Champoeg SP, OR

Champoeg: yet another name that defies the rules of  phonetics.  It’s pronounced sham-POO-ee.  Allegedly, it’s a bastardized Kalipuya Indian word meaning a carrot-like, edible root – or the place where such roots are found.  The common name of the plant is yampah.  Tomorrow, I’m gonna grab my trusty trowel and go yampah hunting.  If you have a favorite yampah recipe, please forward it to me.

It’s a large park, about 20 miles southwest of Portland.  Besides the campgrounds, it has cabins, yurts, bike trails, a museum, historic buildings, boat dock and large open grassy areas.

Trish is quite the happy camper, now that we have enough storage space for her fabric boxes, iron, pint-size Janome sewing machine and assorted quilting tools.  She spends lots and lots of hours measuring and cutting and ironing fabric, making hundreds of little fabric squares that she will piece together when we return home.  She’s made numerous lovely quilts in recent years.

I watch her do her quilting thing and think, good grief, how can she stand it, doing the same thing over and over and over?  It would drive me bat-shit crazy in a matter of minutes!  Ranger and Artie don’t appear to find it very exciting, either.

Champoeg is where, in 1843, Oregon pioneers gathered and voted in favor of forming a provisional government and wrote a petition to the US government requesting recognition of same.  Champoeg was a relatively large settlement at the time and many thought it would eventually be the territorial/state capital.  The Willamette River threw a wet blanket on that: in December, 1861, the River rose 52’ and wiped out the entire town.  It was not rebuilt.

This is a typical yurt except for the handicapped ramp.  Inside, there’s basic furniture including bunk beds.  It has electricity but no plumbing.  Light is provided by the central, round skylight and ‘windows’ of clear vinyl.  In the above picture, the privacy flaps are down so you can’t see the windows.

Day 95. Champoeg SP, OR

The name Champoeg isn’t French after all. It is said to be a corruption of a Kalapuya Indian word meaning ‘place where carrot-like roots are found’. Kalapuya is now a dead language; prior to this bit of research I’d never even heard of them, must have been a small group. They are now included in the Grande Ronde nation, as are several other small area tribes. It so happens that my niece Carina is the housing director for the Grande Ronde group.
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This park was the site of The Champoeg Meetings of 1841-43. The Meetings were held to organize a much-needed provisional government and to vote on which country the citizens wanted to be a part of, the US or Great Britain. It was a near thing, with the US winning by only 2 votes. The Brits had more of a presence in the Portland area at that time, had a large Hudson’s Bay Company fur trading post in Vancouver, WA that was established in 1824.
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In the mid 1800s, there used to be good sized town here called Butteville. It was wiped out when the Willamette River flooded and was never rebuilt. One old store survived and is still in operation.
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Trish and daughter Laura are doing the factory outlet stores today (eeeeeeeeeeuuuuu!) while I research movie streaming. Can I stream movies to my laptop via the droid when the two are USB tethered? Also have to check on the replacement EDGE radio at Camping World. It was supposed to arrive last Thursday and they were supposed to call me when it arrived. From my rants in prior posts you know how much confidence I have in CW, gotta keep bugging them until they’re so sick of you that they actually do something to get you off their back.

Day 94. Scappoose, OR

What the hell is that?

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We’ve seen some odd looking rigs in our travels but none odder than this one. We returned from running errands yesterday to find it parked beside us. Last night we were sitting around the campfire having drinks and snacks with Jim and Paulette, and the owner of the rig joined us briefly. He provided us with the history.
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This guy owns a trucking company in eastern Oregon. He had this 30-year old motorhome with a dead engine, and decided to marry it up with a newer Kenworth semi tractor with a sleeper cabin. He chopped off the tractor sleeper cabin and the entire front end of motorhome and proceeded to put them together, said it only took 3 weeks. Obviously, he knows his way around the automotive shop and sheet metal work. Three weeks? Would have taken me 3 years. And the end product would be hands-down winner of the RV Pig Party prize.

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When he was all done, his son gave it a paint job, and from 30 feet away it looks pretty darn good. Weird but good. Up close, you see a lot of dents in the motorhome body, and also the old painted-over graphics. He says it has a lot more power than a traditional, comparably-sized motorhome, and it also gets better gas mileage. ‘Better’ is a relative term, wouldn’t take much to beat the fuel efficiency of those humongous class-A rigs.

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Night before last, we had dinner at the Dockside in St Helens with friends, Don and Jan, who live near St Helens. Don was one of the regulars at my poker table for several years; Jan is an accomplished artist who works in clay.

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We’ll be hitting the road again today, headed to Champoeg SP several miles south of Portland for a few nights. Funny name, Champoeg, pronounced shampoo-ee. Looks like it should be cham-pig, don’t you think? It must be French: everyone knows that any similarity between the spelling and pronunciation of French words is purely coincidental.