Discover Oregon

Ten nights in Oregon, which is enough to find out why people who live there are so pleased about it. Flights, car and hotels are arranged together from the UK with a road book for the driving.

Two nights in Portland open it, a city of bridges, bookshops and food carts, with Mount Hood on the skyline. Then two nights at Cannon Beach, where Haystack Rock stands out of the surf and the tide pools around it fill up twice a day. From there the route runs south on Route 101, which is the best stretch of the Oregon coast: headlands, lighthouses, sea stacks and almost no development.

Two nights among the redwoods follow, just over the California line, and then the trip turns inland for its two best stops. Jacksonville is a gold rush town that stopped growing when the railway went elsewhere and has been preserved by the accident of it. Crater Lake comes next, a caldera nearly two thousand feet deep filled with water so clear it reads as deep blue. Mount Hood closes the trip, an hour from where it started.

Seven stops over ten nights, three of them two nights, and around 850 miles. Two things to settle with them. Crater Lake’s rim road and lodge are snowbound from roughly late October into June, and Mount Hood is a ski mountain in winter, so the last third of this route depends on the season and the page does not say so. Several overnights are also given as the coast rather than a town. It suits anyone who wants one state done properly.