Hitting the Oregon Trail

Today was a culturally action packed Saturday in Portland. It started for us much earlier than would have normally been the case, because Kyle's Aunt Martha and her husband Jerry, who are both heavily involved with The Confluence Project, invited us to attend the ceremonial opening of the Vancouver (Washington, not Canada) Land Bridge.

Here's a little information about the Confluence Project from their website, www.confluenceproject.org:

In 2000, a group of Pacific Northwest Native American tribes and civic groups from Washington and Oregon asked Maya Lin to participate in a project commemorating the bicentennial of the journey of the Corps of Discovery—the Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1804-06. These disparate groups were brought together by the hope that Maya Lin would rethink what the commemoration of the bicentennial could be. Out of this collaboration came the Confluence Project: a series of seven art installations along the Columbia River Basin created to evoke the history of the Lewis and Clark Expedition and the tremendous changes it brought to the Pacific Northwest.

I realized when Martha and Jerry invited Kyle and I to this ceremony that I really knew nothing about Maya Lin, who is most famous for her design of the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C. Well, after not much time researching, I discovered that she was still a 21-year old undergraduate at Yale when she won a public design competition to design the memorial. Holy cow.

In any case, attending the ceremony was one of those things we never would have even known about if we hadn't been invited, and it was a wonderful gathering of artists, citizens, and government figures (the Mayor of Vancouver, the "first man" of Washington state, etc). It also couldn't have been a more beautiful day for the opening.

What's more - we got to catch a glimpse of Fort Vancouver. For those of you Oregon Trail fanatics, you most likely remember this stage of the game - it meant you were almost there!! I never made it that far, sadly. But it was still fun to see Fort Vancouver, which during the late 1800's was a significant settlement. The original buildings have since burnt down, but have been rebuilt (see left).


Here's a great picture Kyle got of a mask embedded in an overhang over the bridge:

All in all, it was a neat way to spend an (early!) Saturday morning.
With the exception of me missing my 12:00 doctor's appointment due to getting stuck waiting for an 8 million mile freight train to pass through town, the rest of the day was equally as interesting - we found out the Oregon Distillers' Festival was going on at the Armory, which is home to Gerding Theatre and Portland Center Stage. We tasted a bunch of ridiculously harsh vodkas, whiskeys, and gins, and then headed off to the grocery store to get some fixin's for dinner. The Armory, which was renovated in 2005, was originally built in the 1880's for - you guessed it - amunitions storage - and has since had a number of functions, including a brewery.