Day Seven of the Oregon Trail: Oregon at Last!

I guess I don’t need to apologize for how far behind I’ve gotten on these Oregon Trail posts, because it should just be taken for granted at this point. Argh. In the last week, I have been absolutely exhausted, mentally and physically, and work has been awful and stressful, and I just haven’t had it in me to blog. But I need to do something, so blogging it is.

Day Seven saw your plucky traveling blogger arrive in Oregon, the Promised Land!

It would be a few days before I reached Oregon City and the end of the Trail, but I was coming closer.

As I had traveled from landmark to landmark, seeing different museums and learning more about what kinds of hardships the emigrants endured on their journey, I started to think that these people must have been not only brave and hardy, but dumb as a sack of buffalo chips. “Those people are ridiculous,” I thought. “Nothing could be worth that.”

But when I passed into Oregon and got a good look around me, I had to say, “All right…I get it now.”

The first major stop in Oregon was Farewell Bend, where the Trail finally left the Snake River that it had been following for many miles.

Then I traveled through the gorgeous landscape…

…to Baker City, where they had one of the better Oregon Trail-centered museums.

The museum (sorry, “interpretive center”) had a lot of displays of things that I took pictures of and now I can’t remember what they were. Because it was inside, I took pictures with my iPod, but the quality was so bad I can’t even read the signage.

The interpretive center itself was on a high hill in view of the Blue Mountains. Not so shabby a vista, I have to say.

And Baker City was a decent little place with a cute downtown area, but I didn’t think to get my own photos of it. I tried to do a Google Image search for a picture or two to “borrow” but I didn’t find anything good enough there, either. Oh, well.