Every year that we can man­age it, we will go to the Hood River Fruit Loop tour. (But then we’ll accept just about any excuse to drive out to the Colum­bia River Gorge.) The hills lead­ing up to Mount Hood are a beau­ti­ful back­drop to the agri­cul­tural endeav­ors that bring us so much culi­nary delight. We always enjoy stop­ping at dif­fer­ent places each year to see if we can remem­ber where we went the year before. It’s just one of the lit­tle joys of get­ting older …

This year we decided to reverse our usual route so that we might arrive at one of our favorite des­ti­na­tions in time for lunch. This great house sits just across the street from the Apple Val­ley Coun­try Store and Bak­ery. Since I’m right in the mid­dle of rebuild­ing our porch, I have a height­ened aware­ness of porches — and this is a par­tic­u­larly sub­stan­tial example.

So the first order of busi­ness is stand­ing in line next to the smoker for some bar­be­cue. A lit­tle solo gui­tar music play­ing in the back­ground made up for the annoy­ing over-parenting going on behind us. Once lunch was fin­ished, it was time to go into the store and sam­ple the wide vari­ety of fruit jams and pre­serves that they pro­duce and sell. If there is still room after lunch and sam­pling, there also good pies being made and served on site as well.

Towards the end of our tour we once again sought out this amaz­ing, icon­o­clas­tic apple and pear orchard — The Mount Hood Organic Farms and Cot­tages. The pro­pri­etor has not only a wealth of fruit knowl­edge but also a pro­cliv­ity for eccen­tric archi­tec­ture as well. The photo above is his vin­tage apple sorter in a long room appar­ently designed to house it.

The odd thing to me is the appar­ent dis­con­nect between my expe­ri­ence of the place and the one pre­sented on their web site. Per­haps the eccen­tric archi­tec­ture crowd just isn’t well-heeled enough to go after.

This is a detail of some of the work under­way to dec­o­rate the build­ing com­pound that looks to be a long term owner/builder project.

A view across sev­eral of the build­ings gives a sense of the over­all effect. Of course, much more of it is under con­struc­tion than com­pleted at this point.

Before we depart, Lisa takes in a view of Mount Hood from the large invit­ing green in front of the build­ings. Her view from that van­tage point is directly towards the mag­nif­i­cent Mt. Hood.