Day Fiftyseven - Aug 8, 2004

We woke in the luxury of a bedroom in a house. This has happened at only one other stop, Joey and Anissa's in Wisconsin. It is always a pleasant surprise. Also like Joey and Anissa's we could hear that our host family was already in full gear by the time we opened our eyes. It appears that kids make great alarm clocks for parents. Who knew? We opted out of sunday morning services to take advantage of good cell phone reception and broadband internet to pay bills, map out family and friend visiting for the next week, and to generally do some much needed life housekeeping. Both Brian and Theresa's families are from Oregon, so our travels always take on an increased focus when we enter the state.

Wrapping up our chores at about the same time that our host family returned from church, we all climbed into their much more contemporary minivan and headed toward McMinville for a local attraction Brian and Theresa have been talking about visiting for years, Howard Hughe's monolithic wooden boat/plane the "Spruce Goose". The Spruce Goose was moved from California to Oregon in the early 2000's and is now housed in the newly constructed Evergreen Air Museum. The plane is just enormous in a curiously stubby kind of way. Everything seems oversized, the wingspan is over a football field in length, but it doesn't seem porportionately long enough. It is a wonderfully curious thing to look at and in. The rest of the museum is chock-a-block full of cool planes, as well, and is well worth a visit. From the museum, we drove on over to the D River Beach in Lincoln City for some great wading in the ocean and some ambitious sand castle subdivision building. The weather was exceptional Oregon coast weather, not too hot and not too cold. The company and hospitality was, of course, as good as it gets.

We eventually worked our way back inland, through the "sunday night heading home"/Siletz Casino traffic to Newberg for a dip in the hot tub and another movie. It all makes us very grateful to have such nice friends. We may never leave.