Mother’s Day in McMinnville

The annual Hippie Chick race was at Champoeg Park again, and Kellen was ready to join me again – not in the race like last year, but at the park to cheer me on. You know our tradition is to go camping on Mother’s Day, but this year I tried to make reservations too late at Champoeg Park, and all the sites were reserved already. So I got us a hotel room in McMinnville. I was eager and excited to spend a whole weekend with my kiddo. I feel that I never get enough time with them.

The race was fun. More fun than last year. As I continue my training in preparation for the Belle Brigade race in August, I am a whole different body this year compared to last. I was struggling last year after a spring injury, and spent the whole year with swollen, painful knees that grew worse during the year and limited not just my racing, but all my movement that involved legs, like sitting, standing, walking. By the 2023 August race, I limped along at a pace around 16.5 minutes per mile, with knee braces on both knees. By October I was fed up and got some physical therapy, which was magical. I worked all winter long on PT and my legs are really close to good as new again. My pace in the Hippie Chick race was 12.3 minutes per mile! It’s my best walk pace ever.

It was more fun this year because other teammates were able to race with me. Alexandra has been with the Belle Brigade since the beginning, and Bashaa is new this year. The Hippie Chick was her very first race and it was a blast watching her enjoy the festival atmosphere.

Kellen got along great with my teammates, and found out they are the same age as Bashaa. How crazy for me to get these little reminders that my baby isn’t a baby anymore. Then we went to the hotel and showered and spent the day in McMinnville, a little Oregon town in the news that very week for making the Top 10 list of best main streets in America according to USA Today. I had never spent time there.

I found the town to be perfectly fine, but not worthy of a Top 10 list. We did find great food and atmosphere at 1882 Grille the first night we were there. The street is cute enough, and there is a library with a little park on one end, which added to our enjoyment of it. Most stores were wine shops and clothes and art for tourists, and most of those were closed – we guessed it’s too early in the season? But there were plenty of tourists. The place was gearing up for the annual UFO Festival the following weekend (unidentified flying object), which I hear is what brings in the masses. Many of the window displays had alien and spaceship stuff. This year’s festival guest of honor was the whistleblower who exposed the US Government’s secret list of UFO sightings and documentation a few years ago. I wonder if the festival thrives because of the tendency of rural people to believe in conspiracies. In their defense, attendees come from all around the area of course.

Anyway, can you believe I didn’t take a single photo of downtown except that horse and buggy? The only other photos I got were from the McMenamins (ha! of course!). We went there because the weather was amazing and we wanted to eat at the rooftop bar.

The McMinnville McMenamins has a hotel! So Pedro and I will end up staying here one day in the future.

I had found a new thing to check out on the Atlas Obscura website: Erratic Rock. What an intriguing name, don’t you think? It’s just a big ol’ rock in the countryside. After we ate, I took my geology graduate, Kellen, out to find it.

How fortunate we are to live in Oregon. It is so beautiful in a variety of ways. In this case, we were in the fertile Willamette Valley, famous for agriculture. Recently becoming more famous for vineyards and Oregon’s exceptional pinot noirs. This part of Oregon has rolling hills and huge flat valleys planted with a hundred kinds of crops and rivers running through, with snow-capped mountains on the horizons.

The trail to Erratic Rock State Natural Site has a modest incline that one doesn’t really notice for most of the super short walk. Then, just before the end, it turns 90 degrees to the left and goes right up the side of the hill, climbing 75 feet in elevation. Out and back, it’s less than a half a mile, but that last bit is challengingly steep. People using wheels might need a second person helping to push.

Of course I looked it up. In this case, Erratic Rock is for “glacial erratic.” This is a rock foreign to the area that was carried here by a glacier. Thus, you will find erratic rocks all over the world. They can be tiny or giant. The one in McMinnville, the Bellevue Erratic, is 90 tons and comes from what is today Montana. It was carried during the Missoula Floods that I have mentioned before, that periodically carved the river channels and deposited the extraordinary rich sediments in Oregon’s agricultural valleys.

The Missoula Floods were up to 1000 feet deep and carried glaciers with embedded boulders. When the glaciers melted, they dropped the boulders at that spot. This one is the largest of hundreds in the Willamette Valley.

For May, it was unseasonably hot, and we had absorbed enough of the weather. We toyed with the idea of visiting the nearby Evergreen Aviation Museum, where the famous Spruce Goose lives, assuming it would be air-conditioned. But in the end, we went back to our hotel room instead, cranked up the air conditioning, and talked the rest of the day away. It was my favourite part of the weekend 🙂