Weekend Away

What a weekend! It started out to be just another 3 day trip to Portland with a few noteworthy objectives:

1 - to do something fun on Amy's Spring Break
2 - to shop at a REAL mall, something that Bend is lacking.
3 - to visit with Nan and meet her boyfriend, Jason.
4 - to get Amy to an audition for the Oregon Ballet Theater's Summer Intensive.

So, on Friday we drove over the mountains and directly to the Washington Square Mall in Portland and Amy shopped to her hearts content. We even had a chance to "play" with the ipad 2 and the iphone at the Apple store. FUN! We checked into our hotel and promptly went over to IKEA for a delicious dinner of Swedish Meatballs and Gravlax (smoked salmom) mmmmmmmmm! I should note, that Amy, the vegetarian, had a veggie wrap!

On Saturday we decided to motor to the coast since we were so close and we hadn't seen the ocean since last February. We had made plans with Nan to get together for dinner so we had the whole day to explore a part of the coast we hadn't been to before. First stop - Seaside -



Amy needed to stretch her legs after an hour in the car! ;)





Next stop was Astoria, where the Columbia River meets the ocean. We took a bit of time to look at a shipwreck from 1906 - very cool!





Then, it was back to Portland to keep our date with Nan & Jason. Little did we suspect that they had some very exciting news to share with us. It wasn't until we were seated with our food and eating/conversing that I noticed a bit of sparkle on Nancy's left ring finger. I had told her when they first came in that she was glowing and looked so beautiful - now we knew why! Instead of meeting Jason, the boyfriend we met Jason, the fiance! They were barely 24 hours into their engagement - What a privilege to hear the whole story - in person! The Lord has truly brought them together in a special way and we are so very happy for them!


On Sunday, Amy was supposed to have her audition but she decided that she did not want to go thru the stress of another audition - so instead we went to church at Imago Dei, bought fresh veggies at an Asian grocery store and came home over the very snowy mountain pass.

Amy returned to school on Monday and Dan & I went skiing. Sounds fair to me! Mt. Bachelor had 12" of new powder Sunday night and it was a great day on the mountain. Pretty nice way to finish the weekend and/or start a new week! Which ever way you want to look at it.

It was a memorable weekend, to say the least!

By way of updating you on the latest here in Oregon, I'll excerpt an email between Dan and our brother-in-law, Marty Benoit.

Our nephew, Jeremy, is spending his Junior spring semester in Sweden at Lulea University of Technology. His Dad (Marty) sent us this link to a Swedish TV show looking for Swedish-Americans interested in reseaching their ancestry. (Similar to the TV show here - NBC's "Who do You Think You Are?") In the process of checking out their website Dan ran across this comment - seeking "outgoing Americans with Swedish ancestry" that seems like an oxymoron. Shouldn't be more than a dozen or so.."

Most of us are not very outgoing, just big and dumb! Actually Nancy got some lutefisk for me for Valentine's Day so we had lutefisk that night. Normally it is a Christmas "delicacy", but I enjoyed it on V-Day. It keeps me in the Scandinavian club for another year.

It is going okay here. We had spring-like conditions in January, and then winter set in about two weeks ago. We hadn't had any snow on the ground for weeks and then we woke up to 10" on the ground 2 weeks ago ... and it hadn't been predicted so it was quite a surprise. School was canceled for the 6th time in 20 years. Then we got stuck with another 5-6" of unpredicted snow a few days later. Then it got cold. We seem to have turned the corner now in that snow gets predicted and doesn't materialize.

We motored to Spokane for a ballet audition a couple weeks ago. There is a whole lot of nuthin' in the 375 miles between here and there, with maybe the exception of the Columbia River which is quite scenic. This past weekend we went to another audition in Portland, which we did in a day trip. It is dicey crossing mountain passes in winter but we lucked out and did not hit anything nasty other than snow covered roads in the mountains. Chains are often mandatory (unless you have studded tires, which I refuse to do) so I was happy to not have to contend with putting on chains. Amy did not get accepted from the Spokane audition, which was actually for a summer camp thing in Seattle with the Pacific Northwest Ballet. Their acceptance rate is 30% so we were not surprised, and I was just as happy that she did not get in since Seattle is quite a long ways away for a 14-year old to spend a month or so. Don't know about Portland yet. Be that as it may, we have been tentatively planning on taking her to a week long camp in Long Beach, CA in August and then maybe another week in Eugene. With all this ballet stuff in the air, it is essentially impossible to make summer vacation plans.

Tonight we went to a high school to hear about their programs for entering 9th graders. I don't know the story in NY, but here it seems to be common to attend a school outside of one's district. The school that we went to tonight is not in our district, but we wanted to check it out since they have an International Baccalaureate program that sounds enticing. I was sold on it so we will see what happens.

We have not gone skiing for a couple weeks. We wait for nice days when we have time, and they do not arise that often. Last week the top of the mountain had 80 mph winds with 98 mph gusts at the top of the mountain. It is really weird because some of the other lifts on the lower part of the mountain had only 10-20 mph breezes. Today was windy here so I thought for sure the top of the mountain would be blowing away. Would you believe 2 mph "wind" at the top! However, a couple of the lower mountain lifts were closed since the wind was blowing 40-50 mph on the lower mountain. Really strange things happen at high elevations.