R is for River Tour

I know I am super behind on so many letters for my abc field tripping! I am working on getting those caught up! I can't promise anything, but I am working on it!

For the letter R...

We had an awesome opportunity to go on a river jetboat tour the day after April's graduation with her leadership class. Her teacher invited all of us (me and boys) to come, and we had never been so we decided to go too.

We arrived at the Willamette Jetboats bright and early in the morning as our boat was scheduled to leave at 9:15. This was a super hot day, so we were all eager to get wet, and get wet we did!

I tried to get as good of a picture of the whole boat as I could while waiting for our time to board.

Finally we were off! This is the beginning because we are still dry!

We went under several bridges in Portland. The tour guide was pretty hilarious, and had us laughing the whole time. Along with jokes, he told us quite a bit of history and fun facts.

The city line was just gorgeous...

We saw some points of interest, including the fire boat station...

 A really old boat that is also now a museum...

Different parts of the city that were accessible by boat...

And, of course we went to the Willamette Falls in Oregon City. I was super excited about this part because I had never seen the falls from this view. We drive by it all the time, but I have never stopped to see it up close.

Just as we were starting to approach it we could hear the rushing water.

Finally up close. I had never realized how big it is.

It was so pretty and the sound was just soothing.

The boys are still kinda dry! Although we had gotten a little wet at this point (which was the turn around point for obvious reasons ;).

I had always wondered about these old factories too! We learned a lot of history about the old abandonded buildings, and the plans for the future for this area. Apparently there are plans to improve and change it.

Lots and lots of factories from long ago are around these falls.

After the falls we headed back to our starting point (behind OMSI). It was a pretty exciting ride so I didn't take a lot of pictures on the way back. We had both speed and water. That boat is amazingly fast, and can definitely kick some water up on the passengers if it's driven a certain way! As evidenced by our last picture. We were all soaked! Completely!

We had other plans that day up in Portland, but we were all too cold and wet, so we ended up going home. Pretty cool field trip though!