In The Heart Of Oregon’s RV History

From Silverton we moved an hour south to the Junction City area.  We titled our blog “In the Heart Of Oregon’s RV History” as Oregon once had a very thriving RV industry.  Some of the most venerable motor home brands in the industry were made here – Country Coach, Beaver, Safari, Monaco, and Marathon.  Today only one of those brands, Marathon, still is manufactured in Oregon, and Marathon is a small builder of very high end coaches from Prevost RV shells.  The Monaco brand still is manufactured by another company only in Indiana and at much lower volume than before they went bankrupt in 2009.

But part of the legacy of all those RV companies that used to manufacture in Oregon is a very vibrant RV service industry.  Country Coach has a parts and service center at the site where they used to manufacture and they still make and supply parts for and service the coaches they once built.  And there are a number of very good independent service shops that can service any and all of these brands and any other brand for that matter.

It was time for us to have all our scheduled service done – motor and generator oil and filter changes, fuel filter changes, and a few minor house repairs as well.  We went to a small independent shop where there is a guy who Gary has been buying parts from during the four years we have owned our coach.  Now I have to wonder about his choice of shops when we pull in and there are cows on one side of the shop and chickens on the other (which Alley had the chance to stalk on one of her walks).  The owner of the shop building who also does the chassis work does a little farming on the side as well as his RV service work on the side of his main job as service technician at a car dealership.  Our parts guy and one other technician also work out of this same shop.  It is an interesting arrangement but among them they have a lot of capability and are more reasonable with their service rates than the bigger shops.  And we had access to fresh brown eggs even if was a bit of an “aromatic” setting.

We did run into two problems we were not anticipating.  They discovered we had a coolant pump with a slow leak.  This pump is to push hot coolant coming off the engine up to the front and back for our dash heat functions.  We now know the source of why were were observing that we were losing a bit of coolant over time.  We also knew we had a tiny water leak from the back of our electrically operated toilet.  What we all assumed would be a simple and cheap fix turned into quite the expensive one when a motorized valve assembly had to be replaced.

We also took in one other shop in the area, a cabinet shop that does a lot of RV cabinet work.  We had this access panel on the dash that had a lot of open space behind it.  We had seen another coach like ours which had this space filled with a nice little cabinet that matched the other ones in the coach.  This cabinet shop in Junction City makes them and we had one made and installed for us. 

 

Silver Falls State Park

Not too far from our Campground in Silverton is the largest State Park in Oregon -- Silver Falls.  Within the boundaries of this Park are 10 waterfalls.  There is a 9 mile trail that will take you to all of them.  We didn’t take that trail.   Well we did take parts of the trail and saw several of them.  We were fortunate that there had been hard rain  two nights before we went there so they were all flowing.

 

Among the more impressive ones was Upper North Falls.

 

 

 

 

 

And North Falls.

 

 

 

 

 

 

And South Falls which the trail goes through the lava rock behind it.

 

But there is no point in now going to the Park….… I drank all the falls dry.

The Salem-Keizer Volcanoes

We watched our second baseball game of the season.  We haven’t visited many places with baseball teams this year.  But we are now in the territory of the Northwest League, a short season Class A league.  The Salem- Keizer Volcanoes are an affiliate of the San Francisco Giants.  Salem is the larger city, but the stadium is in the adjoining town of Keizer.  Attendance was a bit sparse the night we went – probably just under a thousand people and the home team Volcanoes lost by a score of 7 to 5.  Most of these guys are later round draftees who have very limited prospects of ever making “the show” but they still are living the dream that they will play in majors one day.

Oregon Capitol

We are camped less than 10 miles east of Salem, the capital of Oregon.  We haven’t always visited the state capitol buildings when we have had the chance, but this one seemed rather unique so we drove over for a tour.

 

 

This capitol building was dedicated in 1938.  It was constructed because the prior one, which like the capitols in many states resembled the US Capitol, burned down.  Actually this is the third capitol building for Oregon as the first one burned down as well.  This building is a major departure from other states’ capitols as it has an art deco design.  Most of the structure is marble (maybe to keep it from burning).  There is an inner rotunda built inside the outer one which is what you see from inside the building as shown in this picture.

 

One of the defining features is the statue of a pioneer on top of the rotunda.  The statue is 22 feet tall and is made of bronze but is gilded with 23 carat gold.  The pioneer carries an axe in one hand and a tarp in the other both for constructing a shelter in the Oregon territory.

 

 

 

 

We took the tour to the top exterior of the rotunda.  There is a small diameter spiral staircase between the walls of the interior and exterior rotunda domes that leads to the roof.  There are excellent views from the roof as it is about the tallest structure in Salem.  The rear view includes Willamette University, founded in 1842 and claimed to be the oldest university in the Western United States.  The Capitol is surrounded by other State buildings and lots of greenery and flower gardens.

We walked the downtown area of Salem as far west as the Willamette River.  Along the river is a park that contains an indoor carousel constructed in 2001 in the hand-built grand style of historic carousels.

Spruce Goose

We follow several blogs and at times we read something we are very surprised to learn.  For example, awhile back we read that another blogger had visited an air museum in Oregon that is the home of Howard Hughes’  “Spruce Goose”.  The last we had known, the Spruce Goose was housed in a hangar in Long Beach, California.  We were planning to check it out if we had traveled that way.  But because of another’s blog we learned that it now is housed in the Evergreen Aviation Museum in McMinnville, Oregon, southwest from Portland.  This is not exactly new news.  The Spruce Goose was sold to the Evergreen Museum in 1992 and was transported there in 1993 and after a long restoration and reassembly was put on display in 2001.

For those who might not know, Spruce Goose is a nickname for an experimental heavy lift aircraft started during WWII to be constructed of materials non-essential for the war effort like aluminum.  Hughes built most of the plane out of laminated wood materials.  The Government put $18 million into the project and Hughes put $7 million of his own money into it as that was the only way for it to be finished as it wasn’t completed before the end of the war.  The design even employed beach balls for buoyancy in the wings (it was a sea plane as there were no airfields long enough to take off and land it).

The wingspan is greater than the length of a football field.  The overall size is similar to the largest transcontinental planes of today.  Congress was becoming unhappy with Hughes over the money which had been spent for a plane which never flew during the war effort.  After a hearing in Washington DC, he returned to California and flew the plane at about 70 feet of altitude for about a mile just to prove that it was airworthy.  The plane never flew again even though Hughes maintained it in flight-ready condition for nearly another 30 years.

There are many other air and space craft in the Evergreen Museum, but the real star of the show is the Spruce Goose, a name Hughes reportedly detested.  But then there also is a water park in the museum complex with a 747 mounted on the roof which is the launching pad for some the water slides.

First Visit With Little Victor

Leeanne wrote that I traveled off somewhere by myself. So just where did I go?  Well, I traveled to Columbus, Ohio to see our first grandchild, little baby Victor.  Leeanne left me behind “to guard the fort” while she went back for her parent’s anniversary in March, so it was my turn to travel.  But then she left me in Las Vegas while I left her in ……..Silverton, Oregon.  That all doesn’t seem like the fairest of trades, but as I will explain later, it all will be rectified soon.

It was wonderful to see Natasha, Andy and little Victor.  They actually trusted me to baby sit him a couple times while they went out on some short errands  Victor and I got along famously even though he didn’t do a lot more than sleep.  He is a happy, healthy baby and a bundle of joy.  So, how is Leeanne going to get her turn to see little Victor?  We have decided that after Oregon we will continue our northward trek into Washington, but thereafter we will head off to the Midwest before wintering in Florida.  So by sometime in later September we both will be back and cuddling little Victor. 

This picture has a little story that goes with it.  One time while watching little Victor, I commented later to his parents that he had given me a “look” similar to the one baby Derek Jr. had made at the end of the movie Zoolander.  They both told me they knew exactly what I was talking about – they had seen the same “look”.  That night they ran the video camera on Victor for awhile and sure enough, they caught him in a  “blue steel” moment.  When Andy posted it to Facebook, one commenter remarked that it looked a bit more like “magnum” than “blue steel”, but no matter – he’s a great looker whatever you call it.

Oregon Gardens

While Gary was off traveling somewhere by himself (more to come on that in a future blog post), I used the opportunity to clean the inside of the motor home including a much needed carpet/rug cleaning. I took a break from cleaning and visited the Oregon Gardens located in Silverton. The Garden sits on the site of a former horse ranch and covers 80 acres. The site was selected to include the development of a wetland system to recycle the city’s treated wastewater. The water travels at up to 700 gallons per minute, through a series of ponds, creating a habitat for wildlife and plants.

They have over 20 different gardens some of which include the Wetlands, a Conifer Garden, a Children’s Garden, a Rose Garden, a tropical greenhouse, an Oak grove, and a medicinal garden. They have a large Christmas Tree garden – of which Oregon boasts they sell the most Christmas Trees in the U.S. Being from Michigan, I might argue that claim. They also have a Market garden that features 147 agricultural products grown in Oregon some of which include: berries, grapes, grass seed, hops, pumpkins, apples and quince. The produce from the Garden is used in their Café or is donated to area families.

They host many events throughout the year including weddings, car shows, and movies in the park. In 2007, they opened the Oregon Garden Resort which is a small “community” of 131 vacation cottages. Also located on the property is a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed house, the only one in Oregon. Since reservations are required to tour the house, I only walked around to glimpse it.  Although it was a nice diversion from cleaning, it was perhaps not as impressive as some of the free gardens that we have visited including Niagara Gardens in Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada.