Thursday, March 28th - Oregon City Historic District

Since it was Spring Break and we desperately needed to get the kids out of the house for a while, we loaded up our three middle schoolers and went to Oregon City. At only 1-1/2 miles and loaded with historic houses and a really cool elevator ride halfway through, we figured this was our best bet for keeping them all interested. And it was interesting – many of the houses are labeled with the names of their original owners, the founding families of Oregon, and there are at least three museums that we're planning to go back to visit - on the weekend, when they're open.

But the best part of the walk was the elevator, which runs between the historic residential district of Oregon City and the historic retail district. It looks a little out of place, a big round space-age looking thing on a pedestal, built in the 1950's to replace one that had been there since 1915 and was originally powered by water. We walked into the enclosed observation deck to an awesome surprise: the entire thing is lined with lenticular photos of Oregon City both past and present – those are the kind that change as you move by them. I really want to see surveillance video of this room as people walk around it, swaying back and forth as they go. The elevator is completely free, with an attendant sitting behind plexiglass who pushes the button and marks down how many people are on each ride. We opted to take the steps back up, then continued down the Promenade to where we could see the Oregon City Falls.

The kids were starting to get bored by this time, so we backtracked to where we'd deviated from the official walk and continued on back to the car. As we finished up we realized that I'd been following the arrows on the map backward, doing the walk in reverse order. This was probably not a bad thing, as it was considerably shorter post-elevator that way, and I don't think the kids would have been as patient with the back-and-forthing we started out with. Our plan is to include the kids on more of our walks this summer....probably not all of them, though. I have a feeling that these weekly walks may become a great excuse to get away from them for a few hours!