Earthwalk Day 940 (19 August 2024), 9422 km: Oregon State Capitol

A lot of these legs have been long, arduous treks. Leg 31, not so much.

It was rainy yesterday and today in Syracuse, but just a little drizzle this afternoon, not enough to impede my walking. So I covered enough distance to (virtually) arrive at my next destination, the Oregon State Capitol in Salem, OR. And I don’t know if I like it much, but much respect for not looking damn near indistinguishable from almost every other state (and national) capitol building in America.

This is Oregon’s third capitol building; the state seems to have had a bad habit of burning its government buildings down.

Salem is one of those cities that is a state capital and otherwise you’ve never heard of it, and for that matter you probably didn’t realize the state capital wasn’t some better known city. Aside from being the state capital perhaps its best claim to notability is that it sits right on the 45°N parallel, halfway (to a good approximation) between the Equator and the North Pole.

Virtual me is now a couple km south of the Capitol (so a bit closer to the Equator than the Pole), heading out on Leg 32.

And…

I hate it when this happens. I just found out I missed the Museum of Flight in Seattle. And what’s there? A Soyuz capsule, that flew three people to the ISS in 2009. So far as I know there’s only one other Soyuz that carried a crew on display in the US, and I won’t get to it for years.

A map showing my progress is here, a spreadsheet with progress detail is here, and a Google Earth KMZ file is in this Google Drive folder. Present coordinates: 44.910°N, 123.031°W.