Travel Maven blog

Unwinding at windy Columbia River Gorge

Hood River, Oregon

When you look over the wide Columbia River from Oregon toward Washington on the other side, you might conclude that the white caps on the waves that seem to be traveling west to east -- left to right -- are the result of a very heavy current.

Well, there’s a heavy current, where the river cuts through the mountains at the Columbia River Gorge.

But the current is headed in the opposite direction, downstream from east to west toward the Pacific Ocean.

What’s headed east, causing all that watery commotion, is the wind.

Which is why the Columbia River Gorge, east of Portland, Ore., is one of the world’s best places to windsurf and kite board. The Cascade Mountains on either side of the river create a wind tunnel -- typically at up to 35 miles per hour – that moves surfers at good clip on the waters of the wide Columbia. May through September is the peak season.

Baseball, numbers, fantasy, poetry

Like travel, baseball is one of my passions, which I satisfy in my midlife years with shared season tickets to watch the Cleveland Indians -- and a franchise in a cerebral game called Rotisserie.

Ours, I'm sure, is the only Rotisserie baseball league in the country with a Poet Laureate.

Every April, a group of 12 otherwise sane adults -- each with some relationship past or present to the Cleveland newspaper called The Plain Dealer -- gathers the weekend after opening day of the real baseball season to auction off all the players in the American League, as if they were for sale. Each of us begins the day with $260. By the end of the auction, we are out of money, but are owners for a season of a fantasy baseball team.

For the next 25 weeks, we fantasy general managers will begin the morning with an Internet look at how our chosen players performed the day before and where our team lies in the Plain Wheeler Dealer standings.