You thought CITY folk were a paranoid bunch...

Yeah, the creek is gorgeous, but you can only enjoy from a distance. A few days ago Catie and I decided not to waste the gorgeously warm day. We decided to pack up some food and beverage in a cooler and get to a creek/river/moving body of water to enjoy the day. I saw that Gales Creek looked really nice, and it was on a list I found online of places to go in Washington County.

They lied.

We left our house and drove just under ten minutes to Gales Creek, however, we couldn't find a place to park or have a picnic. So we stopped in the General Store to get directions, and the conversation went like this:

Me: Hi, we're trying to find a place on the creek to have a picnic.
Ladies in the store: What creek?
Me: Um, Gales Creek...
LITS: You mean the town?
Me: No, I know I'm in the town already. I just want to know if there is an area along the creek where we can lay down a blanket and relax.
LITS: We don't have any place where you can camp...
Me: NO! We don't want to camp, we just want to have a picnic for about an hour
LITS: Well we don't have any place like that, but if you go out to Timber about five miles from here you might find a picnic area, and if that doesn't work, go back through here and look for Roderick St. on your right...but don't turn right. You'll go up about ten feet and you'll see a clearing and some tall grass. You'll wanna turn there.

So we went out to Timber and the only picnic area we found was owned by the people who lived in the apartments above the general store. We asked if their picnic area was open to the public (all TWO picnic tables of it) and he said it would cost $10 plus a pooper scooper for the dog we brought. We passed. So it's BACK to Gales Creek to look for this clearing, which we were beginning to think didn't exist. Catie then took us to Shafer so we could get a bottle of wine and directions to a REAL picnic area. We were told to look for an abandoned building and there was an area behind it where we could hang out.

So we find this area. Get everything all set up and start eating. Not more than five minutes later a guy pulls up in his truck and says we have to leave. Not only were we on private property, but 99% of Gales Creek is private property (even the parts where there were NO houses) ever since some druggies left their fires burning. We explained to him our plight and how we spent over an hour just trying to find a place to eat. After some chit chat about how the world is coming to an end because nice girls like us are few and far between, he let us stay as long as we cleaned up our mess and didn't leave a fire burning. Since we didn't have anything to START a fire with, and had everything in our cooler, this didn't present a problem.

This shouldn't have surprised me, but I couldn't believe the trouble we had to go to just to find a place to sit and eat (and Haag Lake was NOT an option). Now, I'm from Rogue River...a town so small it only has one stop light connecting two school cafeterias nowhere NEAR an intersection. Our river runs right along the town, behind people's yards, along people's houses, and EVERYONE (even tourists) uses the river for recreation. So being in another little town, also named after their creek, that DOESN'T welcome people just blew me away. I can understand a few bad apples may have tainted their attitudes toward humanity, but when did a couple of girls with a cooler and a mini schnauzer pose a threat?