Gone Fishing!

You would think, being self-employed all of my life, that I would have hung (people are hanged, everything else is hung) this sign up many times: GONE FISHING!

   I never worked a full year until I was 28 years old and have never taken a day off since!  Well, almost never, it is a rarity for me.  There is always "the chance" that I will miss something, some job out of nowhere will materialize while I am gone and I might miss it.

   Being self-employed is not all it is cracked up to be.  Never have I had a paid day off!  I can't even imagine it.  Someone would pay me to go fishing?  hahaha!  sure, in my dreams!

   Well, I am retired now and one day mixes into the next, a Tuesday is about the same as a Saturday, sometimes work comes in and sometimes it doesn't.  It is a bad economy and I don't hunt for work like I used to.

   So I am off on my adventure starting early tomorrow morning.  I am packed, have my TOMTOM, turned to a sexy voice for companionship and directions for when I get lost.  A five and one half hour drive, the longest road trip since I was 27 and crossed this whole country in a 1965 VW Van!  Now that would be a blog!

   And this upcoming adventure will be something to Blog about too; I know it will.  I'll keep mental notes and I am taking my camera so I can report all of the highlights to you!  Well, the ones I am willing to talk about anyway!

   And there will be fishing stories!  Big ones!  Giant ones!  and The One That Got Away! Except I have every intention of catching it!

  That's it!  See ya Wednesday.  I have GONE FISHING!

Oregon Ducks!

Well, how about them Ducks! The University of Oregon Football team has done it again! Ten for Ten and now Oregon is on the map. No one knows where Oregon is. In my European travels when I mentioned Oregon the closest anyone

came was Northern California? Oregon is as far West as you can get without getting wet in the Pacific Ocean. We are blessed with over 300 miles of coastline, all open and public beaches, nothing is private; you can explore it all. I live in Springfield, the town adjacent to Eugene, the U of O, home of the Ducks. It is an hour and a half to the coast, mostly a nice two lane road through the coast range, a road cut through the mighty Douglas Fir.

The other direction, driving East, I am an hour away from the real mountains with their snow capped peaks and majestic views. This is skiing country; the roads are narrower and windy and as you get higher in elevation the Douglas Fir give way to Pine, the main forests of Eastern Oregon.

Portland is our only Big City with over a million people and most of us live in the Willamette Valley between the two mountain ranges. Eugene is at the southern end of this valley, our "big city" of just over 100,000 people. It is the home town of "Nike", you might wear their shoes!

It is a great State, now famous, "Home of the Oregon Ducks"! If you ever get close, stop by and I will take you Salmon fishing!