I’M BEYOND EXCITED to start blogging and show you guys what’s been going on in my life. As most of you know, I graduated from the University of California, Riverside this past June and up until my trip, I have been mostly hanging out with friends or chilling at home. This trip up to the Pacific Northwest was sort of that “last big trip” I get to go on before I start working.

Believe it or not, it wasn’t until this year that I became more knowledgeable and interested about the Pacific Northwest or PNW for short. Since Instagram has become a huge part of my life over the year (separate blog post to come in the future) I’ve been following a lot of photographers in that area of the United States. If at that time you asked me “What’s in Oregon?” or “What’s in Seattle?” my answer would be “I have no idea.” If you asked me now, I can give you a whole list of places off the top of my head. As I started to follow a lot of Instagrammers in that area, my desire to travel up the PNW grew more and more as the weeks went by. So I decided to ask my very good friend Justin if he would be down to take a road trip up to the PNW. Knowing the adventurous side of him, I knew he would say yes and it was official.

Originally it was going to be just me and Justin going on the road trip but Justin decided to bring his high school friend with us. We left early Sunday morning and hit the road. I had a few places in mind that we could stop by before reaching our destination in Portland. Our first stop was Lake Siskiyou in Redding.

Of course we would choose the white person to be our model.

I gotta say there are some hidden gems in Redding like this lake and other waterfalls around the area. I might have to make a trip up here next time :p

After many hours of driving, we were finally in Oregon!
Our next stop was Crater Lake National Park.

I would definitely come back here again and would recommend anyone traveling to Oregon stop by Crater Lake. There is so much to shoot around here. We couldn’t explore the whole park since we had very limited time.

After taking a lot of pictures we were on the road again. I have to admit, Crater Lake might not have been the ideal location to stop by since it was about an hour off the freeway. The reason is we booked an AirBnB a week before and there was a certain time we had to check in by. If we were late, obviously the owner would be mad at us and that wouldn’t look good on us either. After we got on the freeway we still had about 6 more hours to go. We were able to get in contact with the owner of the apartment we were going to stay at and she was nice enough to push back the check in time. After we passed this check in time I knew we should of went to a different place other than Crater Lake or left early. At this moment the lady was mad at us. After a few angry texts, it was known to us that she had to cut a date short in order to meet us. Now we felt really really bad. We finally arrived to the place we were staying at for the night an hour late (whoops). We decided that it would be a good idea to give the lady a bottle of wine as a way of saying sorry. It’s a good thing Justin’s friend works for the wine industry and brought the wine on the trip or we would have been homeless for the night (literally). The lady told us that last month she refused to let a person stay because she was late and gave her bad attitude even though that person already paid the full amount. So those who are planning to do AirBnb.... don't be late to your check ins! After talking it out with the lady, everything was good.

The next day we decided to check out Oregon’s most popular waterfall…. Multnomah Falls. I’ve seen so many pictures of this waterfall on Instagram and I wanted to experience it myself and it did not disappoint.

Another place that I really wanted to see was Rowena Crest. This is a really popular spot for a lot of Instagrammers in the PNW. It’s also known as #ThatNWroad in the Instagram community and rightfully so because what makes this place so unique from others is that it features a curved road that is shaped like an Omega sign. So if you go to the PNW and you don’t take a picture of Rowena, did you really go to the PNW?

Oregon was also the place where I witnessed one of the most amazing sunsets in my life. I’d say it’s a very close contender right behind California sunsets (I might be a little bias :p)

The next day was unfortunately our last day in Oregon. Since we saw a lot of nature over the past 2 days, we decided to check out the city of Portland. I have a certain fascination with bridges so we checked out 3 of the most popular bridges in Portland. First one was Tilikum Crossing. This is a brand new bridge and it wasn’t even opened when we were there. It’s said that at night, the lighting of the bridge changes color based on the speed, height, and water temperature of the Williamette River.

The next one was Hawthorne Bridge, one of the most iconic bridges in Portland.

The last bridge that we went to was St Johns Bridge. This was probably my favorite bridge out of the three as it is huge, the color is really unique and distinctive, and it was located in a beautiful park.

And yes we did a photoshoot under the bridge.

Overall I really enjoyed Portland. The scenery, the city, the people, the food... everything was amazing.

Some general observations:

- Portland is not diverse at all. We only saw 3 Asian people at most, as the majority were White.

-While going to Portland on the freeway, we experienced one of the smoothest roads. You can literally see the reflection of the lights from the cars on the road and it was so quiet in the cabin.

-A lot of people here drive Subarus.

-There’s a lot of North East, North West, South East, South West streets rather than your normal North, East, South, West

-A distinctive color of Portland is this turquoise color like the St Johns Bridge. The color is on street lamps, signals, etc.