Our Stay at Olde Stone Village

This RV park in McMinnville, Olde Stone Village, is about 45 minutes from any of our family’s homes in the area so we are doing a little bit of commuting to get to them. But this park is really nice. We have a corner site which is always nice because of the privacy it offers and the pretty view it gives us. We are across from a gazebo and the pool, laundry and office are close. The park is directly behind the Evergreen Aviation Museum, in fact, there is a walking path to the museum right behind our site. We went to this museum yesterday and really enjoyed it. The big (and I certainly mean BIG) attraction is the Spruce Goose, Howard Hughes’ gigantic wooden plane.

You can walk into it and see most of the inside. The size of it is staggering – it dwarfs all the other reconstructed planes exhibited around it. We saw an IMAX movie called The Hidden Universe. We would highly recommend this museum to anyone who is interested in aviation, history, and space travel. My favorite part was watching a video of President Kennedy giving his famous speech kicking off the space travel program in the early sixties. I remember sitting with my class in the auditorium of my school. It was very exciting for all of us kids to listen to his inspiring speech and to think about the future of flying through space and touching other planets. Other exhibits that were amazing to me were the Hot Shots and the equipment they used to battle forest fires, the scary spy plane, and all the helicopters, including the M*A*S*H helicopter.

We don’t expect to do a lot of sightseeing while we are here. Instead we are spending our time seeing family and entertaining them in our RV. So far Bev, Jenn and Trekker had lunch with us on a rainy day. Barry, Bev and Dad were also over for lunch and on that day we were able to enjoy our outdoor area. This site is large enough to put out our canopy and eat at the picnic table under it. And still have room for our 4 folding chairs. We can also park upto two cars. Some of our sites were so small and narrow that you have no room to extend the canopy or have only a little space for 2 chairs. But it always seems to work out for us that when we are expecting company we have the right site to entertain in.

We babysat for Paisley Jane last Friday.

After helping with a garage project at their house, Julie and Jake went out on a lunch and movie date (first time for leaving their baby). Our little darling was an angel and just smiled and played with us the whole time.

On Saturday, the whole family got together at Dad’s home to celebrate an early Father’s Day and also Brian’s birthday. We all brought yummy food over and enjoyed Barry’s grilling efforts. There were 16 of us, ranging in age from 6 months to almost 94 years old. All of us were on our best behavior and we all loved being together. Thanks go to Bev for getting us organized.

We did a few more things planned for this week and then we go on a pop-up camping trip with Julie and Jake to Ainsworth State Park. We’ll take those few days to help them get used to camping in the pop-up and give us some special time together.

The weather here has been mostly lovely – warm and sunny in between a few showers. So much different from the winter time we spent in the Portland area. I definitely enjoy it more when the pretty trees are set off by a sparkling blue sky.

Last weekend we dashed off to New Jersey for our nephew Jimmy’s wedding. It was wonderful to see him and Rebecca and their adorable daughter Jolene start their lives together.

We had a great time with all my family there and the wedding was absolutely beautiful and lots of fun.  It may have been a quick trip but we squeezed in lots of family meals (Thanks, Lisa!) and good times. The temperature there was very similar to the Portland area – even a good rain storm – but Doug and I had a hard time with the humidity.

Now we are starting to plan the rest of the year of traveling. We are heading east but haven’t finalized anything else. We will definitely make reservations for the Fourth of July because it’s always hard to find the right place for a holiday weekend.  This is pretty exciting for us because we are about to embark on a long journey, traveling through parts unknown (to us, anyway).  This is the dream!