So this afternoon my husband and I set out to have a little impromptu picnic in one of the many parks that our fair city of Vancouver has to offer.

…Hindsight being 20/20, we probably should have written out directions to the park, but we decided to wing it, and we ended up in the hills HIGH above Camas Washington, and no where near the place we set out to visit.

It was cool though, because we ended up at a really cute little park, in a really nice QUIET area- right next to Fairgate Inn Bed and Breakfast, which is a little B&B that looks a bit like the White house. Hehe.. I took note of the name of the place next to it, and after a little googling, This particular park can be found at- 2213 NW 23RD Ave
Camas, Washington 98607.

Ok, so enough about that. Like I said, this was an impromptu picnic, so we made up a quick lunch made up of a few sandwiches, some carrots and dip, assorted cheeses and a nice crusty baguette. We also had banana cream pudding, but my husband started in on the pudding first, so.. no photos of thaneverbashfulwithbutter.comhttp://www.neverbashfulwithbutter.comt. hehe..

PBJ&fluff. A nice slathering of organic peanut butter, kosher fluff, Whole fruit strawberry jam on white bread. Come on.. you can take the girl out of childhood, but you can’t take the white bread out of a fluffernutter.

Aaron’s Applewood smoked ham, Tillamook sharp cheddar, lettuce and tomatoes on the same wholegrain white.

Now, I’m much too lazy to log out and log into my other account, and then log back into here again, so under these cuts are photos that have nothing to do with food, but rather the slight adventure that took place in the hours proceeding. Nothing terribly exciting, just a trip up highway 14 up past Washougal.

Click with caution.

Here we see my husband conquering the play structure…

At this point we discussed our opinions of that strange orb-like viewpanel behind the slide.

..we decided it was a portal to the underworld- LOOK AWAY! *giggle*

I think we may have found the only handi capable playstructure in the Vancouver area. Seriously, that is one WIDE slide.. and it even has hand rails at the top!

Go Aaron go!

…See, what you don’t know is that at the bottom of the slide, some child had spilled soda or some other sticky substance, and Aarons feet made this HORRIBLE screeching sound as he neared the bottom.

I probably would have gone on the slide if it hadn’t been for that. I’m not really big on getting my butt all cozy on a metal slide coated with an undetermined sticky substance… There was a tire swing though, I was all over that. Aaron neglected to take photos. I think he was napping at that point. It was a very relaxing park.

If you’re not from the Portland metro area, you probably don’t know where highway 14 is. Basically, along the bottom of Washington state, pretty much running parallel with the Columbia River (and the Oregon/Washington border) is Highway 14 (State Route 14). It starts in Downtown Vancouver near Interstate 5, and runs through Plymouth Washington.  Once you’ve gone through Vancouver, you enter Camas and then Washougal. At the end of Washougal, Highway 14 becomes a National Scenic Area, as there are many beautiful views of the Columbia river gorge, and pretty trees and whatnot.

But first, a few scenery photos from the park-

The grass was seriously this bright green colour where we were sitting. Kind of scary.

Trees! We’ve got a bunch of them ’round here, don’t we.

This particular park had a lot of green stuff, but not many flowers…
‘Cept these ones.

We had actually happened upon this park by accident. We had no idea how we got there, and thusly, had no idea to leave. We actually ended up by highway 14, and a split second decision (and desire not to spend the rest of the day indoors) lead us to drive up East, rather than West, which would have taken us home.

…Oh yeah, we’ve got lots of rocks and cliffs too.

This is towards the end of Washougal… There was a whole line of boats out on the water.

The docks.

Ok, I took a photo of this because I thought the sign was kind of funny. Apparently the Parker house has family dining, and is hosting a Guns and Roses tribute tour. Hehehe..

Mount Hood in the FAR OFF distance. (it was fairly overcast today, so the mountain only came out a bit. You can still see it though!

Ok, this photo needs a little bit of explaination.
We couldn’t stop, so I took this photo from a moving car hoping to get a good shot of the pretty cliff over on Crown Point. If you look to the far right of this photo, in the top third, you’ll see a light grey spot on top of that cliff. That is The Vista House. We were going to cross over to the Oregon side of the gorge and go there on the way back home, but it would have been pointless as it was getting late already and we were burning up the little bit of daylight we had left. Soon though..

I tried REALLY hard to get a better shot, but there was always a tree in the way on all of the turnouts, and the only view point was full of tourists and SUV’s.

A hilly area by the gorge…

Ok, this photo I tried to get part of the road railing in on purpose. What you see there is the gorge. Its much prettier in person. This section of highway 14 has this ancient cement railing on it, with newer metal railing inside. There is absolutely no shoulder to the road, and you literally feel like you’re driving on the outside of the cliff. Its really pretty though. There is moss and ivy growing over everything, and if you look around yourself and forget that you’re in a car or that you got where you’re at in a car, you feel like you’re back in time for a few minutes. Its way cool.

The open road ahead of us, where will our next road trip take us?

I hope you guys are enjoying your weekend!
-A.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 1st, 2008 at 1:56 am and is filed under May 2007. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.