Leaving Oregon

We are leaving Corvallis, Oregon tomorrow.  We will be headed back to our home in Minnesota, a little sooner than expected. ( I will explain more later).  We have had a great time hanging out with the family.  But it's time to get back on the road.  We are headed up through Washington and then through Idaho and Montana.  We will be stopping in Montana to visit some the same friends we started out our journey visiting, I guess we are bringing our journey full circle.

Corvallis - Oregon

View from our room

Here we are again, back hanging out with my mom, sister, and her family.  We arrived on Wednesday, March, 30th.  This time we are parked in the driveway across the street...her neighbor has a large, graveled in area for our rig.   The kids are enjoying staying in their Mirma's(grandma) house at night.  This last weekend was girls weekend...yahoo!  My mom, sister and I went over to the coast and stayed in my dad's condo that he has there.  It over looks the ocean, it was absolutely beautiful and relaxing.  My mom only stayed one night and then headed back to check on the rest of the gang.  While she was there we had a great time eating, drinking, and relaxing, and doing some facial masks.  On Saturday, my sister and I went glass blowing and made these beautiful glass floats.  It was so great, it was interesting, relaxing and extremely fun.  We then spent the rest of the day shopping and then stopped in this little bar called the Sea Hag.  We were not prepared for how much fun we were going to have,  we were just going to stop and have one drink, but that turned into a few drinks.  The bar tenders break out in song by playing all the bar bottles with wooden spoons, it was awesome!  There was then some live music and then another round of bar bottle playing and this time it was done to the chicken song/dance...so of course we had to get up and participate in the chicken dance.
We then headed back to the condo for an enjoyable evening of movies.  We were sad when we had to leave and head back.  I was glad we had that chance to hang out and enjoy each other!

Point Defiance Zoo and Aquarium - Tacoma, Washington

Getting ready to be fed!

Well it rained all day on Saturday and we watched movies, played games, and hung out together.   I don't know if I could live here,  too much rain and mud.  I find it much easier to manage in the snow!   However, it was time to get out of this camper...so on Sunday, even though it was raining on and off, we headed out to the zoo.  When we first arrived, it was raining, so we went indoors and started with the aquarium.  We saw lots of fish, seahorses, sharks and they even had a touch tank full of sea creatures to touch.  By that time the rain had stopped and we were able to head outside (we had umbrellas in case it starts to rain again, which we know it will).  We saw elephants, chimps, red foxes, muskox, and lots of other little animals.  We got to see the tigers and leopards being fed, that was fascinating.  That tiger was licking his chops and just watching the zoo keeper as he was talking to us and getting ready to feed him.  We enjoyed seeing these 3 huge walruses swimming around.  They would come right up to the glass of the underwater viewing area and look right at us, hang out, and then swim off.  It was a great way to spend the day, and just as we were getting ready to leave...DOWNPOUR!!  Run to the car and fast!

Seattle

Lots of hands on experiments

Optical Illusion...is Rees floating?

Butterfly Cocoons

Creating our Harmnograph piece

Our Artwork

I took the kids into Seattle yesterday.  We went to the Pacific Science Center.  However the tickets for the planetarium part was sold out...too bad, that was something I really wanted to take the kids to see.  Anyway we had a blast!  It was very hands on.  We saw an insect exhibit, there are some truly gross big bugs in this world.  I have to say that I am glad I don't live in some of those places having to deal with those bugs.  There was also a butterfly house that we went into...that was very cool.  All the butterflies just fly around you, we watched them eating...using their long tongues and seeing that up close was fascinating.  We also saw all the different cocoons.  There were sections on the body, water, dinosaurs, space, a tide pool, and reptiles.  One of our favorite activities was taking a piece of paper and putting it on this machine called a harmnograph...its like a Spirograph, you swing it around and place a pen in and it designs a picture on the paper...we were very proud of our creation.
After we went to look at the Space Needle, just look...the kids don't like heights so we didn't go up to the top, maybe next time.

Gig Harbor, Washington

Arrived we have...into Gig Harbor, Washington.  What a beautiful area!  A little rainy and cool.  We are in a quiet and lovely campground here.  Bryce left to go to Montana and Minnesota, so we are going to be exploring on our own.  My mom is going to come up and spend some time with us here.

I am stressing a little about the kids schooling.  We are getting ready for some testing and I just hope I have prepared them enough.  We did dissect a frog yesterday!  It was good, not my favorite thing to do...but Jake and Trent loved it, Rees, not so much.  She ended up crying and I let here go back into the camper while we finished.  I did video tape it, but it's about 15 minutes long.  I might try to post it later.  Well we are all caught up to date...I promise to keep on top of it!

Heading to Washington

So on March 18th we left beautiful California and headed up towards Washington state.  We stopped in Corning, CA for one of our stops, we just pulled into a campground later in the night.  We then headed up to Corvallis, OR.  As we are headed that way we tune into the travel/weather news because the lights were flashing on the road sign regarding travel and the weather that was approaching.  We are getting ready to go over the mountains by Mount Shasta, but chins are required...are you kidding me...it's MARCH, isn't this suppose to be over.  Anyway, we bought some chains just to show the highway patrol so we could go over the pass.  So many people were turned away due to no chains.  We had to wait in a long line of traffic while highway patrol checked each truck and car for chains.  Why would you wait in that line(it was like 45 min. of waiting) and not have your chains, only to have to turn around and go back!  It was snowing up towards the top of the pass, all I could think was...what are we doing, we have been staying away from this stuff since we left, yet here we are right smack dab in the middle of SNOW!   We watched the temperature continue to go down as we sat in 31 degrees, YUCK!  We hit traffic again at the top as the truckers were pulled over and putting on their chains.  It took us about 2 extra hours just to get over the pass.  After we got over the pass we thought it was going to be smooth sailing...not so fast, let's just add a little hail storm before you get to your destination!!!  Anyway we made it and stopped at my sister's house to hang out with them and my mom.  We had called ahead to let them know when we would be in and to request that my mom whip up some tuna casserole, a family favorite.  Of course she did and we had a very comforting dinner with family.  The cousins all got to hang out and have some fun before we took off the next day.

Last Days in California

Our first house in Canyon Country, CA

We got married on this grass overlooking the beach

Bryce, Me, John and Christine Bjerke

Well my husband has said that I have been slacking on keeping up with our blog...okay he's right!  So I am going to try to keep up better.  So our last days in California were spent hanging out with some old friends and visiting some sentimental places.  We took the kids by our first house in Canyon Country, it looked exactly the same.  We ended up getting together for lunch with Bryce's Aunt Peggy in Ventura. It was wonderful getting to see some of his family too.   While we were up there, we took the kids to Mandalay Beach where we got married over looking the beach.  It was still very beautiful.
Then I had an old college friend, John Bjerke and his wife Christine, come up to our camper and have lunch.  We enjoyed catching up and seeing each other...it had been 12 years since we saw each other last.  I had a blast seeing them.  We then spent one more meal with the Crawfords...which was fun as usual.  We talked about how we felt like we never left, we just picked up where we left off, that is such a great feeling to have those kinds of friendships.  I can't believe we didn't take any pictures while we were with them.  I am usually very good about that, but I guess I was too caught up in visiting.  We are very lucky!!