Hello and welcome back to Nomad Dad Life! We continue our journey around Oregon today. If you didn’t read the last post about the Oregon Coast, please do so here. Today’s post takes us north up Interstate 5 for our most disappointing excursion in Oregon. We also talk about how we were able to make it one of our most memorable trips, for good and bad reasons. It was a good way to teach our kids to try to find the silver lining in everything. Life rarely goes according to plan and sometimes it works out better than what you had planned. This isn’t one of those cases, but it still worked out!
Mount Hood Railroad
Mount Hood Railroad, located in Hood River, Oregon was our main plan for the day. Arkyn loves trains, Oregon has some amazing views, Google had good reviews, everything was pointing to a good day! I hadn’t been on a train since some friends and I took one from Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, to Chicago to watch the Vikings lose to the Bears back in 2018. We had a lot of fun with that trip, so I was looking forward to this one as well.
Maybe our expectations were too high going in, maybe we didn’t get enough sleep the night before (Thanks, teething child!) Maybe the internet was wrong and this wasn’t as good as they said it was. Whatever it was, we would recommend spending your money somewhere other than Mount Hood Railroad.
Hood River, Oregon, is located about an hour east of Portland. That meant we had a close to a three-hour drive to get there before ten that morning. Maybe that’s what the problem was; you’d have better luck herding cats than keeping two toddlers on schedule at that time of the morning. Anyway, Arkyn’s favorite part of the train ride was that the toilet had a foot pedal to flush it, and if that doesn’t sum up our experience perfectly, I don’t know what does!
Train Experience
For being a “scenic” train, there wasn’t much to look at. One side got a good view of some dirt on the side of the hill and the other got to see a lot of graffiti. It had a PA system to tell the history of the railroad to make the trip a little more interesting. Only one speaker worked and not very well so no one could hear what was being said, but I don’t think it would have helped anyway. At the end of the trip was an orchard with a huge store that sold fresh fruits and jams as well as a winery.
The scheduled stop was for 45 minutes but the train was running late so it ended up being a half hour stop. The fruit store did have a nice selection, but was overpriced. The winery must have been good as it was at capacity when the train got there. Some passengers got to sample wine outside, but they didn’t have enough time after getting served to even finish a glass.
The ride back was the same route, and the track had a switchback, which is one of only five remaining switchbacks in operation in the United States, so you couldn’t even swap that graffiti view for a nice view of some dirt. . .Overall, it just wasn’t a good experience for our family.
Multnomah Falls
On our way back to Eugene from Hood River we came across an area on the Columbia River Highway with a parking lot in the middle of the divided highway that was almost full. Curious to see what was there, we pulled into the parking lot to check it out. It was Multnomah Falls, the most visited natural recreation site in the Pacific Northwest with over 2,000,000 visitors annually. The falls have 2 steps an upper falls, which is a 542 foot drop, and a lower falls, which is a nice 69 foot drop. The falls has a bridge to cross the river to get a different view of the falls.
At the base of the falls there is a visitor center, gift shop, snack bar, and restaurant. The trail is short and paved the whole way, so it’s an easy hike with children. After our short hike the children got some sno-cones from the snack bar. They made a mess and were able to jump in the river to get washed off. They had a lot of fun at this stop, so this helped salvage our trip a little bit.
Salem, Oregon
Our final stop on the day was by far our children’s favorite–Gilbert House Children’s Museum in Salem, Oregon. This children’s museum was huge. It consisted of five Victorian houses and a 20,000 square foot outdoor play area. In the five houses were 20 hands-on activities for our children to stay busy with. This was great because we already had a long day and I needed to get some work done after we got back to our home, so I wanted the children to be worn out.
Our children got to try out every exhibit before the museum closed, but I didn’t want to risk them not being worn out. We took a walk across the Union Street Railroad Bridge. This is part of the struggles of working remotely with kids when you don’t know anyone in the area. We didn’t have family or friends that could come and babysit while I worked.
If we wanted to do anything as a family or explore our new area, my only option would be to work was after Arkyn and Ayla went to bed. After some time of doing this, I knew working from 8 or 8:30 after they were finally done fighting me about going to bed and working until 3 or 3:30 in the morning only for them to be up at 7:30 wasn’t going to be sustainable for me. Unfortunately, I knew I was going to have to put my notice in again.
Finding Balance
Since my workplace was a new agency, there were still a lot of moving parts and a lot of work to do behind the scenes. I had the opportunity to work in a part-time capacity through the end of the year. This also meant I wouldn’t have the supervisory aspect of the job, which was difficult to do working remotely besides working weird hours of the night when my staff was in office from 8-4:30.
This was a major turning point in our travel journey. With reduced working hours every week, I was able to get more rest. Fae didn’t have to come home from an overnight shift and help me watch the kids so I could meet deadlines. We had more time to cook and plan our meals, which lead to healthier eating. This meant more energy for trying to keep up with two tiny humans who don’t know how to sit still.
This change reduced the stress level for everyone in our family. We could focus more on us and the things we enjoyed instead of work. We were able to get more hours out of the day and that is not something we take for granted. Of course, we knew when we had children it was going to be a challenge. We also knew that it was one we wanted to take on. We want to raise our children, not have someone else raise them. When we lived in Minnesota we didn’t put our children in daycare at all, and we maybe called a babysitter once so we could have a night out. Sure, they can be difficult sometimes, but being there to see them do something for the first time, learn something new, or master something they have been practicing for a long time makes it all worth it.
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Links
Mount Hood Railroad: https://www.mthoodrr.com/
Multnomah Falls: https://www.fs.usda.gov/recarea/crgnsa/recarea/?recid=30026
Gilbert House: https://acgilbert.org/
Comments by christopherrylander
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