OK, not any cottage gardens. But I hope you'll enjoy the pretty pix anyway. The Travel Forum is seldom active and this didn't seem appropriate for the CA Gardening forum, so you guys are "it", LOL.

From late Sept to the end of October 2010, we spent over five weeks traveling to and from NorCA for an Alaskan cruise departing from Seattle, which is one of my favorite cities to visit. The cruise was a disappointment, but we had a great time overall. Despite my many trips up here, this is the first time I've driven (put 2000 miles on the car). There's still so much we missed, like the Dalles and the Columbia Gorge and the Cascade Valley and....well, obviously we will be making the long drive a couple more times in the next few years!

We'll start at the Far North and work south. On a small cruise ship you get very close in Glacier Bay. Because it was overcast, the turqoise color of the ice comes out strongly:

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Global warming may be a problem, but it is thrilling to watch huge pieces of ice calve off right before your eyes. Here's a closeup of that amazingly vivid ice color:

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We spent over a week in Seattle (I've visited 11 times in 30 years) showing some friends around. Did not take a lot of photos for ourselves, though these three were good ones.

First, floating homes on Lake Union. There are also houseboats, but floating homes are treated differently for tax purposes. As shown here, there's usually two homes to each slip, one in front of the other:

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And yes, we did the touristy thing and captured Bill Gates' zillion-dollar compound off Lake Washington, with its imported sand beach that nobody ever uses, because thousands of people will gawk at you every day of the year!

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Here's a beautiful, peaceful waterfall - but it happens to be located smack in the middle of Seattle. It's the REI Co-op flagship store, with this lovely rushing waterfall sited outside between the store and its parking garage:

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We didn't spend as long in Portland as we should have. It's a vibrant, interesting city. Although many go to see their famed Japanese Garden, here in CA we have several of the best of that ilk. I was more interested in visiting the Lan Su Chinese Garden, an amazing recreation of Ming Dynasty buildings and landscaping, created by 65 Chinese artisans over 18 months, prior to the Garden's opening in 2000.

I forgot my camera (my very bad), but I bought a postcard and scanned it because I fell in love with the magnificent pebble tiles used in the outside walkways. This is a detail of Chinese gardening you seldom see here. The small photo on the LH side is the 2-story Tea House, the largest of the 5 bldgs in the Garden:

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We turned off I-5 and drove to the Southern Oregon coast. It's as gorgeous as people say, with long stretches of beaches that you can drive right up to, unlike most of California:

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In Gold Beach, OR, we managed to find the small but cute "Feline Inn" on North Jetty Rd. outside town. Some volunteers built a row of miniature houses to shelter the feral cats living out on the wharf that overlooks the Rogue River:

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And here's one of the residents!

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As we drove into CA again, we took several scenic alternates to the coastal Rte 1/101 (the two highways merge in several places, then diverge again). We saw the redwoods in Stout Grove, then the Newton B. Drury Scenic Parkway, and finally the entire Avenue of the Giants, where we found this massive stump. My DH is just shy of 6' tall, acting as the measuring tape:

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Just north of the town of Mendocino, McKerricher State Park offered us a sandy beach with fall-colorful iceplant foliage:

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The limestone just above the beaches get carved out by wind and water into interesting formations:

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When we made a return trip to the Mendocino Botanical Gardens, the rhodies are of course long gone, but the dahlias were still holding up, although neither of these had nametags:

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In a covered pavilion they had a really spectacular display of tuberous begonias, in a multitude of colors. Here's one of them:

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A more complete travel diary and a few more photos (but again, no gardens, alas) are on our Travel blogsite:

Here is a link that might be useful: 2010 Pacific Northwest blog