Every July brings one of the biggest joys of the whole year, the annual homage to Oregon! We have also started the tradition at stopping at exit #76 to take a pic with our ever growing Rowena (Sophie).
When we got to Oregon we started the fun immediately by hitting up garage sales, where we got some cool things & visited the black-hole high school stadium (a HS by my parents that made news with ESPN for the black astro turf they have). The kiddos, however, stayed behind while we shopped to paint grandmas nails, which turned out awesome.
This year we finally made it to one of the happiest places of my whole childhood, the Enchanted Forest. This place hasn't hardly changed in 30 years, it is the Disneyland of Salem and is based on all things fairy-tales. Luckily, Uncle Robert and Aunt Lucy were able to join us on this fun kids trip.
Cory learned some great architecture pointers from the man in the crooked house. While the kids got some shooting tips at the range from Uncle Robert.
After our snack and a show the kiddos got to ride on the Candy train and bumper boats. This was the biggest thrill of them all and caused some tantrums when we eventually had to leave.
The kids also got to pan for precious"jewels" which are used as trading currency among the themselves.
The Old Lady in the Shoe slide was one of my favs as a kiddo and I think I can safely our kiddos also absolutely LOVED it by the 12+trips they took going up and down it!
On multiple occasions this trip we made it out to play & picnic at local parks. The park I loved taking the kiddos to the most is an old park and therefore almost always empty across the street from my old elementary school. They kids got terribly filthy every time we played, but it was totally worth it not to constantly panic over where all your kiddos were in the big busy park.
For past several months now Grandpa has been talking about taking the kiddos fishing and Phoebe was super excited to finally get to go. All the kiddos were excited to catch a fish, although I am not sure they really know what it meant to go fishing. We found a local pond stocked with fish to cast our lines in and bought a pack of night crawlers for our bait.
The fishing was actually action packed, unfortunately, all the bigger fish were already caught so all we got were TINY blue gills and catfish, which we all caught released back in the pond. Everyone, (except for Cory) reeled in their own fish, even Sophie believe it or not!
Fishing, aka just sitting on the bank, turned out to be too strenuous for Cami so she had to stop early to catch a few Zzzzs. Eventually, she and Josh mustered up enough energy to break out the cookies and snack in the shade on a chair. Cami also made sure to visit the "cool" potty, a nasty almost full outhouse, a couple times where she just nearly fell in butt first down the hole, good thing she caught herself by her armpits on the toilet seat. The kids overall had a blast fishing and it might have to be a new yearly must do event.
Another must do event at Grandma/pa Potts' house is to go swimming in the "hot pool" on a daily bases! It was amazing to me to see how much Sophie has grown since we were last there staying with grandma/pa Potts this winter. Sophie can now walk on the bottom where in February when she attempted such, it meant she was under the water and needed rescuing.
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