João Canziani

With a flourishing food and wine scene and an artsy, DIY vibe, this eco-minded metropolis is challenging San Francisco’s supremacy as the West Coast capital of cool. The Ace Hotel Portland, a rocker favorite, also scores big with kids, who love the in-room turntables and the burgers at on-site restaurant Clyde Common. Get around town on the energy-efficient Portland Streetcar. —James Jung

The play’s the thing in Ashland, home of the nearly year-round Oregon Shakespeare Festival, which draws more than 100,000 people every year. The town, which has about 20,000 residents and is located about 300 miles south of Portland, has also been garnering attention as of late for its budding restaurant scene.

Keith Daly

With its antiques shops and picturesque hiking trails, Gearhart—just north of the renowned, more-bustling Cannon Beach—is an in-the-know haven for Portland hipsters like Paige Powell and Gus Van Sant. In the evenings, people drive onto the hard-packed sand for wine and stargazing parties.

Stay: The 12 attached cottages of the Gearhart Ocean Inn, constructed in 1941, are an easy walk to the beach, and the owners will furnish a “clam gun” for scooping up clams from the sand.

Eat: The nicely refined Pacific Way Bakery & Café serves top-notch muffins and coffee in the morning, and later a menu that includes bay shrimp, designer pizzas, and flawless crab cakes. —Tom Austin

I just finished my first Romantic Suspense, “Fatal Judgement” and I really enjoyed the novel by Irene Hannon. What attracted me to the book was the idea of a U.S. Marshall charged to protect federal judge Liz Michaels, a woman he didn’t like. She was married to a good friend who died in an auto accident that he sort of blamed on judge Michaels. Could he put aside his feelings for her and keep her safe?

The term romantic suspense seems to mean strong, beautiful women and bigger than life men in life and death situations that make their bonds grow strong. Award-winning Hannon does that very well. Throw in a deep faith in God and a sceptic and you have all the ingredients for a sleepless night reading by flashlight under the covers.

In addition sea ice extent in the Arctic, measured in millions of square miles, not only is one standard deviation above the mean, but is setting records going bask to 1978.

Ice Age Now has a nifty chart that “…shows global temperatures for the past 15,000 years.

You’ll see that today’s benign climate is not even close to being the warmest on record.

Not even close.

Temperatures have been warmer than today for almost all of the past 10,000 years.

“Heceta Head Lighthouse, as seen from Highway 101 in Oregon.”
(Courtesy Vonelle Viajera/myBudgetTravel)

The Colombia River played a pivotal roll in the western expansion of the U.S.
(Alptraum / Dreamstime.com)

Tumbling 1,200 miles from the Canadian Rockies to the Pacific Ocean in Oregon, the Columbia is best known for its part in Lewis and Clark’s 1805 expedition westward, for the gold rush of the 1860s, and for being such a formidable obstacle for pioneers on the Oregon Trail. Today, the Columbia divides Washington and Oregon for its final 309 miles, reaching Astoria, Oregon, at the treacherous Columbia Bar, once known as the “Graveyard of Ships”. Wineries abound on both sides of the torrent and midday winds from the craggy Columbia River Gorge power a busy windsurfing scene on the river at the city of Hood River.

No mention of Benghazi, I suppose, or “What difference does it make? What difference… does… it… make?”

Pray for our country!