City Walk - #1

City Walk number one from the book - Swan Island loop. What you need to know is that Mister and I did not decide to do a City Walk on Sunday until mid-morning Sunday - after sleeping in, after breakfast, after two grocery stores and after inviting family over for dinner at 6:00 and telling them I would make potato salad. That said, we only got in half our City Walk. At about the half way point, we decided that we should probably head back toward the car because we were going to be cutting it close in getting home and making food for guests and also it was full on sun out and the second portion of the walk had no shade and I was already sunburned from the day before. If that doesn't make you want to read further, I'm not sure what will. Ahem. So, the Kenton Neighborhood in North Portland. One of the older portions of our fair city. Named for one of the founders, Kenwood, but later they found out that there was another portion of the larger city already with that moniker so chaned it to Kenton.

This Paul Bunyon character was in a small pavillion which had other industry relics. Although, we never did see the relics. The book said they were there, we were relic challenged.

The Kenton district was the largest meat packing/producing in the Pacific NW. It was on the river and at the heart of the rail lines. The first industrialists bought many acres of land and instead of building and leasing homes to the workers, they did a novel thing and partitioned the bare land and sold it to the workers who built their own homes. Most of the homes were far smaller than 900 square feet - back in the day.

Eventually, the advent of refrigerated trucks made transporting meat so much easier that being at the hub of the rail lines wasn't so important. The butcher shops could then be located just about anywhere which spelled doom for the Kenton area. Soon the downtown area was nothing more than seedy bars and homeless people. The Kenton area has been the focus of revitalization and is becoming a unique trendy place to live and play.

This poppy was in a barrel outside a restaurant bar in downtown Kenton. It was fabulous. I don't think I truly caught its beauty.

This is an old firestation. Mister didn't really know I was going to take his picture, he just sort of turned around and I had the camera pointed in his direction. So, please ignore the slight scowl.

Bleeding hearts in the median by a home. I've been searching for bleeding hearts to photograph and there was an entire patch of them. So delicate and lovely.

This is the view as we walked along the bluff with Swan Island below us. Swan Island was named, well, because there used to be a lot of swans there. Industry moves in and the swans disappear - go figure.

Here is the bluff path. Not so exciting in the photo, but the grass on the left was bright beautiful green and on the right was flaming red. At first we were amazed at the contrast and how pretty it was then later realized the grass was probably red because it had been poisoned. Poison can be pretty is maybe the lesson.

C This is the industrial area where we were supposed to finish up our walk. As you can see, much sun, no shade. Our walk ended up being about the same physical distance, we just skipped the second portion of the circle. There is a park down on Swan Island, McCarthy?, and we'll probably finish the second arc on another day.

Here is a grand home built by, hmmm, can't remember the man's name. He was the son of the main founder of the area. The photo doesn't do it justice, huuuuuge lot of land and very large home.

The dogwoods were EVERY where and so pretty in pink. I took lots of photos of them. I just need a better camera and lens to be abel to capture the grandeur. That's what I'm telling myself anyway.

Another City Walk soon as Spring and Summer are here.

365 - 72

This photo is from one of Mister and my City Walks which we walked last weekend.

So are the rest of these photos in this post. You must know by now, I'm not a journalist. I take the photos, I talk about the walk, I try to include photos I've taken along the way to illustrate. These photos have very little connection with the narrative, other than they were taken on the walk. Nice, huh. There will be some talking, then a random photo with caption. Good luck!

We walked through Lake Oswego, what is considered a bit of an affluent area of our fair City. We started off in George Rogers park which used to be a mill and smelter for mining iron ore. The companies back in the 1800's would come into an area and basically rape the land to get what they wanted. What is now a beautiful man made lake (who knew - not me) used to be a swampy area with a little lake called Sucker Lake. Due to mining and people moving to the area to work and shipping on the river and brilliant ideas by the major land owners at the time, the entire area was slowly converted into an upscale, over priced City with lake front properties, expensive restaurants and a beautiful Sur La Table, but I'm biased on the kitchenware stores.

This is the smelter which was used in the iron ore production. Its now in a park and had construction barriers all around it. So, not entirely my fault the photo lacks a frame of reference. Let me just say, its large.

You have to know that when Mister and I hike, even if its an urban hike, bring a camel back with sports drink and/or water and snacks and kleenex for me and cameras and wear our hiking shoes - walking on concrete and asphalt for a couple hours can kill your joints and wind breakers and well, you get the picture. We dress basically the same as if we were in the wilderness. At one point while Mister and I walked, we passed a woman who gave us the most bewildered look and said, "are you hiking?" Mister responded in the affirmative, showed her our City Walks book and in the 15 seconds it took for us to pass each other, explained we were doing an urban hike, learning about Lake Oswego. It was rather hilarious, you may have had to been there. We just looked at each other and realized, yet again, yes, we are dorks.

The walk was just over five miles and took us from river front park through old two, around the lakes, through new town, down into up town and ended on a trail by the river.

This is some art in a park where we stopped to use the port-a-john. :-) No, not a park restroom, they didn't exist, but an outhouse. Necessary by the time we'd been walking for a couple hours though.

This is an elephant in a little park setting which was also all cordoned off due to some type of contruction.

We learned a ton and had a great time. I would say that probably the last mile-ish that we were hiking on the trail was my favorite part. While I am adoring these City Walks, I prefer the wild, wild west.

The end. Lucky you.

City Walks: #2 Piedmont & Overlook Loops

I've said it before, I've always thought urban hiking would be great. Up until now, its been difficult to find someone who wanted to do it with me. I then get motivated by Alison of Discovering SanFrancisco and her "city walks". I go out, I buy me a book...

and voila! The next thing I know, Mister and I are city walkin', we are city walkers, we are walkin' the city...... ok, no caffeine or alcohol involved here, just a prolonged lack of sleep.... story of my life. I digress.

We find ourselves with a beautiful Fall afternoon and decide to do our first city walk. We choose two loops in North Portland. The Overlook loop actually meanders right by the Overlook House, where Mister and I got married just two+ years ago. We took it all as a sign.

So, the nitty gritty is this: North Portland - which can in places be intimidating, but these two loops were not; excluding the MAX ride (which we did exclude due to waning daylight and temperature) the two loops totalled 5.9 miles. It took us just about 3 hours, or maybe a bit more, and we were not in a hurry, we took our time and stopped often to check stuff out. Despite the photo heavy post, you won't, unfortunately, get much of a feel of the walk. I took what I thought was a lot of photos, but it turns out I just took a lot of the same thing, over and over. Lesson, hopefully, learned for future city walks. We start our walk on Rosa Parks Way in Peninsula Park. This park contains not only the oldest community center in the city, but also what was the original "Rose Garden" (Portland is the City of Roses, The Rose City). The sunken rose garden was superceded just 4 years after it was built by the Washington Park Rose Test Garden which still serves as a focal point in our city.

There are notable homes as you walk along and the book also gives interesting information about the neighborhoods that you, as a regular person, would just never ever know. At one point, there were quite a few alleys. We didn't pay much attention then were informed (by the book) that the alleys were created for the telephone and electric wires. Keeping all those overhead wires on one street, contained - as it were, kept the look of the main streets and avenues 'cleaner' and more desirable. Interesting.

This is a 1906 shingle-style home with a semicircular bay window above the front porch. It was beautifully painted and looked to be well-taken care of.

We came across this metal shop called Edelia. There were so many really cool metal sculptures, here's one, a bicycle which looked, we never really got to talk to anyone, they were busy, to be made of recycled materials.

This is a big old 4-square home on the Overlook bluff. Imagine, your bedroom has that upstairs balcony. How great would that be?!

This triangle of land with 3 large London plane trees used to be the site of streetcar turnaround. You could walk or drive by this and never know.

Don't know what these berries were, but they were SO purple.

This was in someone's yard, an old British phone booth. A replica? The real thing? Either way, it had a skeleton (leftover from Halloween, I presume) hanging out.

We then came to this cute, hidden walkway. It is one of the very few, if not the only, walk way over a major street (N. Going) the only street to/from Swan Island, an industrial area. Here you can see the spiral ramp.

...and the spiral from underneath...

... and it apparently is over top of Simon G. Stanich Park. No clue who that is/was.

... and as we climbed the spiral ramp, the walkway we will soon be inside...

... and us inside the walkway with N. Going and Swan Island behind us... (squint)...

... and finally Mister walking out the other end of the walkway. This is the perfect example of, no photos of all the amazing homes we saw and 23 of the one walk way. Eh, what are you gonna do. I gotta be me.

The walk took us through the adidas Village. (Interesting side note, the company I work for owned, developed and then sold to adidas its village.)

We then turned around, and walked back the way we came rather than finishing the loop as a loop. The last leg of the loop would have been a straight walk down a very busy street, so we opted to return the way we came and see things from a new angle.

In summary.... we loved, loved, loved our city walk and have annoyed everyone we know telling them how much we loved it and can't wait to do more and want everyone we know to do them with us. And now the loop is complete, we are back to the part where we think urban hiking is cool and neat and educational and our friends and family think we are odd.

We're ok with that.

More City Walks to come, but it might not be until Spring. We realized on this walk that we'd need to copy an laminate the walks out of the book because we were constantly referring to it as we walked. Who knows, we'll see.

a prelude, fall color and a kitty

My friend Alison, of Discovering San Francisco, has inspired Mister and I to do some urban hiking. I've always loved the idea of urban hiking, but have had a bit of a difficult time talking anyone into doing it with me. Why walk around the City when the wilderness is just over there... Alison has a book of San Francisco "City Walks". She's been blogging about her adventures as she makes her way through the book. #1 - Alison's a writer, so her posts are interesting and make sense and are cohesive. Not necessarily something found here on my little site. #2 - I found it wonderful that she moved to a new city and found a unique way of discovering interesting things about it that she might not necessarily have discovered on her own. #3 - I bought a book of City Walks in Portland and am very excited to tell you Mister and I did our first Walk recently and I plan to copy (the sincerest form of flattery...) Alison and blog about our adventures. Here are a couple prelude snippets of our first walk, which just happened to be on a spectacular Autumn day in our city.

So, there you go, a prelude to a story... are you enticed?

Now, some fall color. I've been negligent in photographing and subsequently posting fall color photos here. These were both taken on walks Mister and I regularly do around our neighborhood....rosehips.... do you *love* them!And my sweet Harley. He's blissed out next to Mister on the cozy crocheted afghan my mother made me. Its Harley's favorite blanket to snuggle on.And... again Harley with his crazy, cocked ears and reflective eyes. He lays on the back of the chair sandwiched against my back as I use the computer at home.

Have a wonderful weekend.