Portland/Near-Disaster

So I just got back from spending about a week in Portland visiting my uncle. It was a lot of fun, and I'll probably expand upon all of the cool things I got to do at a later date, but for now, I'll just list a few highlights - we went to the coast and looked around (the picture above is Haystack rock at Cannon Beach) , then stayed in my uncle's hotel in Astoria (check out the gallery on the website, it's a really cool place). We also went to a Trailblazers game, which was amazing - my uncle has amazing seats, and the Blazers are playing really well these days. We also bummed around Portland quite a bit, which was great because it's so much different than any other city I've seen, and also because I got to revisit some places I went as a very young child. On the last full day I was there, we went to the Evergreen Aviation museum and saw the Spruce Goose, among other things. That museum is amazing, and the Spruce Goose is unfathomably huge. I've posted some pictures, but it is really difficult to get a sense of the scale of this thing.Here is the view as you enter the museum. Below, you can see just the tail of the Spruce Goose dwarfing a whole slew of other aircraft, including a B-25. Look at the tiny people for scale. (By the way, the plane in the foreground is a Ford Tri-motor, which is the plane my Grandpa jumped out of as a Smokejumper here in Idaho). Anyways, the trip was great. Oh, and I got to meet a high school friend of mine, Caitlin, and her friends for a drink one night. It was a lot of fun. The flight back was even more fun, though. I got to experience my first aborted plane landing as I was coming back to Boise. We were descending through a thick layer of clouds, and when we finally broke through, I could make out not only porchlights and windows, but individual bricks on the houses we were flying over. And, we were going really fast. After just a few seconds (spent wondering whether I was just being overly paranoid about a normal approach), the engines suddenly throttled all the way up, and we were all pushed into our seat backs as the plane accelerated and climbed back into the clouds. After a couple of minutes, the pilot came on and said, "Uh, we, uh, are going to give that another shot. We were coming in high and fast and...the tower wasn't really helping us out at all, so we're going to try to do better." I couldn't help but laugh - not only did we almost land a mile short of the runway at about 700 mph (yes, that's an exaggeration), the aircraft control tower didn't even notice. Needless to say, I felt safe. So, we circled around and made an uneventful landing, but I was still a bit nervous.