Monday, July 24th - Garden Home to Raleigh Hills

After our three week "vacation" we really needed to get back on track.  Katje, never one to ease into things slowly, chose a six mile walk with the word "hills" in it.  She's so ambitious!  We've already done the first part of this walk, taking the Fanno Creek Greenway Trail between Garden Home and Scholls Ferry Road.  On our previous walk we turned around and went back at the end of the trail, but today we continued on, winding our way through some really nice neighborhoods full of houses from the 1950's.  Eventually we came to McMillan Park, and while the walk in the "Portland City Walks" book would have taken us out to Beaverton-Hillsdale Highway and to lunch at a local restaurant, we'd come out early to try to beat the heat (didn't work) so we turned back at the park.

Back we went through the same neighborhoods, on different streets this time so we could critique even more houses.  Almost all of them are from the same era, but there's enough variety in form and decoration that it avoids the "cookie cutter" feel that many modern subdivisions have.  The large, well-established trees help a lot. At the top of the hill on Arrowwood Lane there is a sprawling house that seems to go on forever, set in a large, tree filled lot.  Our book tells us that this is a 54,000 square foot lot, which sounds impressive until you do the math and it turns out to be 1.24 acres.  Not that I did the math - I came home and found a converter online that did it for me.  Thank goodness for Google!

The trip back seemed a lot quicker than the walk out, and pretty soon we were back on the Greenway Trail, sweating our way back to the car. According to the weatherman this morning it wasn't supposed to get so hot so quickly, but I guarantee it was a lot warmer when we set out than the 59 degrees he said it was.  And way warmer than that by the time we got back.

We didn't go all the way to the restaurant off the end and skipped a side trip, but according to the new app Katje put on her phone we walked 5.3 miles in an hour and a half.  It's not the 15 minute mile Katje's working toward to put us on track for our eventual half marathon, but we'll work our way up to that.  Sometime before our marathon.  Really.