Home

Happy Easter!  We arrived home on Tuesday, April 19th, such a bittersweet feeling.  It's been busy trying to unpack, get ready for Easter, celebrating Rees' 9th birthday, and just settling in.  I will be writing a summary soon of our trip and give some final thoughts.  I still cannot give you our reason for ending our journey early, but I will hopefully be able to do that real soon.  It has been an amazing time in our lives!  Looking forward to more...

Bozeman, Montana

We arrived into Bozeman, Montana late in the afternoon yesterday.  We came through beautiful Coeur D'Alene, Idaho and even encountered some snow.  As we were trying to unhook and set up camp...this dam trailer broke again.  The landing gear would not come down or up, so we cannot get the trailer off the truck.  We had to have a mobile repair man come out and jack the trailer up so we could get the jacks back up.  We were going to just leave and head home, but decided we really wanted to spend some time here with our friends, so we rented a car so we could get around, and we are leaving the trailer hooked up to the truck.  It was really cold here yesterday and last night, but this morning looks to be a beautiful day.

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!