Post Offices

Small Road Trip

Off to the Great State of Washington. We are heading to the World Famous 4th of July Picnic of Les & Joanie Gilbert, something we haven’t been to for the past 5 years. Today’s leg was around 280 miles and for the first 100 and the last 80 of those miles it was smooth sailing, but the middle section from south of Bend to where US197 splits off was crowded, slow and quite a contrast to the end segments.

We did stop in downtown Bend for lunch and had a great meal at a place called The Point. We split an order of beer battered fish. But the real highlight was something that Donna saw on a chalk board inside, Fried Apples. It might have been advertised as a desert but we had it as an appetizer. The half dozen slices tasted like a sublime fried apple pie and were served with a caramel dipping sauce and some whipped cream.

For the fun of it and to break up the drive we snagged 3 Post Office photos. There were a couple more we were close to, but on a Friday their parking lots were too full to even find a spot to park in so that I could get car and Post Office in the same frame. We may try and stop at a couple few on the way home next Tuesday.

Here We Go Again

Like our trip all over the state of South Carolina to capture an image of every Post Office in the state, we’ve decided to do the same thing in our new home state of Oregon.

The one for Oregon will differ in a few ways. 1) We are thinking that we aren’t going to chase every single one in the bigger towns, like for instance, Portland’s 2 dozen. 2) Every single one of them may not have the same automobile in the photos, the Miata might just be a Mini Cooper or maybe even a Jeep Wrangler. And 3) I’ve taken a state map and highlighted all the places there are Post Offices where we’ll put a pin in each spot we take a picture.

By my count there are 364 actual Post Offices in Oregon or around 90 fewer than in South Carolina, but that doesn’t make it any easier than the 454 in South Carolina because Oregon has 98,466 square miles, or roughly 3 times the area to SC’s 32,020. In South Carolina we could reach any corner of the state on a weekend jaunt. The furthest Post Office from Aiken was a mere 216 miles away from home, the furthest away here, Imnaha, is 300 miles more than that.

Also adding to the challenge here in Oregon is that dirty 6 letter word, Winter. Back in South Carolina we could drive practically year round, here there are going to be about 4 months where the weather will keep us home. On the flip side of that is in SC we were still working, so most of our trip were confined to weekends, but now we are retired, so if we wanted to we could take a month and just get a big bunch of the Post Offices. And if this COVID thing clears up we just might do several couple week trips next spring and summer.

Either way, we figure it is going to take us at least the next 4 years to finish the project. And because we actually started with some local P.O.’s last June it will take us 5 years total which is the same amount of time it took to finish South Carolina. You can keep abreast of our progress by checking in here on the blog and all the photos will be in the Oregon Post Office gallery.

10011100010000000 Miles

For our 101101th1 Anniversary we decided to throw caution to the wind and take a little 3-day mini trip to the Oregon Coast. We had a free night at a Holiday Inn so the first leg (80 miles) of the journey was just over the mountains to Medford where we spent Sunday Night. The second leg (215 miles) was to our next overnight stay in Gold Beach. The last leg (226 miles) was coming straight home. To make the drive a bit more interesting we opted to hunt out some Oregon Post Offices along the way.

Sunday instead of going straight to Medford we went an alternate route so we could start in Ashland and work our way north the short distance to Medford with stops in Talent, Phoenix, Jacksonville & Central Point.

Monday we headed north and west to get to the coast. The shortest way to our destination would have been to go south to Crescent City in California, but we were saving that for our return trip. I added all the Post Office addresses for the rest of our loop to the car GPS and because we abhor Interstate travel we selected “avoid highways” in the settings.

This worked out well for the first few Post Offices because they were close to OR99 which parallels I-5, but once we got to Merlin the GPS could not find a route to Wolf Creek, turns out from here the next 40 miles OR99 combines with I-5 because of the mountains. Donna looked at the map and realized there was a loop of 35 miles, instead of the direct 15 miles, that would get us to Wolf Creek with out using the Interstate.

Not being in a hurry, we headed west along a two lane road that ran along the Rogue River. It was very scenic and we passed several little county parks for the first 20 miles. Everything was fine until we crossed a bridge over the river to head east to our our next Post Office. The road got a little narrower, almost 1-1/2 lanes instead of two and clung to the side of a mountain on the left and a steep drop on the right with no guardrail. Our forward progress slowed considerably, hoping that some large truck wouldn’t be coming our way around the next corner.

A mile or so in, rounding a corner, we came upon another Miata coming our way. I don’t know who was more surprised, us or them, but we squeezed on by with a wave and kept on going.

A couple of miles later our 1-1/2 lanes dropped to a solid one lane. Now it was getting scary, but even when the road did widen back to a lane and a half there was still no way to turn around and go back. For the next 10 miles the width of the road varied back and forth and fortunately the only other car we came upon coming at us it was on one of those wider spots. What would taken maybe 20 minutes on I-5 turn into over an hour of white knuckle driving. After arriving in Wolf Creek we took off the “avoid highways” setting and we vowed to not do that again. We’d stay on back roads when they stayed close to civilization.

As we were getting closer to the coast and having already photographed 15 Post Offices, by mutual agreement, we opted to not do the last few on the way to the hotel and not any along the coast at all. This would be saved for a weeks vacation either next spring or fall where we’d get all the Post Offices along the entire Oregon coast.

Because I had the odometer to trip so I could see tenths of a mile as Donna called out mileage to my next turn, I didn’t notice that the CTBNL had gone past the 80,0002 mile mark.

About fifteen miles from the actual coast the cooler misty weather made us put the top back up and when we did get on US101 the fog/mist/clouds made actually seeing the beach impossible.

Tuesday morning in spite of the off and on light rain, we did walk down to the beach and take a fairly short out and back walk because, after all, we drove all this way to see the ocean.

On the trip home we did stop and get the remaining four Post Offices on US199 from the border back up to Grants pass. Bringing our total for the weekend of two dozen or about 6% of the total of around 375 Post Offices in the state of Oregon. All in all , even with the white knuckle side trip and cool misty weather, we had a pretty good time.

The Quest Begins

As threatened a little over a week ago, today we started working on taking pictures of Oregon Post Offices.

Because the afternoon was to be a very warm one, we picked a small 80 mile loop that would net us a quartet of local Post Offices – Bonanza, Malin, Merrill and Midland. We are saving our local Klamath Falls P.O. for anytime, it is less than 2 miles away.

Post Office Picture Book In The Flesh

Went ahead and ordered a physical copy of the South Carolina Post Office Picture Book on the 28th of May. It’s 8″ x 11″ hard-covered 89 pages wasn’t cheap, even at the 40% sale price. Mr. Mailman delivered it to our door today and it sure is pretty.

You can still see all the photos for free by peeking in this gallery right here. The book, in contrast the gallery’s alphabetical layout, runs in chronological order, so it is kind of a history of our travels around South Carolina.

This got me thinking of a sequel trip, and the inevitable photo book, for Donna and I to visit every one of Oregon’s Post Offices. Using the information I found on the website Postal Locations I’ve determined that there are about 375 Post Offices in our new home state (South Carolina had 455.) I’ve created a spreadsheet and I’m about 2/3rds of the way through confirming their addresses on the USPS site.

Right now there are about a half dozen that we can do in a day drive, but after that, who knows when we’ll be safe enough to stay overnight in a hotel, let alone venture anywhere closer that a hundred miles of any of the big cites in the state…

Post Office Picture Book

Decades in the making!3 A book about Donna and my traveling the state of South Carolina taking pictures of every Post Office. Back in the mid 2000’s we poked our head into every nook and cranny of SC taking pictures of the Miata in front of Post Offices, the results can be seen right here on Life of Brian by going to the PO Galleries here.

I’m using my old friend Shutterfly which I used to make calendars of Miata photos and other picture books of our travels. This book will include photos of all 456 Post Offices and will be over 90 pages long when I get done with it. All my previous books were 20-25 pages and cost around $25 dollars, this baby will be right around $100. That is if I decide I want to spent that much… Or this might just end up as a really nice way to kill several days while I practice our “Stay at Home, Stay Safe” COVID-19 lock down. Right now, after 3 days, I’m about 60% done adding photos and their captions to the book. Her is a little sneak peek:

2 Weeks In

Today was the two week anniversary of us occupying 1025 Pacific Terrace and have technically owned for 6 days. We are still awaiting the arrival of our washer, dyer and fridge. They were supposed to be here last Friday, but I got a voicemail message Thursday that there was a “shipping delay” and the items wouldn’t be here until next Saturday, January 4th. Tomorrow we have someone coming over to give us an estimate on a new roof.

The Miata is still in transit somewhere, but no word on an ETA. We now know our household goods are at least on a truck, because Mayflower hit the charge card for the $5,000 deposit. Their original estimate on transit was 10-12 days, so we should have less than 2 weeks to wait at this point. It is time to start thinking about driver’s licenses and registering to vote to make us official Oregonians.

Took a little walk this afternoon that included about 3/4 mile of trails that reside up above our neighborhood. We were going to wear just sneakers, but at the last minute switched to our hiking boots. It was a good call as the trail was sneaky muddy. It didn’t look like it, but it was wet and slippery and slowly built up a heavy layer on the bottom of the boots making walking difficult. Even with scraping on rocks and walking on sidewalks the mile back, both pair of boots are still so muddy they are sitting in the garage awaiting the next sunny day for cleaning.

It is a long way off, but last night we started planning for spring. Not only thinking about next years Moss Motoring Challenge, but maybe repeating our South Carolina Post Office Extravaganza here in the Beaver State. I found a list of the population of the 355 cities in the state ranging from Portland at 653,115 down to Greenhorn at 10. In South Carolina I used the USPS site and located post offices in a 25 mile radii, but here in Oregon most of the towns big enough to have a PO are much farther apart than that. Then I got lucky and found a website called Postal Locations which appears to list every town with a post office. From my calculations this state has about 378 Post Offices in it 98,466 square miles compared to South Carolina’s 454 in 32,020. Probably going to take us a lot longer than the approximately 4 years it took to do South Carolina.