FALL VACATION 2011 - Sunday, 9/25/11 - Maryhill Museum, Columbia Gorge

It’s raining.  I spend the morning catching up on the blog and Fred sleeps in.  By the way, if you decide to check on the blog, be sure to go to “Older Posts” because sometimes I enter two or three days of our trip at one time.

It is a gentle, soothing rain and we are in no hurry to leave the RV.

Mural at The Dalles

 We eat a leisure brunch of leftover salmon.  We are trying to clean out the refrigerator.

Fred plugs in the iPod and we listen to Diana Krall.  What a voice.

The sky is still gray but the rain stops.  Water drips from the trees and makes loud plopping sounds on the RV roof.  We pack up and head out to explore the Columbia Gorge and take some photographs.

We drive several miles up the gorge to the Maryhill Museum.  It is a mansion that was “originally planned as a private resident for Pacific Northwest entrepreneur Sam Hill, who in 1907 purchased over 5,000 acres of land along the Columbia River.”

Maryhill Museum

 Sam Hill is also known for the Stonehenge Memorial built four miles east of the mansion dedicated as a World War I memorial.  As the tale goes, people began asking, “What is Sam Hill doing now?”  And that is supposedly the origination of the expression, “What in the Sam Hill is going on?”

 

Sam Hill was also instrumental in developing the highway system in the Pacific Northwest.  Fortune is with us and we are able to drive the “Historic Maryhill Loops Road” because a car club had it open for the day.   Constructed in 1913 by Sam Hill, this “remarkable road was the first macadam-asphalt paved road in the Pacific Northwest.”

Maryhill Loop Road

The sun is settling low in the sky and we decide to wait a while for the clouds to clear and perhaps get a few good shots of the wind machines at dusk. 

We return to the RV, tired and hungry.  I fix a quick meal of soup and toasted jalapeno cheese bread.  We watch a little TV:  20 minutes of the new “Charlie’s Angels” (two thumbs down), “Whitney” (two half-thumbs up), and 20 minutes of the new “Pan Am” (two thumbs down – although it has one of our favorite actors in it who plays the co-pilot, but even he can’t save this first episode). 

Lights out around 10:00.