{"id":10807,"date":"2012-05-17T18:53:03","date_gmt":"2012-05-17T23:53:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.howderfamily.com\/blog\/?p=10807"},"modified":"2022-02-06T08:48:22","modified_gmt":"2022-02-06T13:48:22","slug":"sweet-home-oregon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.howderfamily.com\/blog\/sweet-home-oregon\/","title":{"rendered":"Sweet Home, uh, Oregon"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I\u2019m still working out all of the details on my upcoming trip to Oregon and Washington later this summer. The path seems to be getting clearer to me as I fill in missing pieces. It appears I\u2019m going to have to apologize in advance to my Portland readers. The route will likely skirt the city without actually entering it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I know, I know, so many geo-oddities in such a concentrated area and I\u2019m probably going to have to bypass Portland. Life often requires compromises and I had to trade certain routes to keep peace in the family. I had to accommodate a preference of my wife in order to extract a concession, so Portland fell. You can always email me if you want to know the details about the nearby spot outside of Portland that I will be forced to visit instead. That happens when four family members all jockey for personal definitions of cool stuff.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

That Infernal Song!<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Anyway, and more to the point, check out this sweet town I stumbled upon as I mapped various routes from the Oregon coast to the interior.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"The<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Sweet Home, Oregon (map<\/a>) looks like a wonderful town. They\u2019ve got nine thousand residents, great scenery, a nice website<\/a> and all sorts of outdoor activities. Is it terrible of me that all of those great features were drowned-out by the constant droning of a song I couldn\u2019t dislodge from my head, “Sweet Home Alabama?” — Turn it Up!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I won\u2019t get into controversies associated with that song, whether it tacitly favored or rejected racial segregation. I will note for the record that it contains considerably more nuance than most listeners likely realize. You can research it and form an opinion on your own. That didn\u2019t matter in this scenario where I concerned myself solely with the repetition in my mind. As I\u2019ve discussed before<\/a>, I don\u2019t need to enjoy a song for it to lodge firmly within my brain. However, I do like this one more than that other one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Cover<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

For those of you unfamiliar with “Sweet Home Alabama” — maybe you live far away from the United States or you\u2019re a generation removed, or whatever — the band that epitomized the Southern Rock genre, Lynyrd Skynyrd, released it in 1974 and it made it all the way to #8 on the U.S. music charts. The only other thing you need to know, according to Wikipedia<\/a>: “None of the three writers of the song were originally from Alabama. Ronnie Van Zant and Gary Rossington were both born in Jacksonville, Florida. Ed King was from Glendale, California.<\/em>” Actually you don\u2019t need to know that. Nonetheless, I found it oddly amusing. I concede that some people will claim that Jacksonville might properly belong in Alabama, though.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

An Actual Sweet Home Alabama<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

I checked one of my all-time favorite sites, the U.S. Geographic Names Information System<\/a> to investigate Sweet Homes. Sure enough, there is<\/em> a Sweet Home, Alabama listed in their records.<\/p>\n\n\n\n