Lumber production is measured in board feet. Despite living in Oregon timber country for almost 30 years, until last week I had no idea what a board foot was or how a lumber mill worked. Then I had the opportunity to visit the Hampton Lumber mill in Willamina, Oregon – Timbertown USA – guided by …
Author Archives: colindotpdx
Bad Budapest Tourist. The visit to Budapest was to celebrate the wedding of one of my oldest friends and to catch up with a few more who had also made the journey. All this didn’t leave a lot of time for exploring Budapest. We did walk along the Danube, across the Chain Bridge up to …
“Very likable personality, and cheerful in the most trying circumstances” A few years ago, my sister, Sally, and I requested Dad’s military records from the Army Personnel Centre as he was notoriously reticent about his service. We received a pile of paper that meticulously recorded this five year segment of his life. Starting with “Army …
“Ideas without precedent are generally looked upon with disfavor and men are shocked if their conceptions of an orderly world challenged.” j Harlan Bretz. The story of the Channelled Scablands is the story of one man fighting both the establishment and conventional wisdom. Since the mid-1800s the recent geology of the earth had been settled. …
Where Is Your Place of Zen. Close your eyes. Think of where you would rather be. Not in traffic, or the middle seat in economy class, or watching the West burn, or reading Trump tweets. Where do you go? I expect that for everyone the first image is one of friends and family laughing and …
My New Best Friends In Kelowna – Bentley Motorrad After 40,000 miles of tough riding in every kind of terrain, my BMW R1200GS finally stranded me with a fuel pump that was not getting the job done. It dd not just quit but started running badly enough that told me its days were numbered. Considering …
Keep America Great Already Passing through Eastern Washington one of our posse Elliot Mainzer who runs the Bonneville Power Administration, arranged for an in-depth tour of the The Grand Coulee Dam which is the beating hydro heart that feeds power into over 15,000 miles of the Bonneville power grid across the West. The Grand Coulee …
Belfast: Troubles + Titanic = Tourists Belfast seems to have reinvented itself by showcasing the tragedies of its past. The place is bustling, and confident, and almost cosmopolitan – now about 80 cruise ships dock here every year opposite the slip from which the Titanic was launched in 1912. TITANIC The Titanic Museum is one …
I Love The Smell of Peat in the Morning Mick Sumpter and I have been riding around Ireland from Dublin to Belfast clockwise following, where we can, the Wild Atlantic Way which is a network of roads labeled as the most scenic and which push as close as possible to the ocean. We have been …
Pilgrimage Today – Joey’s Bar, Ballymoney Today Facebook reminded me that it was exactly two years ago that I was at the Isle of Man TT with press accreditation thanks to Jensen Beeler and Asphalt and Rubber. So it was appropriate that today we made a pilgrimage to Joey’s Bar in Ballymoney, Northern Ireland. This …
Colin's Travel Journal 