Sur La Mer (our 31st Anniversary) Part 46: Hwy 22 West Of Salem

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This is kind of a continuation of the feeling I started in the last post, but with a different angle of incidence. How things were to how they are.

After passing the junction of Hwy 22, Hwy 223, and Hwy 99W that has developed over the last 40 years to enable you to bypass the intersection burg of Rickreall so well that you don't have to go through it even if you are trying to get to Dallas from Salem, the highway bents from NW-SE to dead-on E-W and begins the first part of the final approach into Salem from the west across the flat farmlands that dominate the area between there and the edge of the Eola Hills that define West Salem. 

Just like many things I comment on in my roadworthy experience, this was not so remarkably as it is. That is actually a banal observation overworded because I wanted to, but no less true: the interesting thing about Hwy 22 coming into Salem from the west is how it's evolved. The only similar highway I can imagine in form and function is Portland's own Sunset Highway, but that was laid down at one more-or-less fell swoop. It's a full-on freeway. Hwy 22 started out as a local road and evolved that way, and it hasn't finished its evolution. 

Dig, if you will, this picture:

This is along part of that length I mentioned before. Straight on like an arrow from Rickreall to the Hwy 51 junction just west of Eola Bend. Less than a mile to the right as this angle has it, there's a local road called Rickreall Road that winds close to the namesake creek, intersecting 99W just south of 22 at the namesake community. This road used to by Hwy 22, and was bypassed by the road in the picture above, which went in around 1970, give or take a couple of years. 

At the time and for many years after the verges each side of the road were treeless, giving unobstructed views of the fields and farms on either side and the rail line it passed over, but at some time during the intervening 30-plus years succeeding the 1980s someone got the idea to plant these trees, and I did rather enjoy the feeling of going down a tree corridor as we passed through this part of Polk County approaching the metropole. 

The next picture is taken from the car window at a place I like to call Eola Bend: the historic townsite of Eola still exists here and this amounts to the business district. It's the extreme western edge of the incorporated area of Salem, and it's where Hwy 22 finally comes up against the Willamette.

The name on the building reads Eola Inn, because that's what it was as a business and what it is as a landmark. It's been a roadhouse, middle-to-upperbrow supper club, and a outlier to the Rock'n'Rogers chain of un-remarkable painfully-50s burger dives. 

It now appears to be the central building of an awkwardly-arranged used car lot. Never saw that one coming.