Oregon trip

If you’ve been keeping track, so far this year we’ve been to California, Washington, and Alaska.  Well, and Nevada, but that doesn’t particularly fit the trend I’m trying to establish here.  Clearly we were missing Oregon (and Hawaii, but I don’t see that happening in the foreseeable future.)  So, we went to Oregon.

I had a conference in Portland, so Mom came down to hang out with me in the evenings and on the weekend.  She came in her little red convertible and we had a lot of fun zipping around Portland in it.

We managed to eat some fantastic food (waffles, Lebanese, and seafood were the real standouts) and see some pretty cool things around Portland. This was in the Chinese Garden.

One evening we did the TTTT trail, in which you take the train to the zoo, hike four miles or so to the top of a tram, take the tram back to town, then get on a trolley to take you back to wherever you started. It was quite entertaining, although we got a bit lost in the woods on the trail section. This is the view from the high point of the hike.

Here’s the tram.

We also had numerous other adventures swimming in the Columbia, where I saw a gigantic fish jump several times and Mom didn’t, and doing things with my cousin’s family who were also visiting from NM for the same conference. Then the real party began. Ken arrived from NM, Dad and my sister Sara arrived from eastern WA, and my sister Lauren drove down from Tacoma and we camped at Whalen Island County Park for several days. We got shellfish licenses, and basically spent most of our time either pursuing shellfish or eating them. Most glorious. The weather was great, it only rained one afternoon. Here’s Ken and Sara crabbing out of the canoe.

Look, a cute little Red Rock crab. After eating a few of these buggers, we decided they really weren’t worth the effort.

A recording of this crab’s last moments before the boiling water.

This is what’s left after we demolished several (5, I think?) crabs.

What could be better than family and dogs on the beach in the sun? Well, it could have been less windy so we might have wanted to swim, but at least it made for good kite flying weather.

Ken decided we needed to paddle out to the mouth of the bay against the incoming tide. I thought he wanted to go crabbing at the best spot, but no, he just wanted to canoe in the waves and try to tip us over. We didn’t tip over, but I may have had a bad attitude about the whole thing. That’s not us in the canoe, it’s Ken and Sara who decided to paddle back to camp rather than drive around later after dinner. Against the outgoing tide. Not sure why we’re always paddling against the tide. We should time these things better.

Here’s the next day at Cape Disappointment.  Grouchy Ken does not jump  for joy.

Hmm, which mussels do we harvest for dinner?

I think that wave was a bit deeper than they were anticipating.

My husband has been attempting (and occasionally succeeding) to throw my sister in various bodies of water for somewhere on the order of 12 years. Poor girl.

So we picked some BIG mussels. That’s my hand, and I don’t have petite hands. I decided I don’t like the big ones. Too much mussel for me. The smaller ones though, were my favorite shellfish we collected. Somewhere in there we also hung out with my cousin’s family and went to the Tillamook Cheese Factory and ate ice cream, but I don’t know what happened to my pictures of those events. Maybe I didn’t take any.

Mmmm. More crabs for dinner. Those are properly sized Dungeness crabs. Delicious.

There are probably pictures of the three of us doing this at the beach from like 22 years ago, but someone with access to the albums at my parents house would have to dig them out and scan them in. I used to be better at handstands… Lauren and Sara definitely won the contests this time.

Hahahaha. That’s a big stump with a bunch of goofballs on it. I like how the dogs are like, “yeah, we have to live with these people, can you even believe it?!”

“Hey Ken, look at me!” He’s so much more dignified than that last group of people.

Oh, just kidding. He’s not dignified. Also, Ken’s brother came out to visit us for this day and caught a nice crab, although it was missing both claws.

This is a gigantic sand dune. Climbing it gives your legs a serious workout.

Preparing the crab and the sand shrimp that we dug. I can’t believe I didn’t get any pictures of digging for sand shrimp. That was definitely the most fun shellfish to harvest, we were up to our ankles (except Ken, who sunk in up to his knees) in tidal muck going after them. So much fun!

And then we had to go home to the desert where there’s no shellfish, but not before I found a pretty Oregonian beetle.