Another Fun Day with Mona

Today we did a loop of the Portland waterfront by surrey with our exchange student Mona, then visited Saturday Market.  Drew is hard at work again today at the sailing club, where he is helping the club host its annual wooden boat show.  Click here for photos.  High 80s and sunny this weekend... so nice of summer to finally arrive!

 

Summer Snow Day & More

We are hosting Mona, a lovely, college-age exchange student from Saudi Arabia, this weekend, so we decided to show her around the Columbia Gorge and Mt. Hood.  She had never seen snow until yesterday, and it was a gorgeous, warm day to check it out.  We also took her for her first sail on Friday night and are having a great time getting to know her.  Click here for photos.

Happy 4th of July

It had been a few years since we spent 4th of July on the water, so we decided to sail downtown and raft-up near Waterfront Park yesterday afternoon, after taking in a 4th of July parade and pot-luck picnic with our friends in Wilcox.  

It was the 25th Anniversary of the Portland Waterfront Blues Festival, not to mention a gorgeous day, so the river was extra crowded, but the firework show was also extra spectacular!  Click here for photos.   When the fireworks barge pulled up just across from us and the full moon came out to serve as a backdrop, we knew it was going to be an amazing show!

Over the Edge

Our friend Lars had the opportunity to repel off the US Bank Building - Portland's tallest - as part of an Over the Edge fundraiser for the Boy Scouts last week.  Here are some photos we took while watching his descent. 

Adventures in Southern California - Part 7 (Finale)

Click here to see a random collection of photos we took from our iphones/itouches during our ten days in Southern California.  It was a great trip!

Over the course of the past 3 summers, we happen to have visited 3 of the 4 corners of the continental US - Neah Bay, Washington, the most northwestern point, in 2010; Key West, Florida, the southeastern-most point, in 2011; and Border Field State Park south of San Diego, as far southwest as you can go before crossing the Mexican border, in 2012.  Looks like we need to head northeast and add Lubec, Maine to our list of places to visit!

Aventuras en el Sur de California - Parte Seis

On our last full day of vacation, we took a drive to the US/Mexican border and hiked along the border fence to the ocean at California's Border Field State Park.  We could see Tijuana through the fence and got to speak with both a resident and a border patrol agent.  (Apparently the speaking-to-Tijuana-residents-through-the-fence-thing is not something all border agents allow, but the person on duty while we were there was comfortable that we were not trying to pass anything through the fence.)    

As we headed back north, we stopped at Cabrillo National Monument at Point Loma and spent a lovely afternoon.  Click here for photos.   Also included in the album are some photos from our last day in CA, which included a stop in Dana Point on the way to Long Beach to catch our flight back to Oregon.

Southern California - Part 5

While in SoCal, we spent a lot of time at the beach... the home we stayed in for our house-swap was just a mile from the ocean.  The water was much warmer than off the Oregon Coast, though we were still happy we packed wetsuits. Oceanside and Carlsbad both had great surf for boogie boarding.  Click here to see photos. 

(We're not done posting trip photos yet - 2 more days to go - but this is where our camera broke, and we had to switch to iphones.)