Occasionally Interesting, often not

We went to Oregon to see the Aug 21 2017 total eclipse of the sun. Although the location we saw it from gave us only 70s of totality, it was still spectacular and memorable. We stayed with friends for the week, in Tualatin, a bit south of Portland. Our original plan was to spend the weekend at their cabin in Sisters, from where we would drive north to get longer totality; however, there was a forest fire burning near there, with a pending evacuation order (which did come to pass) so we decided to stay in town. The reason for going to Sisters was for more reliably clear weather, but fortunately for millions of people, including us, it was forecast to be clear on eclipse morning in western Oregon. As it turned out, only the first morning of our trip and the last, were clouded over in the morning; the rest of the days were clear blue skies. We spent 2 day pre-eclipse doing some scouting. We wanted to find somewhere that had a view of the Willamette Valley looking west. The idea was ...