Field Trip Madness! Week 32 in Houck’s class, by Jackson Minsker

Every few weeks, one student in our class gets to sit out the super quiz and write the weekly update.  This week’s update was done by 7th grader Jackson Minsker.  Thanks, Jackson!

This week the sixth graders were at outdoor school, so we got to have field trips every day, except for Thursday, because there were some kids who still needed to finish up state testing. But we still got to have some fun after they had finished up.

On Monday we took the bus to the Oregon clinic in portland and got on the Max there. We rode the Max all the way to the zoo, which took about 30 minutes. We got off at the underground tunnel where the Max runs under the zoo. When we had gotten on the elevator to go up to ground level, when the door was about to shut, Houck stuck his hand out the doors and yelled, “No, I can’t go!” They laughed. He did this four or five times. So once we got up to ground level we all walked right past the zoo and towards the freeway. Everyone was so confused but after walking for a few minutes alongside the freeway we came to a path which lead up the small mountain that was by the freeway. That trail was the 4T trail. After reaching the top of the 4T trail we stopped and ate lunch. Then we went back down the other side of the small mountain and ended up a few blocks from the tram, which was our next stop. When we got to the tram we had to wait for a few minutes for one of the trams to come back up. After getting off the tram at the bottom we got to go look at the engine room which was pretty cool. So when we were done with that we had to wait for a half an hour or so for the trolley to arrive. The trolley was super crowded. I barely had enough room to grab my water bottle from my backpack. The trolley just ended up dropping us off at another Max station. We had to get on another Max to get back to the bus. So all in all Monday was a really fun day, but now onto Tuesday.

On Tuesday we got a tour of P.S.U. When we got to P.S.U. we were early so we walked around for a little bit. Then we came across a soccer field. We went onto the soccer field and I expected to get kicked off almost instantly, but we actually didn’t get kicked off. After the tour of P.S.U. we walked to the Portland Art Museum to look at their Ancient China exhibit. But we also got to look at the Laika exhibit. If you don’t know what Laika is, its a stop motion animation movie company. Laika created the movies The Boxtrolls, Kubo and the Two Strings, Coraline, Paranorman and the Corpse Bride. Tuesday was an okay field trip but definitely not as good as Monday.

Wednesday we went to the PGE power plant and got a tour of the facility. Our guides’ names were Terry and Michael. We learned how the dam works and also how they get baby salmon down the river safely. When we went to lunch someone asked our guide if he had Snapchat. Terry was maybe 75, so he had no idea what Snapchat, was so some people tried to explain it to him. He didn’t understand anything they were saying, so they decided to create him a Snapchat called PGE_Terry, which was the best thing that had happened all week, until we were on our way back to the school and Houck said “Anybody want ice cream?”  All the kids on the bus said yes to getting ice cream but we had just crossed the Stark Street bridge. We had already passed Dairy Queen, so everybody was upset for a few seconds until someone said “Turn around!” Everybody started yelling that, so the bus driver turned around and went back to Dairy Queen for us. We also learned that our bus driver was a Twitch streamer, so he gained about 30 followers on Twitch. Wednesday overall was the best field trip of the week, because we got Dairy Queen, we set up a Snapchat for Terry, and our bus driver was a Twitch streamer.