Oregon Museum of Science and Industry
1945 SE Water Avenue, Portland, OR 97214-3354
(503) 797-4000 or (800) 955-OMSI (6674)
http://www.omsi.edu/

Hours: Tuesday-Sunday 9:30am-5:30pm (plus Mondays of school holidays; summers open until 7pm)
Prices: $11/adults, $9 kids & seniors, under 3 free.  Show your AAA card for a discount.  OMNIMAX, Planetarium, some rides & shows, extra.
Parking: $2 but they didn’t actually charge us for it.

It was dinosaur month and they had a special exhibit.  A couple of the dinosaurs moved and roared and it took Miriam a few minutes to believe they weren’t going to jump the wall and come after her.  Then she asked to go see them and had fun.  Even looking at the pictures as I was writing this, she said, “oh I am so scared” (half kidding) and added “are they alive?”  We were there almost two months ago but she remembers…

Cyndi & Miriam

They had both full-featured dinos and some that were just skeletons.

Miriam & Michael

And of course some silly tourist stuff.

Michael & Miriam vamp for the camera

Since we had gone to A.C. Gilbert’s Discovery Villiage in Salem the day before, I was a little concerned about doing science museums two days in a row.  But the places were quite different and Miriam had a blast both times.

OMSI features an OMNIMAX Dome Theater, a Planetarium, and Laser Light Shows, which all cost extra, so we didn’t go.  The Featured Exhibit when we were there was the dinosaurs but now has switched to something else.

They also have a Science Playground for children 6 and under, which is a large room with places for parents to sit down and watch their kids play.  Any child over 3 would be bored there.  The Life Science Hall and Earth Science Hall have a bunch of interactive exhibits that range from fun to lecturey to broken.  Most were geared for elementary school age children.  Some were old and outdated and some of the newer ones were very patronizing.

They have several labs (chemistry, physics, marine science, etc) there which are mostly for elementary and secondary school aged children.

Where we spent the most time was Turbine Hall, which, ironically, is free to the public.  Here you find all the hands on hard science fun that I experienced at science museums both as a kid and as a teacher a couple of decades ago.  Miriam’s favorite was the Earthquake House, a little cottage on a moving platform that rocked and rolled to the sounds of Carole King (I felt the earth move under my feet…no, really).

Accessibility: The building is two stories and there are stairs, escalators, and elevators.  There were plenty of places to sit and rest around all the exhibits and the hallways and lobby.  As I recall, the bathrooms were pretty stinky (air freshener or cleaning product fragrance) but not completely unusable.  Some of the labs (the chemistry lab mainly) emitted very strong chemical smells that wafted out the door into the Hall. Something was going on in the building at large because I had a headache and the typical spaciness/fatigue that comes with exposure.  I can’t pinpoint it though.

For a 3 year old, this is a great place to go once in a great while.  I hear that older children (in the 10 year range) love the place.  And they seem to have enough fun to keep teens occupied too.  A toddler would have enough interesting things to keep busy.  It’s the 3-6 range that might be a bit weak, but then we didn’t explore every area they had.  It certainly was a good way to stay cool on a hot day.

©2012 Norwitz Notions. All Rights Reserved.

As we drove up, we found clean air, large campsites where no one seemed to be a smoker (I saw one cigar many sites away and that was it), and a huge empty field flanked by, what else?, blackberry bushes.

The view from our tent

Champoeg State Heritage Area
Champoeg Rd NE
http://www.oregonstateparks.org/park_113.php
503-678-1251 Ext. 225
Reservations: 800-452-5687

From Southern Oregon (a few minutes from Grant’s Pass), the trip is 230 miles, 3:45 hours.  From Petaluma, CA, it would be 10 hours, not counting stops.  It’s about 35 minutes south of Portland.

Directions: From I-5, take Exit 278 and head west. Follow the signs.

Check in time 4pm; check out time 1pm.

Our campsite from the access road

We spoke to the folks in the one site fairly close to us (on the right) and they were nonsmokers but also locals who decided they would rather come back when it wasn’t the middle of a heat wave.  So we ended up with no neighbors.

View from blackberries next to the field, back to our site

Experiences turn on a dime…had our neighbors been heavy smokers or pesticide users, my stay there would have been hell, like it was the night before at Indian Mary.  For whatever reason though, the campers at Champoeg (inexplicably pronounced sham-poo-ey) were quiet and fairly fume-free (not counting bbq and wood smoke, which fortunately doesn’t bother me, and is pretty impossible to avoid in a campground).

View to the right of our site

First order of business was getting our tent up.  Which took half the time it had the night before.  We didn’t bother with the rain flap this time, since it was still quite hot.  The night breezes were cooler than at Indian Mary though, and we were able to sleep.  Our second night, the heat wave finally broke with a thunderstorm.  Michael and I woke up in the middle of the night, put up the rain flap and got our belongings into the car, and made it back inside the tent just as the first raindrops started to fall.  It’s an excellent tent and not a drop made it inside.

Miriam helps stake the tent

We planned to spend all day Saturday in Portland so Friday night, the night we arrived, we decided to have a campfire.  Michael bought some wood but neglected to get kindling.  All we had was matches, logs, dried grass, a couple twigs from the ground, and 2 pieces of newspaper.

Getting a fire started

Fortunately, all my old Girl Scout training came back to me.  I rearranged the logs Michael had laid side by side and, in very little time, we had a fire.

A blazing fire

The food we cooked (in a cast iron pan) was pupusas that I’d made before our trip, and Amy’s gluten-free, vegan pizza. Both were frozen when we left Petaluma but defrosted in our cooler.  The pupusas didn’t quite work out.  They were very dry.  I’m not sure if that was because they were frozen first.  On the way back, I had some fresh pupusas I made in Vancouver (didn’t freeze them and didn’t put them in the cooler) and they were very dry eaten at room temperature but fabulous when heated well in a toaster oven (even though those were chilled first).  No amount of cooking saved the ones we had at Champoeg though.  They were edible, but needed moist sides.

Cyndi & Miriam cooking on a (semi) open fire

The pizza though, was another story.  Who knew? pizza heated in cast iron over flames is delicious.

Michael & Miriam preparing fire roasted pizza

It was Shabbus, so we lit beeswax candles and put them in a fire-safe place near the picnic table.

Shabbus candles

We ended the meal with the top item that Miriam had deemed essential for camping (getting all her camping knowledge from watching Curious George): marshmallows.  I found kosher ones (egg, dairy, and gluten-free) at Trader Joe’s.

Michael & Miriam roasting marshmallows

Champoeg has a visitor’s center and museums with tours and kids programs, disc (Frisbee) golf, and huge day-use areas, none of which we were able to see.  The Willamette River was way back behind the cabins and Miriam and I didn’t manage to see it either (although Michael wandered past what appeared to be a wading section during a late-night stroll).  With 615 acres, there is a lot we just didn’t have time for.

History, overview of programs, maps.
http://www.oregonstateparks.org/images/pdf/champoeg_history.pdf

Full park brochure and map
http://www.oregonstateparks.org/images/pdf/champoeg_full.pdf

Campground map
http://www.oregonstateparks.org/images/pdf/champoeg_map.pdf

We were in Campsite B9.  The B loop had sites that were much further apart than the A loop.  So better for single campers or small groups.  If you look on the map, above us and to the right is a large circle labeled club camping.  This is the place for groups because there is a shared grassy area in the middle.  When we were there, an extended family was having their annual reunion.

We were warned to bring bug spray and, indeed, there were bugs that came out at dusk.  They were smaller than mosquitoes and seemed to bite a little, but didn’t give us typical mosquito welts.

The park doesn’t use pesticides or herbicides and the bathrooms have no air freshener and are cleaned with “environmentally safe” cleaners (don’t know what, but they had no smell).  Each shower had its own full-enclosed changing room, which was nice.  Bathrooms had flush toilets.  The park host has wood for sale and a cooler with bags of ice.

Champoeg was an easy commute to Portland, and very livable.  If I were in the area, I wouldn’t hesitate to go there again for group camping, single camping, their programs, or a picnic.

©2012 Norwitz Notions. All Rights Reserved.

A.C. Gilbert’s Discovery Village
http://www.acgilbert.org/
116 Marion St. NE, Salem, Oregon 97301
503-371-3631 or 1-800-208-9514
Admission is $5.50 for adults and children 3 and up.  Discounts f or younger children, seniors, and those on public assistance.

I should preface the rest of this post by saying that a heatwave struck Northern California and Oregon the day we left home.  Driving wasn’t a problem, because we had A/C, but we spent a miserable night camping in Southern Oregon and all of our stops were unpleasant at best.  The Discovery Village had an A/C system that probably works fine 99% of the time, but wasn’t quite up to killer hot days like we had and was uneven.  Also, it’s not a building, it’s a complex.  Many of the exhibits are outside and you have to go outdoors to get from one building to another.   It was not family fun at its best.

Miriam had a wonderful time though.  The first room had many devices to make bubbles, including this one as big as a picture window.

Miriam makes a giant bubble

Miriam then crawled through a giant mouth in the human body exhibit, insisted on a prolonged stop in the toddler room, and made her way upstairs, where she found the castle room, with dress-up clothes and a stage.

Miriam plays dress-up in the castle room

It took some doing to pry her away.

Our fair princess gallops away on her steed

Alas, the heat kept me from taking more pictures but Miriam enjoyed the China room (where older girls visiting the museum insisted on sitting us all down at the table and serving us a pretend lunch), a play grocery store, and a giant train set.  There were also swings and a huge (and impressive) climbing structure outdoors (Miriam needed supervision in it but, fortunately, adults fit fine).

Disabled accessibility: limited.  There are ramps leading to each building but only stairs going to the upper stories, where large numbers of exhibits are.  The exhibits themselves are not geared for use from a chair.  I couldn’t use the bathrooms there because there was a strong air freshener or cleaner scent that came from them each time we passed by.  The air quality inside the buildings was fair.  Aside from the bathrooms, there wasn’t anything terrible that I noticed.  I got a headache while I was there but it’s unclear how much was from the heat.

Most of the exhibits are older and don’t have the technology that more modern museums have.  Some of the exhibits (or components of them) aren’t functioning properly.  Yet Miriam talked about this place for days.  She really enjoyed herself.  I’d say that anyone 2-6 years old would have a blast.  Younger kids still have a few things to do and older kids would have fun if engaged in specific activities.

©2012 Norwitz Notions. All Rights Reserved.