6/6: And so, finally, were we on our way. For some reason, we decided I should drive the first stretch, out of Portland and onto the freeway and beyond. I was terrified, my heart was beating like a drum, loud in my ears. But really, it didn’t turn out that bad. We got on the freeway, drove there for half an hour or so and then got off again. No biggie. Because we were headed to Mount Angel.
When we were taking about which route we should take to get from Portland to San Francisco, most people told us to go along the coast. But we wanted to see some countryside too, not only beaches, so we decided to spend our first day driving along berry fields and Christmas tree plantations in the Willamette valley just south of Portland.
In the middle of this idyllic landscape lies Mount Angel. And in Mount Angel, they have an abbey. And the abbey has a library that just happens to be designed by the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto. So the guidebook told us. Being the Finnish human geography nerds that we are (Hanna studies city planning at Stockholm university), we just had to see this. And it turned out to be a nice, if odd, slight detour on our drive south.
The abbey in itself was cute, but nothing special.
But it was situated on a hill, which gave it an amazing view. And the day was so warm and lovely, perfect for a visit at the tranquility of an abbey.
Th wierd thing was the abbey museum. It was full of stuffed animals, some of them monstrously misformed (like a calf with two heads), an exhibition of stones and clothes from the nineteenth century.
An odd start on our roadtrip, indeed.
And so, the library. I must say, I wasn’t surprised. It looked just like an Aalto.
And they were apparently proud of it too.
It was a beautiful library. I could easily have spent my days there, reading and doing research. Too bad all the books were about god.
For lunch, we had real American burgers, me with a chocolate milkshake, down in the village. Then we went for a short walk.
Seriously, Mount Angel might be the oddest town I’ve ever visited. The architecture was so extreme, as if they wanted to create an old German country village that actually never has existed. Because houses simply cannot look like that! They even had postcards that claimed that they had the ‘best October fest celebrations west of Munich’.
But I liked this house, a bit outside of the city. I like the way these westcoast Americans paint their houses in all the craziest colours and combinations. Isn’t the turquoise and the lilac together with the yellow and pink of the roses just lovely?
Katja Malmborg 