Troutdale. It's difficult to characterize absolutely, our town as it is many different things to many different people. It is history. It is family. It is nature. It is quaint. It is rural. It is urban. However, I'd say, just as it has been for the past 113 years, Troutdale is a setting of constant vision, perennial passion and possibility. But, being who I am, just like many others I am fascinated by the history of the area.
From the Corps of Discovery to the founding of the City, from the Kaiser family arriving in the 1940s to my own family carrying on their legacy in the home they built in the late 1960s. I could go on and on — as could my wife and her mother — about all the family history we have here and much of that is what makes me a proud citizen.
But I'm just as thrilled with contemporary Troutdale. The prospect of an offshoot of the already pronounced downtown strip, my own involvement with trying to have a skate spot constructed in Columbia Park, the arrival of promising new employers (I've been with Amazon-PDX9 since its opening in August of 2018) in our industrial district — it's all completely gripping.
What I'm currently enjoying the most are the parks. Taking my four-year-old daughter and two-year-old son on adventures about the many trails and greenways and running amok in which ever park we choose to visit is providing an abundance of memories and fun. The bottom line is that it's anything and everything: history, family, parks and nature. It's quaint, rural and urban and that's how we like it.
It's Troutdale. Always on the move, but never leaving anything — or anyone — behind.
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