Walking With Chewie 01-09-10

Part of an ongoing series of walking, snapping photos, and writing about it. Careful if you fall asleep from boredom to not drown in your breakfast cereal!!

So today me and Chewie decided to walk the flatlands of the area we live in, otherwise known as Happy Valley, Oregon...suburban claptrap bedroom community just southeast of Po' Town. Chewie as usual is amped up!

We start out walking by the local elementary school, there is a nature trail that start off to the far side. Here is the school:

And the nature trail starts just to the left of what you see above. It's a cool little trail, the ground however is quite swampy and you have to be careful when you're walking or you'll totally wreck your shoes. Here's the trail:

All of the blue tree protectors are recent, due to the efforts of the Friends of Trees (friendsoftrees.org), an awesome organization that is trying to green up the Portland area. Check out their website, they have great deals on yard trees also!

Of course no urban nature walk is complete without some teenage chaos present, be it beer cans, empty smoke packs, used condoms, the usual 'innocence lost' crap you see in city nature areas. Hey I've been there! No sactimonious bullshit here, it is a shame when this type of rubbish mars the scenery though... :( In this case it was 'hey, let's knock down the wetland sign!" :

So anyway we're walking the trail, at times you can almost imagine you are in the deep woods because it's a nice trail, but then the sound of traffic or a shot of someone's backyard peeps ya through the trees and shatters the illusion. For city walking though, it's not too shabby:

So then we run out of nature and we're back in the neighborhood. Nice houses, but all too similar to really stand out. Which makes it pretty and bland all at the same time. I suspect when the last kidling is out of the house (she's 14 right now) we will look at either a more rural setting or urban setting. I can dig either 'out in the middle of nowhere' or 'in the middle of the city', suburbia isn't really our style. But hey it's for the kids. :) Anyway I digress, we continue our walk. Here is something I don't get. "hey, let's paint our house teal!" Really? What were you smoking??

Trust me, the picture does not do justice to how this color clashes with absolutely everything around it. Not that 'fitting in' is something to strive for mind you, but be tasteful in your independant style, please? :)

Here is an interesting looking car (sorry, don't know what type.) Economical, sophisticated, 4 wheel drive...or in plain english, scary UGLY!

Now we're almost back home. I took a snapshot of this streetsign just to wax on a little about a pet peeve of mine, mis-named streets. Look, if it's Riverside Dr. cool, but be next to a river, okay? Same with Cliffview Terrace, Mountainside Road, you get the picture. So this one is Thornbridge Dr. The street is a total of like four blocks long, no rose bushes, berry brambles, or for that matter any damn BRIDGES!! Grrrrrrrr...

Ok, I'm better now, thank for letting me vent. :)

Not much more to see on this walk. Chewie did his business and I'm swinging a plastic bag full of jettisoned recycled dog food, so I cut it a little short. Besides it's starting to rain. Until next week!!