July 8 - Volksbike in Vancouver, Washington

We were up and had breakfast early, and then decided to try the 25 kilometer Volksbike in Vancouver, Washington, which is a small city just across the Columbia River from Portland. The directions included a map and we found that quite useful in keeping on the route, which led out along side streets and across a large railroad yard to a nice bike path in the country. The bicycle path was an out-and-back through farms to Frenchman's bar, a place on the Columbia River, and we had a couple of nice views of the river along the way. We were routed a different way back through the city, but I think the trailmaster had picked the street so that the climb back up the hill to the start/finish point would be quite gradual.

We were, of course, stopping every half hour or so to enjoy the view, take pictures, or drink some water, and when we stopped across from a fruit store Monika stepped inside to purchase a couple of apples and Bing cherries to supplement our diet. I was across the street with the bikes and noticed that I was standing under a plum tree that was dropping plums all over the sidewalk, so I started looking for nice ones to take along with the idea of maybe making some jam rattling around in my head.

Since we still felt pretty good after we finished the bike route and stowed the bikes in the truck, we drove back to the McDonalds in Portland to have lunch and see if we wanted to do the walk along the Columbia River. The lunch, and sitting down for a while, refreshed us enough to tackle the walk, so we ambled down the street and over a block to a riverside hiker-biker trail. That gave nice views of the Columbia, which at this point was a very large, slow-flowing river leading directly to the ocean. I was fascinated by a little subdivision of houses floating on the Columbia, each with what looked like a garage underneath. Although I strongly suspected that those garages were in reality boathouses, it appeared as if a typical suburban subdivision of two story houses with attached garages had been simply tied up along a dock on the river. I did wonder what kind of zoning allowed that, and whether some day in the future a visitor would simply see a landscape of houses stretching from shore to shore up and down the Columbia, submerging one of the world's grandest rivers in tacky subdivisions. Seems a shame, though.

We walked out to roughly the 5 kilometer point, but then opted to come back along the river rather than walk along the city streets a couple of blocks to the south, which was an option offered in the directions. That gave us an opportunity to photograph a blue heron and two ospreys sitting on a nest beside the river, and to pick some blackberries from a wild bush that was climbing up an old plum or apple tree.

The fruit on the tree was still green, but quite a few of the blackberries were ripe and we picked several handfuls, taking them along in a plastic bag that I had scavenged from the side of the trail. I didn't have all that many blackberries, and I didn't have all that many plums from the morning bicycle ride, but I thought I just might have enough blackberries + plums to make a batch of jam. Pursuing this somewhat quixotic but in my mind eminently practical quest (we were down to only 1 jar of peach and 1 jar of raspberry jam), I bought some pectin and sugar, boiled five jam jars, and cooked up a batch of plublack jam back at the trailer. I was really happy to find that Sure Jell now made a type of pectin for low-sugar jams that allowed me to use less sugar than fruit and still get good jam. Monika and I like really tart jams, but getting the jam to set right with low amounts of sugar had always been a problem for me.

That mission accomplished, I fell asleep for an hour while Monika finished crocheting a beautiful centerpiece for the trailer's dining table. Realizing we hadn't answered our email since Patience and Jake's house, we drove over to the nearest library and signed in for an hour to do that before returning to the trailer for dinner and an evening of Dueling Computers. At the library we also checked the AVA.org Website and found a special weekend event in Sandy, Oregon, which turned out to be less than 15 miles from us. Since it was so close, we decided to extend our stay in the campground and fit that walk into our weekend activities. When we finally returned to the trailer and I could take my shoes off, I discovered a blister the size of a quarter on the ball of my right foot. Nuts! So I put my bare foot up while lying on the sofa and typing on the computer and hoped the air would help the blister heal quickly. We finished up the evening reading Baxter Black's books; we had switched so that each of us was reading the one the other person had finished last week.