A sample of Oregon

If your still following our West Coast adventure, here is the next leg of our journey. Oregon. Pack me up right now and send me there! We drove south from Seattle through Portland, and then over to Lincoln City, and EVERYTHING in Oregon was so beautiful! This first photo will have to be hung. Just as the sun is going down and we are driving through these rolling hills of farmland bordered by dark green pine trees, we spot this lovely golden wheat field and pull over quickly. I've had wheat envy for a long time, and almost found it in Utah, but didn't, so when I saw this, my heart sang!! I love photos with the beautiful golden wheat! LOVE THEM!! Luckily my oldest daughter is in training to be the next family photographer, and she hit the mark, and nailed the focus! This is me with my youngest.

And this is her... we like to play with my camera and do fun post processing together!

While preparing for the trip, we found out that Lincoln City was having it's annual kite festival the very day we'd be driving through, and were super excited to go! Online it said they were doing free kite making for kids, followed by a parade on the beach which I thought would be so fun, so we told the kids about it for days and days leading up to Lincoln City. We arrive at the kite festival at 9 am in the morning, the first thing I notice is that we are the only ones in shorts, and without coats on... we found out why as soon as the car door opened. When they finally announced the kite making class for kids, we excitedly hurried over, and they stepped into this trailer, where a teenager hands them a colored piece of paper to color, and then offers to staple on the string. I had to hold back from bursting right out loud in laughter! Not quite the type of kites we were expecting to make, but my littlest was still excited... you can imagine what my older kids said. You can see them in the middle picture with their "piece of paper" kites. Ba ha ha, I'm still laughing inside!!! The display of large kites, colors and flags was for sure worth our morning though, and if your from the Great Northwest and have had an "elephant ear" (the yummy goodness pictured in the middle above, then please comment and tell me that you too could eat these every day for the rest of your life. That one treat was worth the entire drive!

An hour of "Goonies"! We headed south down the rest of the Oregon Coastline, stopped in Depoe Bay to see the Whales....didn't. Stopped here (above) near Orford Oregon for a quick break and the kids see this amazing rock out on the beach, and of course clamour down to it as fast as they can! We spent a good hour exploring the top, the side, and around it, I felt like we were in the movie "Goonies", it was seriously the coolest adventure of little hideouts and trails and even the cave shown below! The rock (named Battle Rock) had a gravesite on top, and a story to go along. Something back over 100 years ago, and this Captain was fighting the indians for the rock, and in the end the indians ran off of the edge of the rock... anyway, that's what a couple of teens told us. I should Google it to get the correct story. If only we'd seen Sloth too, (is that the weird guys name? choc-late!) or better yet, the real treasure!!

The next few pics are from some beaches we stopped at as we continued south to California... I could live in Oregon today! It was my very favorite part of the trip!