spring break 2008

Well, it was, it's like this, it was, you see, we wanted to get away for a while, and that we accomplished. There were parts of the trip that were fun, and other parts that weren'y EXACTLY like we envisioned. It was going to be a week on the Southern Oregon coast in our trailer. We thought we had the best chance of decent weather there this time of year. The weather has been very odd this year, it is a LaNina year and that brings cold wet weather, lots of snow etc. The last LaNina we had flooded the Portland Metro and coastal areas for several weeks, with 100 year flood record set, that was ten years ago. This year was wet and cold, less flooding (the last one was a perfect storm of heavy snows followed by a melt and then heavy rains on already saturated ground, then a huge wind storm that brought down treees and rocks etc. The fish store at the bottom of our hill has a mark on the wall where the water level was during the floods of 96)
So anyway, we were going camping, and we knew there'd be rains and some wind but we hoped for the best. For the most part weather was pretty good from Sunday to Wednesday, we enjoyed the beach, the kids got to play in the sand and ride their bikes. We decided wednesday we needed to go down to see the Trees of Mystery in California. It was about 170 miles south of where we were. We got driving, stopped in brookings or Gold Beach, can't remember now, at a store and got back on the road and promptly got pulled over by a state trooper for running a light (a stop light that was out, not one that was working) as we didn't see it. He was kind enough to let us off with a warning. We continued on south and stopped in cresent city for a crappy lunch about 2 or 3pm at an Apple Peddler, shoulda gone to Subway, yuck. Wasted about an hour and a half due to ssslllooowwww service.
We made it down to Trees of Mystery, PC doc wanted to see something less "commercial" so we drove on by and on to one of the state parks, however, they don't really have visitors center, it's just a national forest campground. So I say lets go back and just see the commercial trees they ahve hostage at Trees Of Mystery. We turned around and pulled into the parking lot at 4:40 pm, please see the picture of Babe the HEADLESS blue Ox (Maybe Paul whacked him with the axe???? ), who nevertheless is spectacularly well hung. Oh, btw, they CLOSED at 4:30. The gift shop was open, so we got the t shirt.

The rest of most of these pics are just pretty ones of things we saw.

After we returned to our campgound (amidst sheets of hail, rain, sleet, alternating with crystal clear skies)we talked it over and decided we needed to head north to a campground we have a membership at that had a pool for the kids to play in. We left thursday and arrived, set up and went to bed. We got up in the morning and found 2-3 inches of snow on the ground.

We woke up Friday morning and lost power. Since we hadn't made any coffee yet, this was a serious problem. We again decided to pull up stakes and head to green grass, at least somewhere that had power. The Pacific power guy saud we were at the end of the grid and there was no telling when it would be back. So away we went, just in time of the great Oregon Spring Beach Cleanup. We got home sunday and had to work monday. We are staying home next time, I think.