Fun with Grand Kids

Tage's favorite resting spot... on the "Mercedes Wheelbarrow", he's always ready to go... "Come on Mimi... isn't there something we need to use the cart for??? (note the parking block behind the rear tire :o)

Taylor helped Ansel feed the horses every morning.

Tage doesn't think much of Mimi's dinners. So much for the "you sit here until you eat this" method ;o) Click on the video below:

Helping Mimi plant petunias, and watering them too...

Sisters Rodeo - Slack

Sisters Rodeo was last week...

It's a great rodeo, but most often sold out, very hot and packed with people... It occured to me that they probably would be having slack on Thursday or Friday during the day and thought that might be a good thing to take the grand kids to and I knew Ansel would enjoy it. Going to watch slack would give the kids a dose of rodeo exposure without being tied to a cramped hot bleacher seat with who knows sitting beside us from start to finish... (meaning that seat mates might not appreciate a potentially wiggly, whiny, poopy two year old) so we drove up there, and sure enough, slack was going and seating for slack was free. Slack- ? my best explanation is that there are many more entries into a rodeo contest than you see at the paid performance. Rodeo planners have figured it out over the years that, you can have X-number of entries in X-number of classes that folks will enjoy sitting and watching for so long. So the runover entries do their runs during "slack" which preceeds the paid performance and then their scores and times are part of the overall rodeo. Tage and Ansel riveted to the bull dogging

Tage who turns two years old Friday June 20, was totally facinated with every event and every entry... his attention never wandered, he never stopped watching, and he wasn't ready to leave when I was. I think the format, of having the seats to ourselves and not dealing with the masses of people was really condusive to his having such a good time.
Taylor cheers and moans for the barrel racers. She figured out real fast which riders had the good times, and that when the barrel got knocked over it wasn't a good thing and she cheered accordingly.

We didn't really have the whole place to ourselves... there were lots of folks watching, they just happened to be sitting to our right, and across the arena. We got to see Joe Beaver (an 8 time World Champion) have a great Calf Roping run during the slack. He ended up 3rd.

next stop, Marion Forks Fish Hatchery

Marion Forks Fish Hatchery

We usually stop at the hatchery if the weather is half decent to let the little legs get stretched, and put some blood back in the buttocks. Truthfully, I don't think they make child safety seats very comfortable. Think about the little bit of material that covers hard plastic... I probably couldn't drive very far if I had to sit on that either. I think Ansel enjoyed the stop too. It was another first for him.

The Hatchery worker offered us a bucket of fish food to feed the bigger ones in the front pond. Taylor always enjoys that. This was the first time that Tage sort of knew what he was looking at.

Back in Oregon

Almost Home: After our storybook trip to see Big Brown and the Belmont Stakes Race, followed by a few relaxing days on Cape Cod, Wednesday June 11th we flew from Providence, RI. into PDX and drove to Salem to spend the night at Eric and Tiffiny's (my youngest son). Thursday morning we brought the grand kids, Taylor and Tage back to Bend. Well it was a leisurely drive with lots of stops along the way. We started out with breakfast at where else ???? Mcky D's... (Mimi strategically chose one that she knew didn't have a Play Area so we didn't have to say "no") Smiling for the self timer on Mimi's camera sitting on the next table

As we were driving up Highway 22, coming up towards Detroit Lake, we could see a lot of water being released from the Big Cliff Dam and Taylor wanted to see the water coming out of the dam... so since we had plenty of time and I went ahead and drove down there to get a good look at it.

Big Cliff Dam below Detroit Lake

Then as we got to the main Dam, Taylor said let's go look at this one too Mimi... so we pulled down there... to see what we could see ;-)

For those of you who have ever wondered what it looks like from the bottom of Detroit Dam. Here's the picture I got before we got shooed out of the very restricted area that we weren't allowed to be in. (but the gate was open, and there was no one there to stop us :-) Detroit Dam on the North Santiam River

My picture doesn't due the height and size of this 463' structure justice. I found the one below on the internet.

Small World

MASSACHUSETTS has really cool license plates:
I would be torn if I lived in MA, would I get a Nauset Light plate or a Red Sox plate???

SMALL WORLD:
Who'd a thunk it? Turns out my sister's best friend's husband who is a retired commercial airline pilot who grew up in Penn. spent a summer in his teen years in Riley, Oregon working on a hay ranch for a man who had race horses that Ansel knew !!!!
It was a treat one afternoon for Judy and Ted to drop by my sister's Cape Cod home and meet Ansel. I forget it was either Ted's dad or uncle whoe knew E.M. Bush who owned a large hay and cattle ranch at Riley, Oregon. They thought it would good for Ted to go out West and work in the hay fields for the summer. If I remember right, Ted took the train from Penn. to Ontario, Oregon and was picked up there. Riley is basically a post office, a two room elementary school, and a mom and pop grocery/convenience store and gas station 28 miles west of Burns, Oregon. I'm quite sure the population is less than 50. I knew the ranch well, it was one that Hoyt's owned, while I worked for them, it was know as the Green Valley Ranch. The ranch house was very unique, it had 9 bedrooms. Ansel says that Mrs. Bush ran an abortion clinic in Portland, and would bring women to the remote ranch to recooperate.

Bonnie and Judy graduated together from Nauset Regional HS. They were Nauseteers and have remained lifelong friends. While it was nice to reconnect with Judy, I was especially enamored with Judy's baby - an immaculately restored 1969 Mercedes 280SL with only 70K original miles.
Judy and Cyndy cruisn in style...

Touring with Dick

Dick loves his jeep. We found a just right step stool and Ansel was able to get in, and then Dick took us on a little tour. We even found a place to buy some old fashioned hard ice cream.

In years past we would have gone for a drive out to the "outer beach" to where the Outermost House, of Henry Beston fame once stood. The literary landmark was washed out to sea during storm of 1978. The outer beach was a spit of land that stretched half a mile or farther beyond the Coast Guard Station and was maybe 500 yards wide. There were several summer cottages out there nestled in the dunes. It was a great area for private cook outs on the beach, since you had to have a beach vehicle to get there. Now the area is closed due to the spotted plover living out there and they are an endangered species... well I didn't look it up, if not endangered they are protected anyway.

Coast Guard Beach looking south

Thumpertown Beach, Cape Cod Bay, Eastham, MA

These two pictures are from the bayside at low tide. The bay was a neat place to take young kids as you can see the little pools and sandbars. I remember razor clams that cut your feet and crabs that bit your toes... I preferred the ocean. Not sure if it was my adventuresome spirit... or that it was just what I was used to. We sort of had an attitude that the bayside beaches were for sissies. Ansel was intrigued by how far the water was, and that the boats were sitting on their sides. I wanted to go back and get a picture of the moored boats at high tide so he could see the difference, but ran out of time.
The moored boat belongs to a beach house to the right of the picture. It lives there for the summer, and when they want to use it, they take a dingy out when the tide is up and switch the boats, leaving the dingy on the mooring while they use the boat.

Summer thunder and lightening storms over the bay were always pretty entertaining. It was odd looking at the bay and not seeing the Target Ship on the horizon. There used to be a decommissioned Navy ship out in the middle of the bay. It was grounded there on purpose for military training exercises. Growing up, we called it the Target Ship, as it was used for target practice by the Air Force. If you go to the Cape Cod map in an earlier post, there is a gray area on the west end of the Cape, and that was Otis Air Force Base. Now I think it is Air National Guard. Anyway going to bay at night was another special night time thing to go to the bay for was to watch them practice after dark. Not sure the chemical make up of what they dropped from the bombers on the Target Ship, but they would flare and light up as they dropped and you could hear the boom. Over the years... 60 I assume, with the combination of the salt water and weather it has deteriorated into oblivion and is no more.

I just googled it... the "Target Ship in Cape Cod Bay, was originally the USS James Longstreet, a war time emergency cargo freighter. In 1943 it ran aground off New Jersey and was declared a total loss, so the Navy took possession of it and in 1944 placed it in Cape Cod Bay for guided missle bombing practice. Here are some pictures of how I remembered it from my childhood.

Sunset on Cape Cod Bay

Bombers dropping missles on the "target ship"

Pilgrims Progress

I grew up with "rotaries", here in Central Oregon they began installing them and they are called "round-a-bouts. They seem to think they created them. The rotary noted in this pictures is at the Eastham/Orleans townline.

Below is my beloved Nauset Light. The pic was taken with my cell phone during my last visit. The lighthouse was on the bluff overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, 1/8 mile north of Coast Guard Beach at Nauset Beach (imagine that?). Back in the 90's due to erosion, it was literally within danger of being swept over the bluff into the ocean. A non-profit was formed to raise the funds to move it to it's present location. When Bonnie and I took Ansel to see the lighthouse, I asked him if he saw anything familiar? He snorted and said why yes there are all kinds of pictures of that lighthouse in my house.Then we took a drive to Provincetown. The town on the very tip of the Cape. It is a Portuguese fishing village. The number one priority for me, was to get a loaf of Portuguese Sweet Bread from "the" Portuguese Bakery on Commercial St. mmmm, the only thing close I ever had, is Hawaiian sweet bread. Mission accomplished, and the loaf of bread was eaten as a snack when we got home.

MacMillan Wharf, Provincetown Hah-ba :0)

This is the Pilgrim Monument... built in 1910 to honor the Pilgrim's first landing on American shores and where the Mayflower Compact was created. It is 252' tall with a 360 degree viewing area. I believe it is completely made out of granite. (New England is home to many granite quarries) Several times as a kid I made the trek up however many stairs there are to the top of this masterpiece. Forty years ago, in all it's majesty the monument could be seen on the horizon from anywhere on the Cape, now the trees make it impossible.