ON TO OREGON!

We got up at 4am Thursday morning and left Provo, Utah and headed to Oregon. We had a 12 hour drive, so we wanted to get an early start. It was sad to leave Tami's family and that new baby girl! 

 

We drove through most of Idaho and all of Oregon to get to the coast!  A long, but pretty drive.  Well, actually it would've been prettier except for all the smoke! Lots of fires in Oregon right now!!

Me and Siggy, just like old times! It was so great to see her and Mike, they are so awesome! I sure wish we lived closer to them!

They fed us, entertained us, and put us up for the night! such good friends.  We left for Tillamook the next morning!

 The cheese factory is under construction, but we still got to sample the cheese and get ice cream, so it was all good!

 Growing up on the farm I remember we had the 3 bottom row  kind of cows.

 Now this is what I'm talking about!! Yum. Yum.

 Then we drove by all the old houses we used to live in. They are pretty run down now. We rented this house for awhile on 903 4th St. before we bought the house on Park Ave. 

 This was the little church building we attended growing up. It didn't have the steeple then. 

 Our house on 411 Park Ave. It didn't have an enclosed porch or the bay windows then. 

 My old high school-- Go Cheesemakers!!

 I barely recognized Swiss Gma's house or the house we lived in next door!  They are so changed! Lots of houses built around them now!  No big barn, nothing looks like I remember it!

 This big old building is still there across the street in the base and still seems creepy! I remember as kids going exploring over there!

 Only 1 of the HUGE blimp hangers is still there. It is now and Air Museum with lots of old planes in it  The other one burned down in 1992.  The local farmers were storing their hay in there and it caught on fire. It burned for a week!

 A picture inside the hanger!

 We took a little drive up Trask River to our old swimming hole. It looks exactly the same--beautiful!!

 The blackberries are starting to come on and we picked quite a few to eat!!  Yummy!!

Its always fun to come home to my old 'stomping grounds'!

'ON THE HOME FRONT'

I've been meaning to make a post about all the things happening on the home front. After 15+ years, we finally painted the house a different color.  It really needed to be painted and now it looks like a brand new house!! We put all new outside lights up (we had 15 to replace) and we put up brand new facia, which is the metal that covers all the wood and keeps everything from rotting. We also replaced the railing on the deck outside our bedroom. Our painter Don New started in January and finished in March. He just plugged along each day, doing a little at a time. 

First he sealed everything up with a good filler.

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LaVerl took down all the old lights.

Took off all the old deck railing! A lot of it had rotted!

All the bushes next to the house had to be cut down or removed from against the house so he could paint.

When we added this addition, the stucco color never did match the other part of the house, so we decided to repaint everything gray!

Once it was all painted, LaVerl started hanging the new lights.

 We were happy that the color of the metal facia matched so well with the paint color of the trim. 

 We also like the metal rod iron railing we put up. We still have a little bit of trim to finish. This is just up so high that LaVerl hasn't got up there yet with his really tall ladder.

The finished look! We think it turned out pretty nice! Next will probably have to be a new roof!! 

   

THE GREAT AMERICAN ECLIPSE!!

Today we got to see a 'once in a lifetime' event!! I'm so glad we were in Utah because it was a 91% eclipse here! So very cool!  Thousands of people traveled hundreds of miles to observe this spectacular occurrence!!

On Monday, August 21, 2017, a total solar eclipse, frequently referred to as the "Great American Eclipse", was visible within a band across the entire contiguous United States passing from the Pacific to the Atlantic coast. In other countries it was only visible as a partial eclipse.

A solar eclipse occurs when the Moon passes between Earth and the Sun, thereby totally or partly obscuring the image of the sun for a viewer on Earth. A total solar eclipse occurs when the moon's apparent diameter is larger than the sun's, blocking all direct sunlight, turning day into darkness. Totality occurs in a narrow path across Earth's surface, with the partial solar eclipse visible over a surrounding region thousands of kilometers wide.

The previous time a total solar eclipse was visible across the entire contiguous United States was during the June 8, 1918, eclipse, and not since the February 1979 eclipse has a total eclipse been visible from anywhere in the mainland United States. The path of totality touched 14 states, although a partial eclipse was visible in all fifty states. The total area of the path of totality was about 16% of the area of the United States,^[4] although most of this area is over the ocean and not actually over the United States.

This is the picture I took.  Not to good without special equipment to see what was really happening!

So in order to actually see the moon passing in front of the sun, we had to have on special eclipse glasses like these! They were in high demand and all the stores ran out of the days ago! Luckily Tami's neighbors had some we could look through!

These were selling online too, pretty clever!!  But I don't think they worked too well!

 So now I can mark another thing off my bucket list- 

to see a solar eclipse!!

(It wasn't really on there, but why not?)