Fun in Oregon and stuck in Boise

Right now I am sitting in my cousin's house in Boise, Idaho.  It is one of those lazy Sunday afternoons, and I am not going to buy a baker's dozen of cupcakes or go see the Chronicles of Narnia, so I thought I'd update my blog for once in my life.

On Friday, the first of August, two of my younger sisters and I loaded up my car and took off on our way to Oregon to visit our oldest sister.  We drove on Friday until we came to Boise and stayed at my cousin's house that night.

The next day we traveled through the remaining part of Idaho and then into Oregon.  Anyone who has ever traveled through eastern Oregon knows that it is not the lush green of western Oregon and it is really nothing more than a continuation of Idaho.  We reached Pendleton around one and wondered around until two-thirty.  At two-thirty we went on the Underground Tour.  It was quite interesting.  The guide led us down a flight of stair and into the bowels of the town.  We saw where the Chinese lived in the eighteen hundreds, we saw different workrooms of the city.  We were even led into an old brothel, which was, well, interesting with a very unsettling feel.  After the brothel we headed back under the town where we toured an old Speakeasy from the prohibition period.  I think the tour was worth the fifteen bucks that it cost, but I've now seen it once, so I don't feel like I'll probably ever really want to see it again.

That night we drove most of the rest of the way towards Portland, but we decided to stay the night at a campground in the Columbia Gorge.  There was a railway that ran by the campground, and apparently a train came by every twenty minutes blowing its horn.  It took a bit for one of my sisters to fall asleep because of the trains, but I was so tired, it seemed like I fell asleep almost as soon as my head hit the pillow. 

The next morning we hung around the campsite for a while, then we took off for Portland.  We bypassed my oldest sister's place and went straight to church where we enjoyed the Sacrament and Sunday School meetings.  Rather than go to Priesthood/Relief Society, we went to the Portland Temple and walked around the grounds and ate lunch on a bench outside the grounds.

We arrived at my sister's place around five and hung out for a while and then walked around Elk Rock Island.  The next day we went to Powell's City of Books, which is a massive bookstore in downtown Portland.  Later we went on the Willamette Jetboat Tours which is a tour of the Portland area on these sweet Jetboats.  It seemed better last time, but the driver was more crazy then, it was still incredibly fun.

On Tuesday, we took off and travelled through central Oregon until we arrived on the coast in the Newport area.  The closer we got to the coast, the greener everything became.  The skies were overcast and it frequently misted.  The younger of the two sisters who came with me had never seen the ocean before, so it was fun to have her see it for the first time.

For the next two days we camped in Beachside State Park, which is a campground just next to the beach, and spent time in Waldport and Newport, and wandered around the different beaches looking around the tide-pools.

I found out that I absolutely love tide-pooling.  I am like a kid in a candy store when it comes to wandering around the beach and sticking my hands in the water to pet an anemone or receive an urchin hug.  I also love to search among the rocks to see if I could uncover some little crabs.  I caught a couple, and one I nicknamed 'Barnacle Head' because he had a barnacle on his shell just above one of his eyes.

Thursday we left Beachside and travelled through Tillamook, where we got some cheese, and stopped at Cannon Beach, where we got some good clam chowder at Mo's, and then stopped at Seaside where we bought some salt water taffy.

We started for Portland on Friday, via Astoria and some beach that had the remains of a ship that crashed in 1906.  After the beach and Astoria, we traveled over the bridge to Washington where we ate lunch at Fort Columbia, an old military base, and then traveled back to Portland.  We watched the Goonies that night because it was filmed in Astoria, then around mid-day the next day we left Portland and headed home.

Unfortunately the adventure didn't stop there.  Sometime between Pendleton and La Grande, a weird noise started in the rear of my car, we stopped to check it out and didn't see anything out of place, so we were thinking it must have been my little mudflap type things flapping in the wind.  It got worse as we went along, but we did make it to Boise alright.  This morning we crawled under the car and saw that something was wrong with one of the axles/cv joint things attached to my back driver-side wheel.  So, I'm stuck in Boise today, but it hasn't been bad since we have been able to stay at my cousin's house.  Hopefully we will be able to get my car fixed tomorrow morning so we can make it back home.