I’ve been hearing about Oregon’s covered bridges for a while now, so this weekend we did something about it. I loaded up my garmin mapper, plotted a route and off we went.
Here is the order of our bridge visits…
- Gilkey (1939)
- Hoffman (1936)
- Larwood (1930)
- Shimanek (1966)
- Hannah (1936)
Actually our first stop was in Salem to get some frozen yogurt to make sure we were properly sugared up. I should mention Jasmine did not want to go on this boring roadtrip – she came around though and got into the spirit of exploration.
This was our first trip relying solely on the garmin navigater – no google map printouts or fold-out maps. It did quite well, with only a couple hiccups. The biggest being almost getting stuck in an infinite loop. After the second time around the same loop we took the opposite turn, and then the garmin got back to working.
I think my favorite bridge was Hoffman. Ideally located spanning a beautiful gorge and verdant vegetation. My second favorite was Larwood, but not for the bridge itself, but for its wonderful adjacent park and the babbling brook.
I was surprised that most of the bridges were painted white. I was expecting a variety of colors – yellow, baby blue…
We topped off our daytrip with a lunch of salad and pizza.
