There are plenty of ways to spend a day in Oregon. You can hike to a waterfall. Wander through wine country. Hunt for agates on the coast. Spend an afternoon poking around one of those wonderfully strange little roadside places we seem to have tucked into every corner...
There is a stretch of summer in Oregon when a drive through Clackamas County can lead somewhere unexpectedly theatrical. One minute, you are following familiar farmland roads south of Portland. The next, you are hearing the ring of armor, watching banners move in the...
Hug Point is open again. That sentence alone would have been enough for a lot of us after a closed spring break and a summer spent driving past barricades on Highway 101. Oregon Parks and Recreation Department confirms the wayside is open, with no day-use parking fee...
There are normal fall festivals. You know the type. Apple cider. Corn mazes. Hayrides. Maybe somebody puts on a flannel shirt and spends twenty minutes choosing a pumpkin that somehow costs more than lunch. And then there's the Oregon fall festival where grown adults...
If you waited out the summer Multnomah crush, Tuesday, September 8, 2026 is the first full day without the Multnomah Falls (I-84) Timed Use Permit. The Recreation.gov season ran daily from May 22 through September 7, 2026, from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., for private vehicles...
The first cool morning that makes you dig out a flannel is basically Oregon’s official invitation to fall. After that, the to-do list writes itself: a cider donut still warm enough to fog the bag, a hayride that smells like cut grass, a corn maze that takes longer...
Paid partnership disclosure: Oregon Coast Aquarium is a paid partner of That Oregon Life. The Aquarium did not write this itinerary; That Oregon Life retains editorial control over the route, caveats and recommendations. The best Newport day with kids is not a stack...
There are ordinary movie nights, and then there are the kinds of movie nights that feel like somebody climbed directly into your childhood memories, grabbed two battered VHS tapes from beside the television, and projected them onto an enormous outdoor screen. That is...
There is something about fall in Northeast Oregon that feels a little different from autumn anywhere else in the state. The mornings arrive colder, the mountains seem sharper against the sky, and pockets of brilliant yellow begin appearing along rivers, old roads, and...
Wine gets most of the attention in this part of the Willamette Valley, but there's another kind of treasure to be found here. Instead of pinot noir, this place deals in things that are millions of years older, considerably harder, and, depending on who you ask, every...
There are plenty of places in Oregon where you can pick up a doughnut, grab a loaf of bread, or order a birthday cake. There are far fewer where generations of the same family may remember doing exactly that over the span of more than a century. Helen Bernhard Bakery...
Portland has an extinct volcano sitting right in the middle of the city, so naturally, at some point a group of grown men decided the appropriate thing to do with it was build homemade cars and race them down the side. Honestly, it would almost be stranger if this...