Pacific Northwest Vacations | Oregon Travel Guide

Oregon

Oregonians like to brag that their state has it all: temperate rainforest, beaches, snow-capped mountains, desert playas and everything in between. If the California coast is beautiful, the Oregon coast is nothing short of spectacular as you wind along the cliffs and across the harbors of fishing villages and public beaches. Just a short hop over the Coast Range and the fir trees give way to an oak savannah paired with Pinot vineyards, orchards and berry farms, preserved thanks to progressive land use planning in the seventies.

These inter-mountain valleys are where the majority of citizens live when they're not visiting the ocean or climbing up to the alpine reaches of the Cascades. Forced to choose between local coffee roasters in the morning and neighborhood brewpubs in the evening, it’s a pretty hard life. When it's all to much, a side trip east to the Oregon Outback is in order for a change in perspective on the rangeland as migratory birds fly south; sometimes a loop back along the Columbia River Gorge to catch the wildflower show and windsurfing is necessary. And as the grassland gives way to the evergreen forests again, you remember what makes this place so extraordinary.