Tuesday – We left for Oregon at about 5 a.m. The trip took a little longer than usual for a couple of reasons. First we had to make a couple of extra stops along the way. One was to get drinks since I managed to leave the filled ice chest on the kitchen counter. The second was not so much extra as longer. We took the time to sit down and eat our lunch at a Subway in the middle of Oregon. Unfortunately the staff was not very fast so it took a while to get our food. The other problem was that we ran into pretty much steady rain from about 60 miles outside of Portland to where we turned towards Salem. But even with that we managed to make it in just over 13 hours.
It was great to see the Oregon Piers – especially William and Kelli. William had just turned 6 months a few days before and as usual he was happy to be hugged and held by grandparents. Kelli was excited to see us but still is not into too much cuddling.
Tom showed us the downstairs library, family, guestroom he has been working on. He has done a great job and It is getting close to being finished. The main thing left to do is to get the carpet laid. I am jealous of all the bookshelves. But my guess is that he already has enough books to almost fill them.
Wednesday, Thursday and Friday – They kind of blended together. Mainly I had my teeth worked on – Shauna took really good care of me – and we read a lot. We did spend an afternoon in Silverton looking at stores and then eating at a family restaurant that had an outside deck that stuck out over the river. It was a beautiful day, the food was good and we took our time reading and enjoying the sun before we finally got up and left. Mary spent some time working on her extraction – I did almost nothing really useful. It was rather like a last vacation before heading off for our mission. Speaking of that, the one thing we did not do much of during our trip was to study our Indonesian.
Saturday we were up and away at about 5:20 a.m. Tom, Shauna and William all stood at the door and waved goodbye. Well William is not quite up to the Goodbye waving stage but at least he was there. We let Kelli enjoy her sleep.
The trip home was an hour shorter. I had replaced the cooler and we ate lunch on the fly. The trip through Oregon has some great sites. The Columbia River Gorge in the early morning light is always beautiful. The scenery is always changing with different cliff formations, different colors and even the way the water flow changes along the long path. The other feature that we had not seen before is the changing leaves on the huge pulp wood forests that grow along the freeway. One is miles long and probably as deep. Rows and rows of tall trees planted maybe 20 feet apart. What made it especially beautiful was that not all the sections of the trees were in the same stage. Some were still green, some were lighter green, some were light yellow and some were golden. On our way to Portland the sun was well down in West and it seemed to accent the golden color. On way back home the sun was just coming up and was filtered through some morning clouds. This gave very subtle shading to the colors. It was truly beautiful.
We got home just after 7 – we did stop for dinner in Provo – and it was good to walk into our own house.