Monday, March 4th - Lower Macleay Park to Pittock Mansion, take 2

We decided that today we'd take a second go at the Lower Macleay Park to Pittock Mansion walk. We attempted this once already in January, took a wrong turn and got horribly lost in Forest Park (there's a blog entry about it, if you're interested) so we were determined that today we would make it to Pittock Mansion because there was not going to be a third chance at this walk. We would either check this one off our list today or rip the page out of the book and pretend it was never there.

We started out again along Balch Creek, and this time when we came to the stone house we went left instead of right. We'd have taken great satisfaction in ignoring the sign that pointed us the wrong way last time, but it's been removed. We followed the (correct, this time!) trail as it continued alongside the creek and switchbacked up to Upper Macleay Park. Here the trail crosses Cornell Road and continues uphill (from this point forward just assume that everything is uphill) to a junction with the Wildwood Trail. The book says to continue on Upper Macleay Trail, so we hung a left and kept climbing. A few weeks from now the Trilliums will probably be blooming and it will be gorgeous, but Forest Park is always pretty and with the sun shining and the trees starting to bud, it was a beautiful day for a walk. Which makes it doubly sad that I was so busy creaking and gasping my way up the trail that I wasn't giving it the attention it deserved. Those three weeks of cookie moving and lame walks were probably not the best way to lead into a hike like this!

Eventually we reached another crossroads with the Wildwood Trail. The signs this time were very clear – the Upper Macleay trail continued forward, while Wildwood ran to the right and left. Since the book mentioned no detours we continued on Macleay...until we hit a residential street. The trail did continue, but as Lower Macleay Trail. Hm. We pulled out the book (which we've been bringing on all of our walks since the last time we got lost) and started trying to figure out where we went wrong. Once again a jogger came to the rescue (huge deja vu moment here!) and set us straight – to get to Pittock we should have turned onto Wildwood at the junction. Back we went (fortunately we hadn't gotten too far off track), and were soon once again heading uphill toward Pittock. The rest of the way up was pretty much just gasping and creaking through a series of steep switchbacks but at last (at last!) we came out in the Pittock Mansion parking lot.

If you've never been to Pittock you should definitely go, Built in 1914 by the owner of the Oregonian, it was saved from demolition in 1964, fully restored and opened as a museum. We wandered around the grounds for a few minutes and admired the views of the city, Mt. Hood and Mt. St. Helens, then headed back down the trail. It was a little muddier on the way down due to the melting ice dripping from the trees but it was definitely faster downhill (we didn't get lost, which helped) and before long we were back at the car. Tired and muddy, but we made it this time- 3.8 miles out and back with an 850 foot elevation gain, and now we can check it off our list. Finally!

Photos from Neighborhood walk

Our walk this week found us in our own neighborhood, which was a nice change of pace.

Some of the "greenery" we saw along the way

Love this house! It looked so pretty today we had to take a photo of it.

 Patricia D Whiting Metzger Park Hall building and Metzger Park



This is one of the open spaces in Metzger Park, you can see a portion of the playground in the background



The trail that runs through the park

Love the way the trees line the path

Metzger United Methodist Church

There are always geese on the field of the school, this is probably the fewest we have seen in awhile

Metzger Elementary School

The hill that neither of us like. We have walked this hill many times and every time, we think, ugh, this hill again?

The cemetary that runs along the hill we do not like. The Boyscouts help decorate this cemetary with flags for Veterans Day and Memorial Day. It always looks so beautiful!

Tuesday, February 26th - around the neighborhood

Umm....oops. We did go for our weekly walk, I just totally forgot to write about it. We didn't mark anything out of the books again this week; Katje's son was home with the flu and we're both a little burned out by all those cookies, so we stuck close to home and just walked our neighborhood. We have a few standard walks around the area, and a favorite is up through Metzger Park, then down Cedarcrest to Washington Drive. This week we decided to do it.....in reverse order! Exciting! Okay, not really, but it's a nice walk. I've always thought of Metzger Park as kind of smallish, but I looked it up and it's a full 7 acres, with a nice play area, tennis courts and a hall that can be rented out for special occasions. If you're currently planning a wedding reception, school auction or some other event and are looking for a venue in the Tigard area, this is a nice space and really conveniently located.

We followed the path to the other side of the park, and headed up Locust Street. Walking past Metzger Elementary (where all of our kids went to school) we saw only a couple of geese in the upper field. During spring and fall migrations this field is absolutely thick with geese – and with goose poop. It's going to be kind of nice this year not having to worry about how icky Field Day is going to be. We continued up Locust to Greenberg and hung a right, bringing us to our old nemesis, the Greenberg Road hill, which is not particularly steep and not particularly long, but for some reason it's the worst part of any neighborhood walk. I have no clue why. We hauled it up the hill, past the cemetery and then circled back around to home. Easy walk (apart from that stupid hill), only around a couple of miles and bonus points for not having to drive there. However, after two weeks off the books we're ready for something a little more adventurous. I'll be sure to write my blog entry and post it on time this week...

Wednesday, February 20th - Cookies instead

We both had things going on earlier in the week, so our daily walk got postponed to Wednesday. The original plan was to take a quick walk around the neighborhood before we went to the warehouse to pick up another 600 cases of Girl Scout cookies for troops in the area (this is in addition to the 7,000 cases we handed out in the original distribution and the 432 we picked up last week). Katje had to help a friend with an errand in the morning so we went to a backup plan of going for a walk after picking up the cookies and unloading them at Katje's house, but before we starting sorting them out into each individual troop's order.

It was about 10:30 when we started loading cookies into the 10 foot U-Haul truck we rented and almost 11:30 by the time we got both the truck and my minivan loaded with all of the cookies. Back to the house, where Katje's daughter and her friend helped us stack all the Thin Mints and Samoas on the porch and the rest of the cookies in the TV room. Then we started filling orders. 10 cases of Thin Mints and 8 of Samoas from the porch, 1 Tagalong, 3 Trefoils and 2 Do-si-dos from the TV room. Stack it all in one corner of the living room and move on to the next order. 15 Mints and 14 Samoas, 2 Savannah Smiles, a Dulce de Leche and a Thank U Berry Munch, make another stack in the living room and move on the the next. You get the idea. Some orders were massive, some just a few cases but there were a lot of orders and a lot of walking back and forth. At 3:00 leaders started showing up to pick up their orders and we helped load cars (back and forth), kept filling orders (back and forth) and when we finished filling all the orders we carried all the extras into the TV room (back and forth). I finally headed for home at about 4:30, where I sat down and watched my leg muscles twitch. Fun!

It's not something we can check off in one of our books, but we agreed that this definitely counts for our weekly walk. We have absolutely no clue how it would translate into linear distance (Katje thinks at least two miles, I think more) but considering the amount of squatting and lifting and carrying that we did, we're good for the week. And if the need to check something off in the books becomes too strong to resist, I'm writing “Cookies” in the back of one and putting a check mark next to it!

Photos from Cookies Instead...

The 600 cases of cookies for us to pick up (I kow it doesn't look like much, but it really is!)

Our friend, Liz, in front of the cookies (glad she was here visiting).

Me, counting all the cookies.

Two pallets, plus the sides and back of the uhaul full of cookies.

The uhaul, back at my house, doesn't look like they shifted to much!

Not much clearance in there!

The walk from my porch to the uhaul, and back to the porch, and back to the uhaul, and back to the house....

Monday, February 11th - Old Town Sherwood

I'm going to start this entry by explaining that Saturday was Cookie Depot day, when we distribute Girl Scout cookies to all of the troops in Tigard, Tualatin and Sherwood. Seven thousand cases of cookies. 84,000 boxes of cookies. A LOT of cookies. Needless to say, there is a lot of bending and lifting and carrying and loading involved in this. I am not used to spending an entire day on my feet, on concrete, walking back and forth in the warehouse and to and from cars and I spent most of yesterday (Sunday) whimpering whenever I had to move. Okay not really, but I was very, very sore and tired.

Knowing that this would be the case, we decided last week that we would pull one of our “slacker” walks out. There are several walks in the book that don't really qualify as a full walk, but we still want to check them off our list. Our options are grouping a bunch together (which would probably involve more time driving than walking) or saving them for days such as today, when it's pretty impressive that we didn't just cancel. Believe me, it was tempting.

The walk starts at 2^nd and Pine in downtown Sherwood and goes past the library and various small shops, then down into Stella Olsen Memorial park. We turned left onto a really long wooden walkway over the marshes – I'm sure that at other times of year it's a great place for bird watching, but today we only saw a couple of ducks. The path winds past a picnic area and amphitheater then comes up out of the park within a couple blocks of the car. One mile, less than 20 minutes and home in time for breakfast. On a side note, when I got home I actually read the description in the “Walk There” book and found that there were all sorts of interesting things we should have been paying attention to – the Old Sherwood Hotel, built in 1890 and the Graves Cannery from 1918 as well as the site of a civic protest in the 1910's to get the railroad to build a crossing. Maybe we'll go back sometime and pay more attention...and go to the little antique store we passed, of course.

Photos from Old Town Sherwood

At the Start of our Walk (1st and Pine)

This was a really cute little house (not sure if they use it as a playhouse or a garden shed).

Railroad Road was closed but the sidewalk was open (there was a cute antique shop along this walkway, will have to go back another day to check it out).

Heading down into the park

A pretty little creek running through here

I took this of the light. They were all over at the park and look very oldfashioned somehow...

The really long wooden walkway (a lot of the boards were very slippery)

The wildlife we saw (2 ducks)

See, there really were 2 ducks there!

This was a cool bench, started as a tree that got cut down and repurposed

Another deck area to sit and look at the greenery

The Amphitheater

Took this on our way back to the car, both of us liked the railings and the porches

Another cool item we found, a metal fence with wildlife on it (the metal birds were pretty cool looking)

A new building made to look old