Day 6 - Sep 5, 2007 Last updated: 9/9/07 6:30pm PT
On our final day, we are heading up I-5. We leave I-5 after Salem to head to McMinnville and the Evergreen Aviation Museum. On our way, we managed to take some backroads and ran into a river without a bridge. $2 and a very short ferry ride later, we continue on our way.
The museum has the Spruce Goose, which was disassembled and shipped to McMinnville, OR. This is one really huge plane. It was built by Howard Hughes and Henry Kaiser near the end of WWII as a means to transport a large number of troops and supplies. Since metal was critical to the war effort, this plane was built out of wood (Which doesn’t make sense, since this plane would have been an important machine of the war, so it should have been able to use metal). Anyway, the war ended and it wasn’t finished. Hughes finished building it later with his own money. It flew once in 1947 to prove that it could.
Finally, you can’t pass through Portland without a stop a Powell’s City of Books. First we had lunch at Jake’s Famous Crawfish. This is an excellent restaurant. Then to Powell’s. Denise went off on her own and we found each other a couple of hours later. I thought I did good, I found 3 books. Denise had two brown paper shopping bags full of books. She wins.