festival we know of. It’s such a tightly kept insider event that otherwise plugged in people we know who live in nearby Eugene and Portland have never even heard of it.

We would have had no chance of getting in if not for the fact that our friend Mike Dillon was playing at the festival in two bands: Critters Buggin’ and Mike Dillon’s Go-Go Jungle, so he was able to get us in.

As the word “Family” right in the festival name would imply, this little gathering is super-friendly even to newcomers like us. The folks checking guest list names couldn’t have been more welcoming and almost immediately we make friends with Greg (a glassblower) and his wife Shannon (who owns a small regional chain of adorable baby clothing stores called Bambini), who are our neighbors in the RV parking area. The Airstream helps break the ice too and we host a pretty regular cavalcade of the curious who want to look inside our Safari SE.

Nice folks aside, the Go-Go Jungle late night show proves to be epic thanks to an awesome outdoor stage made largely from huge tree trunks, a fantastic sound system and full-tilt performances for the record books featuring of apple fritters, wicked free styling and, yes, onstage nudity. The fun didn’t wrap up until well past sunrise.

The biggest bubbles we've ever seen were being blown around the campfire.

Since we are unrepentant music hogs, we decide to follow the band to Zigzag (a real town name, we swear, and you have to drive through Boring to get there) to catch the Go-Go Jungle show at the Skyway Bar & Grill the following night. The Skyway is a funky cool roadhouse style bar/restaurant/music venue and the chef, Jason, used to roadie for one of Mike’s previous bands so it’s a little like seeing a show in a friend’s really cool rec room. Even better for us, the owners let us park for the night on the side of a quiet and wooded access road right behind the joint. No one can say no to the Airstream!

Yep, there really is a town named Boring.

We’ve been spending a lot of time in the mountains lately and the hills combined with mid-summer temperatures have added up to some big hot climbs. For the first time, now that we are towing the Airstream, our transmission temperature has begun to spike up as high as 250 degrees which is hotter than we’d like to see, so we switched to Amsoil synthetic transmission fluid which should keep the transmission temperature in check. While we were upgrading we decided to switch to Amsoil synthetic motor oil as well, which should allow us to extend our oil change interval up to 25,000 miles. If anyone’s got any other tips for keeping a hard-working transmission cool and happy, post them as a comment!

Compromising position? No, Eric is just busy changing the transmission fluid and oil.

We’re sure we’re not the first to notice the similarities between house boating and RVing. The thwump, thwump, thwump of the water pump. The incredibly efficient use of space. The need to tie even the paper towels down sometimes. The way the refrigerator snaps shut. The ability to go where and when you like (albeit very, very slowly on a houseboat).

Our first taste of house boating came on Lake Powell. We’d dreamed of getting out on Lake Powell for years and the experience did not disappoint thanks to some expert insider guidance from Steve Ward who grew up in the area as the Glen Canyon dam was being built and spent his childhood exploring the rivers and canyons of the area before everything was submerged.

His is a unique above and below the water expertise and his tips got us into a lovely mooring spot and into some gorgeous areas of the vast lake including a great canyon hike up West Canyon. Every arm of this lake seems to offer something new—unique rock formations or a different tint to the crystal clear water so deep (more than 400 feet in places) that it’s kind of freaky swimming in it. The lake even has Rainbow Bridge National Monument, the largest natural bridge in the world at 290 feet tall and 270 feet long, which we visited at 7 am one day and had the whole place to ourselves.

Huge Shasta Dam, the second largest dam in the US, created Lake Shasta.

With fond Lake Powell memories in our heads, we head out on Lake Shasta. It’s a very different lake and a very different boat—no flat screen TV, wine refrigerator or rooftop wet bar and hot tub like we were spoiled with on Lake Powell—but it does the trick. Sort of like how everyone can’t be lucky enough to RV in an Airstream but those SOBs (some other brands) get them where they’re going too.

One of the worst fire seasons in California history has left much of the state blanketed in smoke, including Lake Shasta. The Mars Hawaii, the largest flying tanker in the world with a wingspan of 200 feet, is stationed on the lake where it fills with water and flies out to help put out the fires.

Anyway, we benefit from a lake expert at Shasta too. Kevin Befford also has years of experience on the lake and his passion for it is contagious. He has personally created a network of more than 60 geocaching sites on and around the lake and knows the water and the shore like the back of his hand. Based on Kevin’s detailed recommendations, we head out toward the base of Shasta Dam for a humbling look up at the massive structure. Then we explore Pitt Arm, a canyon that was never logged before being flooded because World War II broke out and all the loggers joined up before they got to it. When lake water levels are low, like they are right now, the submerged forest in Pit Arm is really visible—and eerie.

It’s great terrain for bald eagles and ospreys, however, and we see a lot of both. Lake Shasta actually has about 20% of all nesting pairs of bald eagles in California, so spotting them is almost a given.

A bald eagle takes flight from the submerged forest in Pit Arm.

Then we head to Squaw Arm where we find a completely secluded beach to anchor on, just like Kevin said we would. Unlike Lake Powell, which has limited opportunities to get onto dry land because of the sheer rock walls of the canyons there, Lake Shasta has more rolling, forested banks with lots of hiking trails. Kevin told us about a trail out to an abandoned mine and mining town in the hills above the lake. With water levels so low (down more than 100 feet and dropping about a foot a day), trailheads have become hard or impossible to see or reach since they are now dozens of feet up the bank from where a boat can anchor.

Our beautiful anchorage up the Squaw Arm. The water level is about 110 feet below full (marked by the treeline) due to many years of drought, and dropping by almost a foot a day. The bare ground in the photo hasn’t been exposed for almost 30 years.

So instead of moving our houseboat and hoping to find the trailhead above us, we decide to bushwhack to the nearby mine site right from where our boat is anchored using our Garmin GPS to get us there. Off we head, across steep rocky hillsides and narrow cliff tops and through dense manzanita thickets along deer trails through the forest. Finally, sweaty and scraped, we reach a dirt road which we follow to the abandoned mine site.

After exploring the mine for a while, we decide to follow the road back instead of repeating our bushwhacking adventure (we’ve managed to avoid the poison oak so far and don’t want to push our luck) in the hope that the road might lead us toward where we left our houseboat.

It’s a lovely, shady, easy walk as the road winds its way around the hillside. In the elbow of a corner near a creek, both sides of the road are covered in blackberry bushes so laden with berries that the vines are practically bent to the ground. First we start filling our hands and our mouths with the delicious sweet fruit, but soon we chug the last of our water and begin filling our Nalgene bottles with berries.

As if we needed reminding that this is prime bear country and they love blackberries even more than we do, we see a huge pile of berry-filled bear scat on the side of the road right where we’re picking. Just to be on the safe side, we raise our voices to make it clear that we’re here (a startled bear is more likely to attack) and that’s about when we hear it—a sound like bowling ball slowly rolling through the underbrush. Then we feel a pair of eyes on us from across the creek on the bank to the far right of where we’re standing. It’s a California black bear watching us with a look on its face that practically accuses us of stealing his lunch. A couple of shouts of “hey bear!” and he turns tail and heads away from us back into the forest. And, yes, we do feel guilty for stealing his lunch but wild blackberries are not to be passed up.

Karen with a bowl of delicious wild blackberries.

Sure enough the road practically leads us right back to our houseboat door (we didn’t need to do all that bushwhacking after all) and the next morning we enjoy those blackberries for breakfast in the sun on the roof of our houseboat as flocks of migrating geese land and take off from the calm cove we’re anchored in.

If only Airstream made a Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang style amphibious edition……