Getting there...

We decided to take our summer trip up to Oregon, my home state. It's about time since we haven't been there since we only had Jeremy and Gage. I finally felt like I needed to go back to see family and show my kids the beautiful state I grew up in.

It takes 15 hours to get to my Dad's house from ours on I-5 if you don't stop for anything. Needless to say we took 2 days to make the drive and decided to see some things on the way.

Our first stop was in Santa Nella for lunch at Pea Soup Anderson's. It's a cute little restaurant in a Dutch Windmill and they are famous for their Pea Soup. Since that was their specialty and my Mother-in-law raved about how great the soup was...she used to go there with her family when she was young...we ordered the token bowl of Pea Soup. It actually tasted a lot better that it looked. It was yummy! Even the little ones liked it...not the bigger ones though.


We cut over to San Francisco to head up the 101 so we could drive through the Redwoods. We saw so many pretty sights along the coast. We had to take a picture of Rich's favorite, a toilet all alone in the middle of a field. He wanted Jeremy to get out and sit on it for the picture but that was a no go, so we just took the shot of the lonesome toilet by itself.

We didn't really have a specific destination in the Redwoods. We figured we'd see lots of really tall trees as we drove through the Redwood National Forrest. We did stop a cute place that had huge carvings of things. The little ones liked the panda that they could climb on.

The Clown Bear Totem Pole was pretty cool but it was so tall we couldn't fit in all in the picture and still see the kids at the bottom. It was a nice stop and the kids got to get out and play a little bit.

It was taking longer than we thought it would because the highway was so small and winding and we kept getting stuck behind really slow drivers. The sun began to set and it was dark by the time we drove by the Avenue of the Giants which probably would have been the best place to stop and see the big trees but we did see a lot of giant trees so we were satisfied. We stopped and stayed the night in Crescent City. It's a cute little coastal town in the very northern tip of California. I was kind of amazed that we had been on the road for over 14 hours and we still weren't out of the state. The next morning Jeremy took his camera, the nice Nikkon (he's a budding photographer among other things) and went to the docks to take pictures.

I've only included a few of my favorites that he took .

But there are many more that I'm going to have to print up and frame.

Once we got into Oregon we stopped in a tiny town called Rice Hill off of I-5 to get Umpqua Icecream. There's a little icecream stand there where I had been when I was little that is still there. It's the cool kind of place where your order of a scoop of icecream is more like two or three scoops. We all got our icecream and then continued on another several hours.

We finally started to see the green rolling hills of where I grew up. I had forgotten how many shades of green there are in Oregon. We also had the overcast skies which is the norm there, but it makes the blue skies that peek through even more appreciated. It was nice to be "home" with the moss on the trees and roofs, the cloudy sky...it's cozy.

We got to my Dad and Step-Mom's house that afternoon. They live in a little old town, in a house built in the late 1800s or early 1900s. I can't remember which. It's on the historical tour of the town. The first thing I did was go to the garden and pick a bunch of raspberries like I used to do in highschool at our old house. I miss all of the fresh fruit grown right in the back yard. Anyway, that was getting there. The rest is to be continued...