Sunday, June 27, 2004
We have been Oregon residents since 1992, and have seen our capitol dome many times through the windows of Amtrak coaches, but this is our first visit. Ted remembers as a child seeing the picture of the capitol building in the Book of Knowledge. Constructed in the Thirties and faced with white Vermont marble, it differs from the older traditional domes of other state capitol buildings with its art deco styling. We visited the capitol this morning and strolled through the extravagant flower gardens, green lawns and shady trees of the surrounding park.
Salem’s population may be growing, and new hotels and shopping centers popping up everywhere, but it has a distinctly small-town atmosphere. The residential areas we see have houses built 60 or more years ago, but most of them have showy flower gardens. Even service stations and fast-food eateries here are landscaped with lawns and neon-bright blooms.
Once out of the city itself one is surrounded by rolling hills and farming country. Various flower gardens are tourist attractions near Salem, with one specializing in peonies, another in antique roses, and so on. The official Oregon Gardens is several miles to the east, with 18 different landscaped areas open to view.
There are several parks downtown. Riverfront Park is a long strip on the banks of the Willamette River. There are sports fields, a boat dock, and a carousel whirling to the music of its band organ. A “genuine” sternwheeler river boat offers cruises. Patrons of Starbucks and other coffee houses sit at outside tables in the “old downtown,” where many of the well-preserved buildings, some with extreme architectural styles, hark back to the 19th Century.
Five miles east of all this eclectic activity, we are time travelers back to the nineteenth century as we lunch at the Macreay Country Inn next to the General Store in tiny Macreay Village, where the locals converse about grass seed and Christmas tree crops, and the music in the jukebox is strictly Country and Western.
Although we are only 46 miles south of downtown Portland, Oregon’s only real city, we are in a different world down here in the Salem area.
We shop at a local supermarket deli and have a light supper in our suite at the Residence Inn, just at the edge of town, overlooking an undeveloped pond and wooded area just off Interstate 5. We can see a portion of the highway and often traffic comes to a complete standstill, a testament to the heavy flow of automobile and truck traffic on our Interstate system, in spite of higher fuel prices.
Monday, after four nights at the Inn, we pack up our luggage in our rental car and head for Portland on the road less traveled, Highway 99 East.
