Field trip!

Hi all!

Last week the Option III students took a field trip to see 4 buildings and a little bit of what this state has to offer. We started off early Tuesday morning and headed for a library designed by Alvar Alto on a monastery near by. Alto is a famous Finnish architect who only has two buildings in the U.S. so it was a pretty unique experience. The building itself was great, but the site it was built upon was even better. It was set on a hill looking out to Mt. Hood which definitely added to the serenity of an already calm, spiritual place. After lunch, we rode up to Portland to walk the city and see a few squares, study the urban layout a little bit, and see a few specific buildings. It was a pretty warm afternoon and luckily the last stop on our list was a local brewery. We stopped in with about an hour to kill and were not surprised to find about half of the class inside already unwinding.

Next after Portland was our overnight stay on Mt. Hood. Half of the class stayed in the base lodge, while the other half stayed up the mountain a ways. I hiked up with a group of 4 other guys, and it was just unbelievable. The sun started setting when we began, so by the time we were about 3/4 of the way up it was pretty dark. This was about the same time that I had physically hit a wall, my legs felt like jello and i was sucking wind. The guys I was hiking up with were pretty seasoned hikers, so it was a struggle to keep pace at that point, but i pushed through and made it to the top with them. I definitely do not have the writing skills to express the experience on the way up, but I can say that i felt such a deep happiness while on that mountain. Getting closer to nature, and seeing the world from a different lens was one of the major factors in my decision to come to Oregon, and it was thrilling to have my first climb be at such a beautiful and rewarding place. It was a very powerful moment in my life, and one that i won't soon forget.

Anyway, if you check out the album I did get some pictures of our lodge and the views the next morning, so you can get an idea of it. The next day we traveled to the Columbia River Gorge to see the valley river center by Thomas Hacker, and then another Hacker building, the Bend Public Library in Bend, Oregon which is a really nice town a few hours north-west of Eugene. It's a good place to go get some sun when the rainy season gets overwhelming here.

So all in all the field trip was a great success and a wonderful break in the middle of a pretty hectic work schedule here at campus. I'm making great friends, and meeting some fascinating people but I think I will dedicate another post to all that stuff soon. Hope all is well back East!

Lots of love,
nick