By Hal Brown
It was a fortuitous accident that friends who had rented a house for a week in the resort destination of Black Butte Ranch had a couple leave unexpectedly so they offered me their bedroom for a few days.
I've lived in a suburb of Portland (Oregon) for about 10 years but had never ventured to the central part of the state where this resort community is.
Getting there is not particularly easy because once you drive south on an expressway for an hour you turn east and head into the Cascade Mountains and up, up, up from sea level to 3,300 feet. The road is very curvy and you have to pay close attention to your driving. Fortunately there are many pull-off areas where you can stop to take photos.
I had a few days with minimal discussion of politics among my liberal friends and I even wrote a blog yesterday before anyone in the house had gotten up. Mostly though we just escaped thinking depressing thoughts.
I glanced at the news online when I got home this morning at 8 AM (I left there at five) and nothing struck me as worth writing about, meaning I had no original thoughts.
What I do have to share are the photos I took on the trip. The first two are political. I sneakily took the photo below of the man with the Trump 45 hat.
It was a reminder of the vast political divide in this country to see this man with a Trump hat in the book section of a thrift store in the town of Sisters which is liberal leaning. This was made up for seeing the man below in the same town. Two men with beards and they couldn't have more opposite politics.These are the photos I took on the drive there: