Oregon Vacation Part 4

This last set of pictures is about the very end of the vaction - so they are so bittersweet to share.  By the last morning it was just the four of us left in the beach house, and we took one last early-morning walk down to the beach.  The girls were hysterical - they were enjoying every second, and making these flowers on our walk down into microphones!

As we were walking down we looked up fondly at the house we stayed at - even looking at it now, weeks after we've stayed there, we still feel homesick.

Beach Steve - all versions of our Steve are appealing, but Beach Steve?  Ah....

This is the little post office in Oceanside, where we stayed - it's right on the beach (that is the ocean you can see up behind the roof!) and we mailed the girls' fifth birthday party invitations from here.  We passed it every single day.

These pictures just speak for themselves - we loved, loved, loved the beach.

Midday we left the beach and headed back into Portland.  Friends of ours from graduate school live there, and they took us around their part of town, which just so happens to be the spot where Beverly Cleary grew up and centered her Ramona books.  We visited a park devoted to her (this is a sculpture of Ramona's dog in a fountain).

And this is the street of Ramona Quimby fame (and our grad school friend, his wife, and son)! 

We drove home after this stop, and although it was a long, long, long drive home we finally arrived and sank into our own beds.  Even though we loved this vacation (and all of our vacations this summer) there is no place like home.

Oregon Vacation Part 3

Yep, still posting about this vacation! We're going to get all the picture in here one day!

The first pictures are of an evening trip that Christina and Steve took to a 'secret beach' that you access from a tunnel in the cliff at the edge of the main beach we played at. (Thanks again to Nana and G-Daddy and Grammie Elle for staying with our sleeping girls during this foray!)

 

 

It was just idyllic - complete with a sunset, waves crashing on the rocks, and a warm breeze blowing.  This was one sweet date spot!

 

We had so much fun that the next day we took the whole family down there.  Turns out it is also a great beach for sandcastle-making!

And see - even in daylight it's a romantic spot!

We had fun cooking at our rental house almost every night - the girls got to show off their knife skills with the "grown up" knives.  They are so great with these paring knives - check out that very precise slicing and dicing!

 

While dinner was cooking one night we hopped out to the deck for some family pictures - and we're so glad we did.  We need to make sure to do this more often, with all of our family constellations!

These guys persistently tried to not only get into beach photography shots, but also in to the beach house!  Every time we'd move around in the kitchen or eating area they would swoop in from nowhere and start cawing at us.  We named the one who came most frequently Bernie - we got so annoyed that he brought a friend we didn't even name that one.

In a very fun coincidence some of our great friends from Missoula were camping on the Oregon coast at the same time we were there.  They invited us over to their camp site for chicken pot pie cooked in a cast iron dutch oven over coals - and it tasted even better than that sounds.

Along with pot pie there were plenty of smiles, secrets, and s'mores to go around.  (There were also plenty of scrapes and pouts, but we used some editorial discretion and did not photograph that).

Here are some missing shots from our trip to Rockaway Beach that got skipped in the last post - we had lunch at this sweet spot that let us have crab and cheese fondue in a bread bowl!

It was a silly, but super fun time.

And here's one more picture of us in front of St. Mary's by the Sea.  Clara and Elena were a little underwhelmed, but the rest of us were pretty sentimental to be there.

Handsome Steve, by the sea - again, another misplaced by can't-miss-posting picture.

We had several craft ideas for our beachy time together- though the handprints in the sand worked out miserably the painting of seashells worked WAY better!  We collected beautiful shells (like these sand dollars) every morning.

Then we painted them with silver, gold, and pale blue paint.  The girls (and everyone else) loved it, and Elena even made Nana Rose's sand dollar into a lovely golden necklace.

One more post, and we should have a good chunk of our memories of this trip saved!