Oregon Family Reunion Funny Ha-ha Good Times!

Last weekend was the much anticipated Oregon family reunion.  I always look forward to the yearly reunions and consider them one of the definite highlights of each year.  I've only missed four in my life, two while I was on my mission, one a couple years ago when we went to visit Gerrit and Elisabeth instead of the reunion, and one more when I had just started a State Farm.  Missing them is always a big downer, so I was very pleased that I was able to go this year even though I haven't been at my current job very long.  Still, two days was all I could manage to get off, so a quick flight was needed after work on Wed. to get me to Oregon in time for the reunion.  I would have liked to have a bit more time, but it didn't work out that way.


My trip started out with the flight.  Most of the time, that's not really worth comment, but it was somewhat notable in this instance.  I arrived a couple hours early and had plenty of time to walk to the terminal from the parking lot, get checked in, and get to my gate.  It was my first time using a mobile boarding pass, and though it didn't work quite as well as paper ones, I was quite pleased with it. It was definitely way more convenient for me, especially since I don't have easy access to a printer these days.  I was early enough to claim one of the high quality seats that's basically a decent armchair with a charging station attached.  Grateful for my good luck, I settled in and started reading.

The only good thing about flying in the
middle of the night is city lights pictures!
This is Portland from the air.

As I waited, I heard the announcements for another terminal that a flight that was scheduled for Chicago was being delayed several hours, and I thought how much that would suck.  Little did I know!  As our boarding time for the 8:05 Portland flight drew near, I saw the plane unloaded and apparently ready to go.  Soon such hopes were dashed, and I learned that we would have to wait for a flight crew to arrive from Chicago, of all places.  It turns out that there was a big storm in Chicago that was causing a lot of problems across the whole system, since O'Hare is one of the biggest airports in the world.

I let Uncle Brad know since he and Aunt Jan were supposed to be arriving shortly after me and had agreed to give me a ride.  They were also delayed sitting on the tarmac for quite awhile.  That made me feel a little bit better, as I really didn't want to make them wait for me.  While we were given hope that our flight crew might show up soon at first, after a bit, they told us that they wouldn't arrive until at least 11:30.  With the promise of a wait of at least a couple hours, I knew that I was going to need to get some food and go to the bathroom, but I knew that would require deserting my chair, which I probably wouldn't get back because it was so much better than the normal chairs.  I stuck it out for about another hour and a half, but then decided to go get things done.  While in the bathroom, I decided that it would be a good time to take my contacts out as they were already completely drying my eyes out since it was already close to my normal bedtime.

My plane didn't end up leaving until around 12:45.  Poor Uncle Brad and Aunt Jan had been waiting for me in Portland for about 2 hours, but fortunately, I was at least quite quick about getting off the plane and picking up my luggage!  To be honest, I'd been a little nervous of the ride to Silverton, because my Uncle Brad has always terrified me ever since I was a little girl.  It's ridiculous, because he's really kind, especially to little kids, but he's also big and quiet mostly, which contributed to my childhood fear.  I guess those irrational terrors we grow up with are often hard to overcome!  The ride in was very nice, though.  It was really enjoyable to get to catch up with Brad and Jan, who I don't interact with as often as some of the rest of my extended family.  I was really grateful for their generous sacrifice in waiting for me, especially considering that it was about 4 in the morning on their body clocks by the time we got in!

We were all quite exhausted, and I definitely crashed pretty much as soon as I got into the room!  Though I'd gone to bed quite late for my normal schedule, I still woke up pretty close to my normal time.  Soon we were all meeting up with the rest of the family.  I got to meet my cousin Nathaniel's wife Catherine, who I've been friends with on Facebook for awhile, but never met in person.  She really is a lovely person, and I'm really glad that he found such a wonderful woman!  They have two border collies they had brought along to the reunion, so we got to meet them too.  Most of us were staying at a hotel, but our headquarters, if you will, was in a house where my Uncle Lance and Aunt Skye were staying with their family and grandma.  After breakfast there, we collected everybody up to go to nearby Silver Falls State Park to do the 10 waterfalls trail.

The first waterfall we saw

It was beautiful just driving through the country to get there.  Oregon apparently is the biggest supplier of Christmas trees in the country, and there were farms everywhere for them.  It was much greener than Utah of course, but it was also quite a different feeling of green even from the east.  This was at least partially due to the fact that the trees were predominantly conifers rather than deciduous like back home in VA.

The hike really was amazing!  I'd say it's definitely among the best, if not the very best hike I've ever been on.  We got to see 9 of the waterfalls, and each was a little different.  The most fun were a couple that you could actually walk behind and around.  I guess this unusual phenomenon of a ledge overhanging a cavity behind the falls you could walk around was created by harder volcanic layers on top of softer layers that get worn away by the water.

 Some people turned back at various points, mainly due to kids.  Both Miles and Molly were feeling sick, so Molly had to be carried basically the entire way, and Miles wasn't able to keep up quite as well as he normally could.  I tried my best to help with both kids as much as I could to give Gerrit and Elisabeth a break, since they were often left trailing in the back a bit due to having the smallest, sickest kids to care for.  Fortunately, Dad helped a lot by giving Miles a ride on his shoulders for a good portion.

After most of the families with young kids had turned back, some of us pressed on to catch a couple more falls.  Dad had gone shooting ahead of everyone else, and as far as we could tell, had missed a small sign indicating the fall we were all supposed to meet at.  We knew he'd be charging ahead for who knew how long, so I volunteered to run ahead and fetch him.  This meant a good bit of trail running, but I at least had some sense I was on the right track thanks to reports from other hikers coming from the opposite direction that dad was ahead of me various amounts.  Eventually I caught him and we high-tailed it back to try to catch the group, though only after stopping briefly at the fall that Dad had originally passed and I had missed in my speedy quest to find him.  Eventually, we caught back up with everyone, thanks to them stopping for a break near one of the other falls.

Dad at the Double Falls that we saw on our own after I caught him

Mom was telling everyone the story of getting separated on the way to Venice while they waited for us.

We regrouped and went on to see a few more falls.  While we didn't do the whole 10 mile loop (though I had originally wanted to), we still did get to see 9 of the falls.  It also probably wouldn't have taken much longer to see the last one as well, but everyone was quite pooped, so we ended up missing it.  I'm glad we didn't do everything in the end, because several of my still-healing blisters from the John Moyle walk were reopened, and I was overall feeling pretty sore in the end.

When we got back to hotel, some people took short naps or otherwise rested before dinner.  I wasn't really tired, so Mom and I walked down to visit some cute stores in Silverton.  Mostly, they were antique shops and it was fun to look through the fun things they had there.  We also walked through a nice little park that had a covered bridge over a river.

The park where the covered bridge was

After dinner at the house, we had time for a family game, and played one I've never done before called "Famous People".  Everyone wrote down a few names of well-known people and put the slips into a pot.  We had a good variety including authors, painters, musicians, characters, politicians, and even a few ancestors thanks to grandma!  The first round of the game is basically Catchphrase, where you described the person however you wanted without saying the name for your team to guess.  After all the names has been done, we moved on to the second round.  Here, all the names were put back into the bowl, and you had to guess which name was being referred to based on a single descriptive word.  This made remembering who was guessed in the first round pretty important, because often all you had to go on was "musician" or something equally vague, and had to run through all the names you could remember fitting the description. I was glad the names ran out on this round before it got back to me, because it seemed like a pretty hard round overall.  For the last round, the names were again put in the bowl and you had to do charades to get people to guess the right person.  Sometimes this was pretty easy, but often enough it was fairly difficult.  How do you act out Dick Cheney, for example?  It was a lot of fun to see what people came up with.  Though my team narrowly lost in the end, I had a great time.  It was awesome to spend some time together doing something pretty simple, but very entertaining!  It was one of my favorite things we did.

The second day, we ended up going to the beach for awhile.  It was really quite a bit too cold for any kind of swimming, but people went out on the sand and played there a bit.  I had forgotten to bring flip flops and there's nothing I dislike quite like sand in my tennis shoes, so I just enjoyed the scenery from the concrete level.  It was quite pretty there.  Apparently the world's smallest river flowed there, from a nearby spring into the sea.

After lunch in Lincoln City, we drove up to Tillamook to see the Tillamook dairy factory.  That was kind of interesting.  We got free samples of a number of cheeses, and then everyone enjoyed some tasty Tillamook ice cream courtesy of grandma.  We also got to see from above how the cheese is produced and packaged.  The main thing we all noticed was that some of the packaging seemed pretty inefficient, with people doing things that could no doubt be done more cheaply by machines, but I have to wonder if the people were given pointless jobs there largely for show!

On the way to the bay

In the factory, signs indicated there were seals in the Tillamook bay.  I could see the bay wasn't very far, and wanted to see some seals, so we ended up driving a few miles over there to look for them.  There were some nice views on the drive, but nary a seal!  We asked several people where we could find them, but basically everyone said that they mostly didn't come into the bay around there.  Some helpful fishermen told us about a pretty reliable spot to see them farther up, and Dad was nice enough to drive up there so I could see them.  Unfortunately, they were pretty far away, so we didn't see much of them, but we did get to see some more gorgeous scenery, so it turned out alright, I suppose!

This was the view from the marina which was across from where the seals were

Part of the garden.  The building in the back is part of a
resort that's attached to the gardens.  There were also
wedding venues where we saw at least one wedding party.

The next day was mostly eaten up with cooking for a picnic with my Great Aunt Lafay's family and then going to that.  We did still have time still to visit the Oregon Botanical Gardens there in Silverton that day.  They were okay, but I was honestly kind of disappointed by them.  They weren't nearly as good as Thanksgiving Point's gardens, and I think they were at least the same price if not a little more expensive!  Still, they had some pleasant points, so it was nice to visit even briefly, since we didn't spend all that long there.

Afterwards, I spent quite awhile baking cookies using some of the powders from work so that I could leverage the experience for my job.  I was kind of bummed that it ended up costing me a decent amount of time with my family, but oh well.

While all the cooking was going on, Nathaniel and Cathrine had taken their dogs on a walk and ended up entering a Bobbie the Wonder Dog look-alike contest.  Basically, Bobbie was a dog that traveled a huge distance to reunite with his family in Silverton, so he is a sort of local hero.  It turned out that Blue, the Smith's older dog, had won the contest!  They had gotten some fun tee-shirts out of it, so that was pretty cool.

Once all the cooking was done, we headed out to Lafay's house for dinner.  It was interesting to meet a number of these more distant relatives, and we all had a pleasant time.  There was a ton of food!  Pretty much way more of everything than we needed, but at least there was good variety for everyone to enjoy.  Probably the best part was the Tillamook ice cream served for dessert with a homemade mixture of Oregon berries.  That was pretty much to die for!

The funny anecdote from that occasion happened as everything was starting to break up.  Catherine had been playing some frisbee with the dogs and had accidentally thrown it into a brier patch.  Apparently it's like Blue's favorite toy, and he was dejectedly looking after it into the brambles.  Gerrit had been packing his family into the car, but seeing the poor, sad dog, got out of the car and went crawling into the thorns to fetch the frisbee.  Once he got out and given the frisbee back to the delighted dog, Blue had promptly peed on the retrieved treasure!  I guess Catherine was a little embarrassed about it, but everyone else thought it was pretty entertaining.

Catherine playing frisbee with Blue and Banjo

Some people left for Portland right after the picnic, but there we still some leaving the next day, including myself.  I ended up driving up to the airport with my Uncle Layne and his family on Sunday.  It was nice to get to ride with them too.  I got to spend some good time talking to each family on car rides in the end, because Merina was riding in the same car as my family for most of the reunion.  The only ones I missed out on was Lance and Skye's family, but fortunately, they are the ones I end up seeing most often since they live closest!

Dad in his ridiculous get-up the day he went to
do laundry at the laundromat.  Not a great look!

The flight home went much more smoothly then the trip out!  There were no delays or anything, though I was a little worried going through security, because the line was quite long.  Fortunately, I still had enough time to get through it.  I was definitely grateful that my main airport in Salt Lake tends to be so easy to get through!  Interestingly, I ended up chatting with strangers a lot more with that flight than I probably ever have in my life.  It started with chatting a bit with a girl who was sharing a plug with me as we charged phones.  There it was mostly simple pleasantries.  As we lined up to board, an older gentleman first came up and asked me what my number was, and told me what he thought his was and I directed him up to the front of the next section.  He soon returned because he discovered he'd misread his number and was actually in my same section.  He asked a bit about what I was up to and I talked a bit about the reunion, then found out he had been traveling for business and was finally returning home.  He asked if I was from Utah, and I explained I wasn't, but had served my mission there.  He told me a bit about having served on Temple Square a number of years ago.  Soon after that, we boarded.

I ended up choosing a window seat right near the front.  There was already a lady in the aisle seat, and she was quite chatty, so we talked a fair amount before take-off.  She was from Eagle Mountain, and I mentioned that it was in my stake.  It turned out that she was on her way back home after attending the sealing of her brother and his wife to a newly adopted child.  She was excited to return home to her two young daughters and husband after being away from them for a bit.

Here was the gorgeous view of Portland from the air.  The mountains are Mount Adams, St. Helens, and Hood, L to R.  I wish it had been a less hazy, because we flew right past some snowy mountain to the south, probably Mount Shasta, but it was way to foggy to get a good view or shot of it!

Northern end of the Great Salt Lake, which
seems really quite low right now.  There
were also sections that looked quite red
like this while others were blue or green.

At the end of the boarding, the stewardess brought an 8 or 9 year-old boy to sit between us, since we were right near the front and he was an unaccompanied minor.  The other lady started to get to know this boy quickly and to provide him assistance.  It turned out that he was going to stay with his grandma for a month with his sister, who was sitting just in front of us, while their mom was on her honeymoon.  It also became clear that it was a lesbian wedding.  All through the flight, I was impressed to see how wonderfully kind this lady was to this young boy, helping him with snacks and such while also encouraging and engaging with him in various ways.  She was a great example of treating everyone with Christian kindness beyond anything that could be expected.  I did my best to follow her good example, pointing things out the window for the boy and such, but she was much better at helping him than I.

Throughout the flight, we also continued to chat about various things.  She told me about her husband working at Adobe, we talked about Kindles and books and such for awhile.  She even asked me some pretty probing personal questions about how many kids I wanted and such, but it would have been hard to take offense because she was so frank and open herself.  She really was a very nice person to meet.

I got out and to my car in pretty good time, and was even able to catch Sunday School and RS in my ward.  I was sad that I missed sacrament, especially because it was ward conference, and the talks were no doubt quite good, but it couldn't be helped!  I wish the whole trip could have been a little longer, but I really enjoyed the time I did have with my family.  They are all truly wonderful people, and I'm always very pleased to be associated with them.  I can't wait for next year!

This beautiful farm was quite near where the house was that some of the family stayed in.  These gorgeous scenes make me keen to return to Oregon sometime again in the future!