My summer break from blogging went on longer than I’d planned. A week after returning from Washington and Oregon, I was in Princeton, New Jersey, working at Educational Testing Service, my former employer, for 12 days. What with visiting old friends and working, and also lacking a laptop, I was either too busy or unable to post.

What follows is a brief review of my summer travel.

Washington and Oregon

Our family flew into Seattle and drove down to Vancouver, Washington, just across the Columbia River from Portland, Oregon. We stayed in downtown Vancouver, near a beautiful central park where we visited a farmer’s market and bought the best strawberries we’ve ever tasted. We toured Portland for just a little over a day. After driving into the outskirts of Portland, we got on the light rail into downtown. Some of the sights we saw: the Chinese and Japanese gardens, Powell’s bookstore, and selected parts of downtown.

Having heard about Portland’s famously sustainable urban design, we were not disappointed by what we found. In particular, I enjoyed riding the light rail and the streetcar lines and also seeing the bike lanes.

On our way out of Portland we picked up my brother-in-law and mother-in-law at the Portland airport and headed east up the Columbia River Gorge to Hood River, Oregon, famous for its steady winds, which draw windsurfers and kiteboarders to the river. We then headed south into the Cascades, through beautiful orchard country at the foot of Mount Hood, then across the mountains and down the other side into the Warm Springs Indian Reservation, which is set in striking, arid canyonlands. We then made our way into Bend, where we stayed a week, visiting my sister and her husband and attending a family reunion for my mother-in-law’s side of the family - the Adams family, originally from Clay Center, Kansas.

We found Bend to be a picturesque, booming town of 75,000, a kind of Aspen of the Cascades, with high real estate prices and striking architecture. The area around Bend, like much of the Northwest, has some remarkable volcanic geology. One highlight was a trip to Lake Paulina and Paulina Peak in Newberry National Volcanic Monument; this featured a remarkable obsidian lava flow. We also enjoyed a drive into the Cascades to see the alpine country around Mount Bachelor.

I did some biking around Bend using my sister’s bike. I appreciated the bike lanes that run consistently through town, and I also came to appreciate the many roundabouts or traffic circles in Bend. Bend has more than twenty of these.

I also met with Jeff Monson, Executive Director of Commute Options for Central Oregon, a group similar to Transit for Livable Communities. Commute Options is doing remarkable work to support alternative modes of transportation, including biking and walking. Their motto: “Promoting Choices That Reduce the Impact of Driving Alone.”

Some tidbits I gathered from Jeff: He said that Oregon requires that all arterial and collector streets have bike lanes. He also told me about a document called “22 Reasons for Paved Highway Shoulders” (including bike lanes) and described their efforts to set up a Safe Routes to School Program. He mentioned the Oregon bike bill, the landmark 1971 law that mandated and funded construction of bike and pedestrian facilities. See the Oregon Department of Transportation page on the bike bill for more on this law. If I read it correctly, it states that cities and counties must spend a minimum of 1 percent of their state highway funds on bike/ped facilities when there is a demonstrated need for those facilities; some exceptions can be made - as, for example, rural areas where there is very little demand for such facilities.

Bend is also committed to multi-use development. I toured the impressive NorthWest Crossing development in western Bend. No two houses here are the same, and they are built with high standards of energy efficiency. The development features an elementary school, parks, shopping, and offices, and it’s designed to be a walkable and bikeable community.
New Jersey

Mid-July found me in the hazy heat of the Northeast. I was struck by how lush and green the Garden State seemed. The Mid-Atlantic region gets more rain there than the Midwest, and more humidity too. I enjoyed seeing the historic architecture again - including the beautiful stone houses - and also the narrow, old-fashioned rural roads (yes, I was driving a rental car, I’m afraid). Though it is densely populated, central New Jersey has managed to keep some open space in the form of preserved farms, parks, or wildlife habitat. See, for example, the land along Cold Soil and Blackwell Roads near between Lawrenceville, Princeton, and Pennington.

I visited Princeton University, my grad school alma mater, and saw its expansion, including Whitman College, which is being built in the neo-Gothic architecture of the late nineteenth century (funded by Meg Whitman, CEO of Ebay); the arc of buildings around Poe Field; and the impressive newer science buildings along Washington road, including the math library designed by Frank Gehry, now under construction. This intellectual theme park, as I used to think of it, is more impressive than ever, and presumably wealthier than ever as well. And the cost of real estate in Princeton is higher than ever. I saw a smallish older house for sale on a nice lot in Princeton Borough for $710,000.

I’ll take the lower housing prices of this neck of the woods.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 25th, 2007 at 2:19 pm and is filed under Biking/Walking, Environment and Ecology, Geography, Other Places, Travel, Urban Design.