I tried to be all sneaky and pre-program blog posts to run while I was away, specifically to avoid the inevitable blog-death that accompanies a dearth of posts… except that I optimistically thought I’d be blogging again the second I got home… and that was wrong.

Last week, Tito and I traveled for what, honestly, was one of the greatest photography trips we’ve ever done. We drove from Portland to San Francisco, down the coastal 101. I’ve been processing photos since we got home, and, even with deleting the ones I didn’t like every night before bedtime, I netted out at 3500 shots. Tito did about 2000 more.

Oregon alone is so varied it blows your mind. From desert sand dunes to lush redwood forests, from rocky volcanic coastline to sandstone, sculpted coastlines, mountains, rivers, waterfalls, sea lions, seals, and birds, this place is a photographers heaven. Portland… if I ever decided to leave Canada, it would have to be for Portland. What a beautiful, friendly, clean and polite city. Amazing culture, amazing people, I was in love.

There is some life-stuff thrown in there as well. The best part of this trip wasn’t about photos or fiber – it was getting to meet, for the first time, a long-lost cousin that I tracked down last summer. We got off like a house on fire. At the end, we thanked them for not turning out to be weird. They thanked us for not turning out to be a phone scam (Hi, uh, my name is Shireen and I think I’m related to you….) and we loved every precious minute we got to spend getting to know them.

I’ll try to intersperse shots from the trip with shots of the fiber tour that I did at the same time. I visited three lovely shops in the Portland area, and 2 in San Francisco. For a start though, I am happy to say that we landed in Portland on the Fourth of July so we got to start this trip off the right way; with our very first Fourth of July fireworks :)