#philomath

 I’ve come to appreciate where I grew up much more since then, and so yesterday when I woke up and was deciding what to do with my day off, I decided to see what I could find within 20 minutes drive from my house. I grabbed some coffee and a breakfast burrito, threw some gas in my car and got out in the pouring rain to go see some neat stuff. Philomath sits right on the west edge of the Willamette Valley, in the foothills of the Coastal Mountains. Not very picturesque mountains, mind you; they're really just big hills that barely see snow in the winter. But 10 minutes in the car heading west toward the coast puts you right into some beautiful rural landscapes. There are a lot of farms, old forest service roads, abandoned barns and little creeks that cut through forests and fields all over the place. 

 I headed out into Kings Valley first, a route that I didn’t take much when I was growing up in the area but have since started driving through more often on my way to the more northern parts of the coast. It almost feels like you’ve been transported back in time a hundred years there, with tons of farmland and old churches along the highway and just one general store for the area a few miles down the road. I stopped along a few random roads on my drive to snap some pictures and placed some mental markers for places I want to come back to later when the rain wasn’t so oppressive. 

After turning around at my 20 minute limit, I swung back towards Philomath, but detoured around the south side of town to go out by Evergreen and Airport Road. I had a bunch of friends who grew up out that way, so I kind of knew what I was doing, but it’s been years since I actually spent any time out here so I felt like I was seeing a lot of it with fresh eyes. It’s really weird moving home after college, because you feel like you see everything differently. The places where my friends and I spent our days just hanging out and doing nothing seem a lot less cool, and the town has seen a lot of development so some of my favorite places to get away from other people are now cluttered with McMansions and townhouses. Nevertheless, I was happy to take the day to shoot around town with fresh eyes, and revisit a bunch of my favorite spots from when I was a kid. My drive took me out towards the south end of Corvallis, where Airport meets up with Highway 99, and I was able to find a couple cool spots to park and snap some photos. They weren’t the wide, sweeping landscapes that I’m used to hunting down, but it was good practice nonetheless. I turned around at the junction, and headed home from there. All said and done, it took me about two hours to make my big circle and return home.