Post Offices

Sunday In The Rain

If I go for a drive tomorrow I can get nine more in about a 125 miles, or less than a half a tank of gas… And if I do, I’ll take Bucky

I did go for a drive in Bucky and did photograph nine more post offices in spite of the rain, occasionally heavy. Trouble is I only took eight of the ones I thought I would, but by luck got one more. I can’t trust a saved Google Map that has multiple stops in it. The Google to Samsung transfer hiccups and you end up with just the Start and End points. Which is really wonderful if the start and end were the same place. Also, you can’t start driving before you hit drive button on the map, because it will keep shouting at you to do a U-turn to go back to the starting point first and sometimes with this it’ll drop all the stops too.

Because I made all the Oregon post offices as a Saved Place, they show as dots on the map and I can hop from dot to dot on a loop. The problem of my missing one on the loop today was because in Hillsboro, the regular post office and the DCU1 were about a 1/4 mile apart and their dots kind of overlapped. I didn’t notice the miss until I was home and removing the photographed post offices from my saved places list.

Lucky, number nine was because there was one post office on the way home that would made an out of the way detour next time I came this way. It was in the small town of St. Paul, between OR99W and I-5. Below are today’s outtakes, AKA non post office photos.

Saturday At The Coast

Well, I did drive over to the Oregon coast today, but more time was spent getting there and back than on the coast. I drove a total of 285 miles and only about 30 of it was along US101. I did pretty much used a whole tank of gas on the day. There were a few walks in state parks, the Indian Beach Trail in Ecola State Park, to the beach at Sunset Beach State Recreation Site and climbing around defensive batteries at Fort Stevens State Park. I set out to clean up all the unvisited Post Offices in the upper left part of the state and it took pictures of a dozen of them to do it. Here are the non post office photos, those you’ll get tomorrow, maybe.

If I go for a drive tomorrow I can get nine more in about a 125 miles, or less than a half a tank of gas… And if I do, I’ll take Bucky. When I got home today the new beige seatbelts were at my doorstep instead of the expected Monday arrival. So after a 10 hour trip, I spent 2 hours in the driveway installing them.

The Fifth Car

It is Sunday and its sunny, what should I do? You know full well what I did, don’t you? That’s right, I took some Oregon Post Office pictures. Today Bucky became the fifth car to have its picture taken with a Post Office in the background and the third different Miata. The first 31 photos were with the CTBNL and the next 11 were with the Ladybug, our previous red Mini Cooper. The CTBNL had 3 more photos with Post Offices before turning over the duties to our second Mini known simply as Mini Two for the next 15 post office photos. The fourth car to join the Post Office Picture Team was the brand new 2024 Aero Gray Miata GT which appeared in the next 15 pictures.

On the way back after a trip to visit family in Granite Falls using Mini Two, I snagged 4 quick post offices before the New Miata took back over for the next 14. The same car also did the next 48 in a row, but it was no longer gray, but a bright blue. There was one photo outlier of Mini Two followed by 7 with the New (blue) Miata. While getting some service done on the Mini Two last week it had its photo taken with 2 nearby Post Offices and quite likely its last ones.

Today the fifth car, New Old Miata, AKA Bucky, joined the ranks of Oregon Post Office posers:

And actually, I considered taking a photo of the second of the above Post Offices Friday morning with a Silver Nissan Sentra I had rented to drive down to Eugene to pick up the fifth car, but opted not.

Aloha, Beaverton, Portland, Tanasbourne, What’s The Difference?

Today I took the Mini in for some service it needed after the last visit back in October of 2024 when I had a new battery put in and an oil change. They noticed that there was a leak in a timing cover that was dripping down on a motor mount which would eventually ruin that mount. Plus the front brakes were getting pretty worn, The back brakes were changed back in April of that year and now it was time to do the fronts.

I had one of the first appointments of the day, 8:00AM, which is when they roll the doors up for service customers because it was going to take several hours for the job. I arrived at the dealer earlier than expected, 7:30AM, even though I had a 6 mile creep coming into Portland on I-84 before getting on US26 to Beaverton.

There was a post office right around the corner from the Mini place, so I backed out and went over to grab a photo. So, the dealer is in Beaverton, the post office is right there, but the Postal Service classified it as in Portland. Still with some time left on the clock I drove a couple miles south and west to get an actual Beaverton post office. Turns out just 3.5 miles further west there is a second Beaverton post office, in the census-designated place of Aloha. I’ll get that one when I get the very last post office labeled as Portland which is located in a neighborhood called Tanasbourne in Hillsboro, Oregon.

I Could Swear I’ve Been Here Before

Went out and took several somewhat local post office photos today. I had been out in this neck of the woods gathering post offices back in November and snagged a bunch, there were still several to get. The first 3 were west of the Willamette River and the last four were east of it and on the way back home.

The first post office in Lake Oswego was easy. The second post office was a little more challenging, Google Maps couldn’t direct me to my final destination. It is on the campus of what was once Marylhurst University and I could see the roads I needed to get there, but it was kinda hard driving and following the blue dot along on the phone at the same time. Luckily it was early Sunday morning and I was the only car driving around.

The 3rd of the day in West Linn (top photo) was the weird one. As I was driving to it, the closer I got, the more familiar the roads seemed. I was having the strangest sense of Déjà vu. When I got to the Post Office, it was in a shopping center and I swore I’d been here before. I remember it because it was a very rainy day and the parking lot was mirrorlike with water. But there was a lingering feeling that maybe I hadn’t been here before, so I took a couple pictures while I was there anyway.

The last four Post Offices were easy finds in smallish rural towns and when I got home, I looked through all the post office photos looking for that West Linn image. It wasn’t there, the one I thought was it, was actually Keizer outside of Salem. I looked to see if I posted West Linn on Instagram or maybe a random post on the blog here. Nope.

Mystery #1 was solved when I started to mark off the captured Post Offices in the master spreadsheet. The address I had for the West Linn Post Office was listed as 5665 Hood St. Wait a minute the post office I found today was at 22220 Salamo Rd. I typed the 5665 Hood address into Google Maps and it dumped me into a shopping center area. When I looked at the street view, I recognized it. The memory was of me driving around looking for the post office in the parking lot was solid.

Back in November I must have realized that the Post Office used to be there and looked up on the phone to get the new address. The reason the route to the West Linn Post Office seemed so familiar is that because back in November I must have driven to the new location. Mystery #2 remains unsolved, why the heck didn’t I take any pictures of the post office back then?

Brownsville

Brownsville – 97327: Just a quick tuck off I-5 to capture a Post Office on my way home from Eugene with the old tires and wheels off of Bucky. (2/21/25)

Today was the first time I drove to Eugene and FTW Tuning and turned right around and came home. I just went down to pick up Bucky’s wheels and tires. The tires looked good from a distance, but 25 years can take a toll. When I was lifting them into the back of the Mini I noticed every tire had a long crack in them, one or two of them were almost around the whole circumference.

I am going to mount some Ultra High Performance All-Season tires on the stock 2001 16″ wheels to put them on the New Miata (see this mock-up.)

Maybe I can sell the 17″ wheels and tires that came on the New Miata to somebody in the local Miata club. There is one wheel that has a bit of a curb scrape, but I think a little black paint will take care of that. Now I have to go join Facebook just so I can contact folks in the Mt Hood Miata Club.

Just Another Rainy Post Office Day

On the way back from Eugene I thought I might catch a couple more Post Offices, but I got ambitious and took a half dozen. Stumbled on a covered bridge along the way. Of course it took 4-1/2 hours to get home instead of a little over 2 hours, but hey, got no reason to go in a straight line.