Happy Caturday!

McMenamins Edgefield

I can't believe it but we have totally neglected to share with you a great chain of brewpubs owned and operated by McMenamins. McMenamins has several brewpubs, concert venues, hotels and even a few movie theaters in the Portland area, as well as other parts of Oregon and Washington. A few weeks ago we spent a couple days out at McMenamins Edgefield located in Troutdale, Oregon.

The hotel and surrounding grounds were the site of the Multnomah County Poor Farm in the early 1900s. The main building served as the farm hospital. Farming operations ceased in the 1950s, and the main building became the Edgefield manor. This manor housed emotionally disturbed children. Later the facility became a nursing home.

McMenamins took over the property in 1990. They turned the nursing home into a hotel and restaurant. The surrounding grounds were transformed into a vineyard and two par 3 golf courses. Furthermore, the various farming buildings have become pubs, bars and distilleries. They even have room for an outdoor stage for summer concerts. We have visited McMenamins Edgefield several times since we moved to the Portland area. Usually we go out to play golf and enjoy a pint or two. But in early July we stayed the night in the hotel and enjoyed a nice dinner in the Black Rabbit Restaurant. We had a rather nice stay with great food and beer. Unfortunately, our stay happened to coincide with a brief heat wave in the Portland area, and hotel was not equipped with air conditioning so our evening was a little uncomfortable. It was fun to stay at the hotel and wonder the historic grounds. We will definitely be heading back to play golf very soon. Look for more posts coming soon about other McMenamins properties.















Location of McMenamins Edgefield in Troutdale, Oregon
















Pub course and distillery bar





















Painted pipe in our room

Happy Caturday!

It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year

The 23rd Annual Oregon Brewers Festival kicked off today with a parade and the ceremonial tapping of the keg. You can bet your masskrug we will attending this year's festivities. Here are some pictures of the parade.

Happy Caturday!

Camping A Go-Go

It's safe to say that Oregon has an over abundance of natural beauty that has a way of beckoning one to the outdoors, eventually. We've always been the type of people to prefer a hotel over spending the night in the wild, but a recent class at our local REI store got us motivated to give camping a whirl. After a trip to the aforementioned REI store as well as Fred Meyer we had all the supplies we needed for our first camping adventure. We will eventually post of a list of camping essentials for your reference, but we feel we should get a little more camping experience under our belts before we start doling out the advice. Until then you can go here for some helpful advice.

For our first time out we decided to not stray to far from home, so we choose a nearby state park. L.L. Stub Stewart State Park was just a scenic 30 minute drive from home base, and once there we could hardly believe we were so close to home. Stub Stewart is a really nice, newer state park with several tent and rv campsites and lots of trails for hiking. We arrived on a Saturday afternoon, set up our camp, and hit the trails for a pre-dinner hike. When we returned to camp we started building our fire, and after a few attempts we got a fire going. We roasted hot dogs and marshmallows for s'mores - real gourmet camp food. Once the sun went down, we were treated to an amazing starry sky complete with shooting stars (or meteors). The one downside to our camping trip was the sleeping on the ground thing. The camp sites at this park are packed gravel and it's just as fluffy as it sounds. Also, a guy at the adjacent camp site sawed logs (as in snored) all night long. We theorized that his long suffering wife banishes him to the wilderness on the weekends so she can catch some zzzs and he can make some other poor saps suffer. Well, without much rest we were pretty much ready to get out of there come morning light and that's exactly what we did.

All in all we did enjoy our night of camping, and with a few minor adjustments we could really get into to this whole being outdoors thing. Next time we plan to have better padding to sleep on and maybe pack some earplugs, you know just in case. Speaking of next time we just made arrangements for a camping trip to Crater Lake, and you better believe we will be blogging about that complete with lots of pictures. So if anyone is still reading this blog and has any tips for camping or specifically camping at Crater Lake, let us know.

Happy Caturday!