Portland

Now we have gone urban. This is Portland, Oregon and we have a flat in the middle of the NW district. There are craft brewery deliveries happening on every corner and the local art cinema is 2 minutes away. The first night we linked up with old Dulwich friend Steve Johnson who arrived here with his family in 2015 after 7 years in Shanghai. He's still adjusting, having lived his whole life in the expat bubble. But Portland seems like one of the better places to decompress.

We descended here from Missoula in 2 days, across swathes of Montana, Idaho and Oregon. The approach to Portland is through the Colombia Gorge, filled almost to the brim with the river, held back by enormous slabs of HEP dams which channel the flow into terrifying steaming deluges. The famous waterfalls down the side of the gorge are tenuous by comparison, but we could not get near them for the crowds, so we drove on into Portland.

4th July Wyoming-style

Our first event in Portland was a street festival on Mississippi St, nominally celebrating things Southern, but it was actually a wonderful cross-section of counterculture Portland, what I think of as anti-Trump. We have already seen a big street occasion elsewhere: Independence Day in Jackson with its sheriffs and soldiers, and where everything stopped for the National Anthem. You might think that the two festivals were chalk and cheese, but I do not find it difficult to reconcile the two cultural sides of America which are each founded in a strong streak of stubborn individualism. Their icons are different, but their insistence on decency and personal freedom are very similar.

And tomorrow we head off again. This trip is a short leg up to Seattle. On the way, we can't resist checking out Mt St Helens who blew her top in 1980. There were months of warning back then, so it's not a dangerous undertaking.

Check out the gallery with the latest pictures.

The Tetons

A Mongolian yurt. I expect it's probably American; on a grassy slope just over the mountains from Jackson, Wyoming. There was nothing left to book in Jackson when Marion was looking online. Well it is 4th July tomorrow and J is a big tourist centre. All the buildings are wooden Wild West and very neat Some of them have plaques assuring us they are at least 50 years old. We missed the shootout staged by the Dramatic Society this evening. It's a beautiful town to which we will return tomorrow for their Independence parade ('tractors and fire engines' promised the lady in the Chamber of Commerce). There are pristine monuments to the past like this in China.

Anyway, we are in Idaho, just over the pass. We drove across a corner of Wyoming today, crossing the continental divide, where in theory raindrops which fall on opposite sides of the line will flow either to the Pacific or the Atlantic.  For many miles, the only human interventions were fences corralling deer, cylindrical tanks capturing natural gas and the sinuous road which traversed wide open spaces studded with brush and stripy mesas. When you drive 500 miles in one day, the scenery changes many times; each filmic vision blurring into the next. The human habitation is spread very thinly and it is easy to understand why there may be a less urgent attitude to our denuding of the earths resources. It really seems like there is so much to go around.

The American landscape is very amenable to a soundtrack. Orchestral music mirrors the sweeps and stunning surprises; and of course the homespun life-lessons of Wyoming Country Gold ('you're easy on the eye but hard on the heart').