PORTLAND, Ore. — I’ve a favorite adage that goes, “It is the journey that supports the destination.”

It is an insightful phrase that I have lived by whenever I travel throughout Oregon’s great outdoors.

This week, getting from this place to that is a journey to savor along a coastal byway that offers leaping salmon and spectacular fall colors – all within a 90-minute drive from Portland.

If the roadway flanking the Nehalem River has a number, I surely cannot find it on a map. Perhaps that’s why I’ve such a love affair with this backdoor byway that takes a bit longer to get from this place to that.

It breezes along nearly 30 miles beginning at a small whistle stop village called Elsie (located on State Highway 26) and bounds down a narrow lane past limb-framed farms that cry “photo-opp,

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