A Sunday Outing on the Historic Columbia River Highway

Last Sunday we took a beautiful drive up the Historic Columbia River Highway, and made stops along the way to take in the beautiful views, visit some of the falls, and play in the water. 

Our first stop was the Vista House, this wonderful round, stone building is fun to look through, and has a great spot to view up and down the gorge. I love taking drives up to this part of Oregon, not only are there great views along the way, there are plenty of fun places to stop.

There were a ton of people all along the highway at all of the different falls and stops, definitely a popular destination for tourists as well as locals, especially during the summer! I had fun trying out my new camera along the way and got lots of great pictures of the kids.

This plane looked like it was on a fun scenic flight!

After The Vista House we made our way to some of the different falls along the way, I love this little waterfall at Shepperd's Dell, it is just a tiny little trail along a mossy stone wall, and leads to such a beautiful little spot. You can walk right up to the falls and feel the water mist.

Here I was practicing the macro setting on this little fern, but realized I had it in another setting, and I wish I could figure out which setting it was because I loved the way it turned out, when I tried again, in the actual macro setting, it didn't turn out like this, definitely a learning curve with all the new settings and a touch screen that I keep forgetting is there, definitely need to play with my camera more out in the garden! :)

Everyone loved Shepperd's Dell.

Perfect spot for a cute couple photo of Joseph and his girlfriend Lorene. :)

After we were done taking in the beauty of our first water fall of the day it was on to number two, Wahkeena Falls. I have been wanting to visit this waterfall for quite some time now, Courtney at Barefoot in Blue Jeans Blog and daughter of my best childhood friend, has blogged many times about how it is one of her favorite spots, here is one of her Wahkeena Falls posts, so I really wanted to be sure and stop by on our drive and check it out.

We all really enjoyed this stop, we had fun playing in the water near the picnic area, which was perfect in all this heat!

The water was nice and cool and the whole area is just beautiful.

Then we went across the street to see Wahkeena Falls, it was beautiful! We were starting to run out of time, so we couldn't take the hike to get up closer to the falls, but we all want to go back with a picnic and explore some more. Wonderful place!!

We saw more Falls along the way that we all agree we need to go back and check out, but we wanted to have time to stop by Multnomah Falls before it was time to head home.

Of course Multnomah Falls is always so amazing to see, the place was so busy with tourists from all over, we even saw a school group from Texas! I actually don't mind big crowds, at least when they are as friendly as everyone here was, and it is interesting to people watch in such a diverse group of people, lots of families, along with some very cute dogs, it was fun!

I wanted to get a picture of the family up on the bridge so they walked up first and I stayed below to get a picture, then I headed on up.

It is a short and easy hike to the bridge, and the view is one of my favorites, beautiful lush green everywhere, it just looks magical!

We enjoyed the view from the bridge, and then made our way back down. We all decided to cool down in the water one last time before making the trip back home.

Definitely a beautiful way to spend a Sunday afternoon!

In other news, the garden is doing great, and I am hoping to do a garden update post here very soon, we had a nice harvest of blueberries, as well as a wonderful bunch of garlic, and now the peppers and zucchini and green beans are getting ready, looking forward to all the garden fresh dinners! I hope everyone is having a nice summer!

You may also enjoy reading about our trip to Multnomah Falls back in 2012.