Another great Portland day for a nice family trip to the zoo.

The reclusive sun bears were actually out and about today. For 90% of our visits they have been hiding or sleeping. They look so cuddly – except for the giant reaper claws that is – I’m sure they are only for climbing trees. Right?

We always enjoy watching the otters. The video shows the critter doing relaxing laps. For some reason, I crave shellfish after visiting these guys.

The elephants put on quite a show today. It was feeding time, and we got to watch him pick up snacks of popcorn and hay located around the enclosure. We visited the elephant museum for the first time, for some reason we have always missed this place. It was interesting seeing the relationship between humans over history.

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Yeah! It’s parade time. This year we tried a new spot. It was much less crowded, but Jasmine still scored a nice load of candy.

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Between running errands this morning, we made a stop at a playground. I also got a photo of the Oregon’s beautiful evergreens.

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Another great meal at our Chinese restaurant. This time I tried something new – shrimp curry.

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I’ve been hearing about Oregon’s covered bridges for a while now, so this weekend we did something about it. I loaded up my garmin mapper, plotted a route and off we went.

Here is the order of our bridge visits…

1. Gilkey (1939)
2. Hoffman (1936)
3. Larwood (1930)
4. Shimanek (1966)
5. Hannah (1936)

Actually our first stop was in Salem to get some frozen yogurt to make sure we were properly sugared up. I should mention Jasmine did not want to go on this boring roadtrip – she came around though and got into the spirit of exploration.

This was our first trip relying solely on the garmin navigater – no google map printouts or fold-out maps. It did quite well, with only a couple hiccups. The biggest being almost getting stuck in an infinite loop. After the second time around the same loop we took the opposite turn, and then the garmin got back to working.

I think my favorite bridge was Hoffman. Ideally located spanning a beautiful gorge and verdant vegetation. My second favorite was Larwood, but not for the bridge itself, but for its wonderful adjacent park and the babbling brook.

I was surprised that most of the bridges were painted white. I was expecting a variety of colors – yellow, baby blue…

We topped off our daytrip with a lunch of salad and pizza.

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