The Avatar in Salem

It's only been a few days since the Avatar last checked in, but he had a busy and sentimental Thanksgiving weekend.  While the real me ran various miles in the City of Roses and up around sisterjen's place, the Avatar made it to Salem, Oregon.

He ran past this house:

This (from Google Streetview, of course) is where my grandparents lived when I was a kid.  I spent a lot of time there; it was dark green then, and had an obnoxious line of holly trees up the side of that long driveway, but the view from the street is otherwise pretty much unchanged.  It's a small house, and has a singularly unwieldy layout, but it also has (or had, anyway) a snazzy indoor-outdoor space extending out from the back door.

The detail that makes me most nostalgic is the big old evergreen looming up behind the house, which looks just like it did thirty years ago.  In those days, my grandpa had the back of the lot tricked out like a small farm; there was an extra icebox in the garage there to store some of his surplus.  The view from the sky shows that that's all been taken out now, which is no surprise; it must have been a ton of work.  It was pretty fun to graze back there in the late summer though, I'll tell you what.

And we spent quite a few Thanksgivings there, too.

Then the Avatar backtracked a few miles north to visit Oregon's Capital Building.  He'll head southwest on River Road to Independence as the journey to Corvallis continues.