Yesterday morning was one of those idyllic winter days, made all the more special for the rarity of their occurrence here in Oregon. We woke to bright sunshine and cerulean skies. Only a few wisps of white drew contrast against the wide expanse of blue.
We decided to play tourist. I read blogs about what folks do when they are traveling, and it is very similar to what we do. We go look at stuff, we take hikes or we drive around, we enjoy all the wonders of nature, we go out to eat, and we take pictures. Sound familiar? So why, we asked ourselves, do we need to drive thousands of miles to participate in the activities we love so well? Here we are, blessed to live in one of the more beautiful places on earth, and there is so much within a drive of an hour or two that we have never seen. We’re stuck here for now, we may as well make the best of it!!
So the sun was out and so were we! Just about 30 miles north of Eugene on I-5, is the small historic town of Brownsville, OR (not to be confused with that other Brownsville!). Our destination here was the Linn County Historical Museum. Uniquely housed in 6 old railroad cars, the museum houses artifacts mostly from the late 1800s to early 1900s. The docent also bragged that they have the best example of an original Prairie Schooner wagon in the west. These wagons were about half the size of the huge Conestoga wagons used in most western movies, and were used for travel over the Oregon Trail. Even the wagon on display at the End of the Oregon Trail Museum has been cobbled together from two wagons. Linn County Museum is quite proud of their wagon and it was a beautiful specimen.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and since I don’t want to write that much, I’ll just let the photos do the talking. Click to enlarge if you can’t read the text or to see detail.
Since Russ and I both have a banking background (in fact we met while working at the same bank), we found the banking display interesting. Russ remembers working on adding machines very similar to the one shown here. That is an old bank safe behind him.
Look closely at the check below. See all the little holes punched in the check? Read the holes backwards and it says “paid” and the date “ 3-7-27”. When I first started in banking, we still hand cancelled our checks like this. Every morning before the bank opened, all the checks that had cleared the accounts the pervious evening were “paid” by sticking them face down in a little machine that poked holes in them just like the check shown below. Boy do I feel old!
Notice there are no numbers along the bottom edge of the check. The large number “12” probably refers to the bank being in the 12th Federal Reserve District. This is probably of no interest to someone who has never worked in a bank but I found it brought back some memories.
For a small museum, there was lots to see and these photos are only a small sample of what we enjoyed.
There is a great park in Brownsville, larger than you would expect in a small town. The park also includes a camping area but it is closed in the winter so we didn’t get to visit that portion. From the abundance of robins in the park, we were almost convinced spring is on the way. February in Oregon has a way of teasing us with days of sunshine and mild temperatures. Then March comes along with its frigid rain and blustery north winds, and we hunker down for another month of winter.
Thanks Russ for taking such great photo of the park. That is the Calapooia River that runs through the park (Cal-a-POOH-yuh).
From there we continued our drive east, stopping for a photo op at the tiny town of Crawfordsville, OR. This photo is for my sisters and brother – they know what it means!! I still have nightmares…
Onward to Sweet Home where we picked up a Subway sandwich for $5. Did you know all regular foot long Subway sandwiches are on sale for $5 in February? Such a deal. We always buy a foot long and share it. Can’t beat lunch for $5 for two!!
We stopped at Foster Lake, just a couple of miles past Sweet home and ate our sandwiches in the car, overlooking the lake. The is what we saw as we munched our lunch.
The parking area is up a ways from the lake and with the head-in parking, it looks like you are suspended over the water. Beautiful.
I was bemused by the posted park rules. TEN (yes, I counted them) columns of fine print, which were totally illegible from the path, enumerated the rules by which park users must abide! I could not even get close to the rules board as it was off the path and on a steep slope of grass with nothing between the sign and a steep drop off to the lake. Strange.
We tried to behave and not run afoul of the regulations. Must have worked as we are still enjoying our freedom. We took a ton of photos of the beautiful scenery and here are just a couple. The moon was already hovering over the lake even though it was only mid-afternoon.
After that, it was time to return home. We spent a wonderful day, saw some beautiful scenery, and all within an hour’s drive of home. We’ve made a promise to ourselves to do this as often as the weather allows. Just because we are not traveling right now, doesn’t mean we can’t play tourist! People come from all over the country to see the beauty of Oregon and here we are, lucky enough to live here. Hopefully the weather will be nice enough next week to enable us to take Therapy for a run to the coast. We’re keeping our fingers crossed.
