What I Did On My Summer Vacation

As most of you know this past weekend was a much needed mini-vacation for the family. Our destination this time was Pacific City, Oregon. It is about eighty miles west and slightly south of Portland, and from my house it normally takes around two hours to get there.

Our plan was pretty simple. Pick-up the boys from VBS (Vacation Bible School) at noon, hit the road and be at the coast by 2:00pm. Our reality was a bit different than our plan. The boys did get picked up at noon, but we didn't actually get going until closer to 1:30. Not really a big deal most days, but this particular Friday afternoon it became a huge deal in our travel plans.

There is a small rural highway that is about five miles from where we live to the main highway. Again most days this is no big deal, you just jump on and a few minutes later you're cruising down the 205 towards I-5. The one goofy thing about this particular stretch of road is that there is a median barrier that divides the two sides of traffic and for this five mile run there are no other roads to turn off onto. Usually this is not a problem, unless of course your on your way out of town on a Friday afternoon and the temperature is about 90+ degrees and there is a major accident at the intersection at the bottom of the hill.

This brings me to the first picture of our vacation. Not exactly one for the scrap book, but one that we got to enjoy for the next hour and a half. Yep, that was no typo there. It took us ninety minutes to travel the first five miles! Roughly one minute for every burning hot flipping degree outside. Ever heard the phrase, "Not a happy camper"? well I have and in fact I was that phrase for a while.

Good news is that it did pass. The better news is that we weren't the ones involved in the wreck that closed the road. Still don't know what happened, but I can only imagine that it wasn't pretty.

About another hour or so into the drive we got to experience one more stop and crawl session for about forty-five minutes while they cleared yet another wreck on a different highway. I was starting to question why exactly it was that I had decided to travel on a Friday afternoon when, to my joy, we were rolling again. A mere five hours after we pulled out of the driveway, we made it to Cape Kiwanda, the RV park we'd be staying at for the next three days. Whew!

From this point on everything was smooth sailing for the rest of the trip. One of the nice things was, we didn't have any plans set in stone as to what we were going to do with our time. We figured we'd just play it by ear and see what each day brought us. That was probably one of the best things we could have done too. No time expectations from anybody or for any reason.

After setting up our camp site and opting for pizza at the local eatery (too tired and frazzled to cook) we headed for the beach to walk along the sand and to take in the sunset. With full tummy, the smell of the salt air and sand in between my toes, my attitude had improved dramatically from a few hours before. It was time to relax and enjoy the weekend.

I'll leave you with a couple of sunset pics I took the first night, and tomorrow I'll start off the post with the same two shots from basically the same perspective, but during the morning hours. It makes for a neat contrast.

I've got a lot of catching up to do too, so I'll try to make it by to visit you all over the next couple of days.