Shortly after heading north from Bend Oregon, we saw another faux ranch scene, this one with several horses, a couple of dogs and a cowboy on horseback. These were close to the road so it was more obvious that they weren't real, but they were still interesting to see, obviously someone's idea of art.
Later we traveled over some scenic, but very hilly and curvy roads which Oregon refers to as scenic byways. There were lots of nice forests and rivers. In the middle of all this we passed through a large, several miles long, lava field. This stuff is really ugly and very little thrives there. This lava field was believed to have been created by a volcanic eruption which occurred about 1,500 to 1,700 years ago. After all that time there is still very little plant growth in the area.
In McMinnville Oregon we visited the Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum. This facility consists of three beautiful buildings with all glass on the south side for lots of natural light and large hangar doors on the north facing side of two of the buildings to allow for moving planes in and out of the buildings. The third building houses an I-Max theater and offices and meeting rooms for Evergreen's businesses which include a commercial flight service, aircraft maintenance service, the museum and a winery.
The museums have airplanes from the Wright brothers era to modern military planes, as well as some US Air Force ICBM missile displays and some NASA missile and space capsule displays. It is well worth the time if you have any interest at all in aviation.
One plane of special interest to me was the Spruce Goose. Howard Hughes developed this military transport plane at the request of the military. It cost and estimated $25m in mid 40's dollars, $18m in federal money and $7m of Hughes' money. Hughes was asked to develop the plane to transport troops overseas, because the Germans were torpedoing troop transport ships with alarming frequency. Hughes was asked to develop a plane using materials that were not already considered critical to the war effort, such as aluminum and steel, so he designed the plane to be constructed of wood. The frame was designed to be built of wood and then the exterior was covered with birch plywood strips, nailed and glued in place. Once the glue dried, the nails were removed.
By the time the plane was completed the war was over and the military had no further interest in the plane. Because of doubts expressed by many in the aviation community about whether or not the plane could actually fly, Hughes flew it one time for about a minute at an altitude of about 70 feet. He then had a hangar built to house it and had the plane maintained, at a reported cost of $1m per year until he died in 1976, so that it could be ready to fly with 36 hours notice.
The plane changed hands a couple of times after Hughes' death and eventually became the property of the Evergreen Museum. The wings were removed and the parts were loaded on barges and moved up the coast and then up a couple of rivers and put in temporary storage until the museum building was completed, at which time it was reassembled. I have a couple of shots above, but there is no place in the building where you can get a picture of the entire plane. It is one of the largest planes ever built. It weighs 300,000 pounds empty, has eight motors and was designed to carry a payload of 100,000 pounds.
McMinnville, which is inland about 75 miles from the coast, is very much an agricultural hot spot, with hazel nuts, chestnuts, grass seed, lavender, peppers, corn, wheat, oats, barley, grapes, pears, and cherries, strawberries, blueberries all being grown. We left McMinnville at about 2PM with a temperature of about 82 degrees and drove to the northern coastal town of Astoria and the temperature dropped to about 56 degrees. We traveled down the coast to Tillamook and took a couple of photos along the way. The coast area is pretty, but it is cool and there is a fair amount of haze which is probably actually fog.
