I did quite a bit of brainstorming in this video … and you should see the amount that I left on the editing room floor! LOL! And by the way, if I haven’t mentioned it by now in this series, thanks for following me in this journey! At the very least, I hope you somewhat entertained while I share some of this beautiful country of ours.
And a bit of a side note, I am already up to episode #18 (with the video edit creations) as I continue to edit these and I am only 3 states in with that process. In reality, and in real time, I have checked off 14 states with a couple of hard drives of clips presently waiting to get organized and edited, so lots more to edit and lots more to come!
Government Camp, Oregon
Trillium Lake was on the AI itinerary. Trillium Lake was also behind a locked gate with a gentleman picking up trash at the top of the hill who told me the road wouldn’t be plowed until probably Memorial Day weekend. This is the central lesson of using AI to plan travel: it’s a starting point, not a guarantee. The lake exists. The road to it exists. The plows hadn’t gotten there yet.
I filed this under “noted for next time” and went to find laundry.
The Laundromat Meditation
Government Camp is a small mountain community near the base of Mount Hood, and I was there slightly off-season, which meant getting my reservation canceled would have been easy and my host wasn’t going to let me. Fine. The laundry needed doing anyway.
I sat there watching the machine and thinking about AI — how I use it, how most people use it, and that particular gap between what a tool is designed for and what you actually want from any given hour of your life. I’d just spent four days in a city with a hundred thousand people and what I wanted was mountains and waterfalls and the sound of something that wasn’t traffic. The AI had helped me plan the mountain part. It couldn’t help me want it less.
The white shirt went in with everything else on cold. Update to follow.
Laura Bushman
I found an art magazine at the hotel and started flipping through it while waiting on the laundry, and came across exactly the kind of story I’ve been wanting to tell on this trip. A woman named Laura Bushman. Grew up in Eugene in an artistic family, became a teacher, retired in 2009, and dove into painting — a passion she’d long been sitting on. She and her husband moved to Hood River. She joined a local plein air painting group. Fifteen years later she has her own gallery in Hood River and teaches classes in both Oregon and Scottsdale, where she lives part of the year.
“I never in a million years thought I would become a professional artist in retirement,” she said. “It’s my second career.”
I’m heading to Hood River. She’s there. That’s a conversation I intend to have.
Up to Timberline
I drove up to Timberline Lodge in the afternoon, which sits at around 6,000 feet on the south face of Mount Hood and is one of those places built by the CCC in the late 1930s that makes you feel simultaneously very small and very lucky. The property is beautiful. The visibility when I arrived was essentially zero — inside a cloud, looking into what I can only describe as a glass of milk. No mountain. No view. Just cold, fog, and the particular kind of peace that comes when you turn the car off in the middle of nowhere and the only sound is weather.
High 20s expected overnight. Chance of snow. The ski season here, I learned from someone in the restaurant, runs all the way into August — one of the longest in the country. That’s worth knowing.
I drove back down in a wintry mix with the heated steering wheel doing its job. The Dodge Durango is not sponsored. The heated steering wheel is genuinely excellent.
White shirt update: still pretty white. Consider this the good news of the episode.
Hood River tomorrow. Laura Bushman’s gallery. I know where I’m going and I know who I’m hoping to find there.
