May

It's June already - what happened to May?!?

Well, after attending CLEO in San Jose during the week of May 15th, I arrived at the PDX airport on Friday afternoon just a few hours prior to my parents, who were visiting from good ol' Germany for a couple of weekends - with a visit of Yellowstone in between.

After a visit to the Beaverton Farmers Market on Saturday morning for our weekly dose of Oregon berries (and cherries from Freddie's for my mom), we headed to Champoeg State Park for a walk in the sunny afternoon followed by some coffee and ice cream at the historic Butteville store. Later, my parents (briefly) experienced some modern virtual entertainment, i.e. the climb on the Oculus Rift, before we headed to the Oswego Grill for dinner:

Sunday was forecast to be hot, hot, hot, so we escaped to our favorite beach hang out: Neskowin. We followed with a classic BBQ in the evening - good times!

The following Friday evening we had some fun with the Swagway:

Saturday morning: More berries from the market, of course! And after a walk through Graham Oaks and a generally chill day, we enjoyed dinner at Langdon's Grill:

On Sunday we enjoyed the sunny weather with a walk around Lake Oswego, a subsequent light lunch at St. Honore's (always a treat!), and some shopping in Bridgeport Village. 

Memorial day: shopping at the Woodburn Outlet, followed by a walk through Magness Tree Farm in the afternoon.

On Tuesday it was back to work for us, but after a tasty Moroccan dinner from Dar Essalam we got around to some chatting in the evening prior to their departure back to Germany on Wednesday. And Pepper clearly needed some cuddle time...

Now it's June already and we are soon heading to Yellowstone ourselves!

Easter Lego

It's been a busy time the last few weeks, but we got ourselves some Legos for Easter - the Assembly Square, the 10 year anniversary celebratory set of the Lego 'Modular' series - and have enjoyed putting it together since then - good times!

 As usual, the attention to detail is delightful. Some of the more impressive pieces are the red couch on the right side apartment and the dentist's chair on the floor below.

Given our affinity for coffee and baked goods, we very much enjoyed the café and the bakery as well, of course:

 The collection has now grown to a point where we will need to make some structural adjustments going forward...:

Spring break!

Well, actually one noteworthy picture before we get to spring break: Skippy (on the far right) celebrated his 35th birthday on March 4th by getting us together for a round of board games - which we hadn't done in years: Tiny Epic Galaxies, Mysterium, and Monarch were the games of choice.

Alright, now for spring break: this year we decided to venture further towards eastern Oregon than we have ever done before (admittedly a low bar, having only gone as far as east as the wider Bend area until now): John Day. We went via Government camp on our drive east and - as every time when we get in the neighborhood of Mt. Hood this time of year, were genuinely surprised that there was still a LOT of snow. It was heavily snowing at times, actually and we were glad that we still had chains in the trunk.

First stop: the Palisades near Clarno. A nice little 3.5 mile hike ('Geo Loop') got us from the Palisades through some rolling hills to Hancock Field Station - which turns out to be private property of OMSI and we were technically trespassing as an initially stern OMSI representative informed us. But we talked our way through that and continued to hike on OMSI property (Michaela's edit: with permission!! :))... Billy taught us well!

   

After spending the night in John Day, we started bright and early in the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument, first checking out the northern part, then the southern - hiking around and then into the blue basin. It was sunny, very lonely and silent - beautiful!

And from the fossil beds we got to the famous painted hills:

On our way home, another reminder that we are in the back country:

We have been in Oregon for nine years now - there is still so much left to see!